No skill no art?
spino...@msn.com
No Skill No Art?
" 'Immer davon reden, nie daran denken' [1] - Now that depth-
psychology, with the help of films, soap-opera, and
Horney, has delved into the deepest recesses, people's
last possibility of experiencing themselves has been
cut off by organized culture."
- Theodore Adorno, Minima Moralia #40
As I pointed out in a previous move in the ongoing dialogue with
Zita Gabriel et al., the Internet seems to encourage a belief in
this newsgroup that there is something called "skill and polish"
in traditional art which is the product of a mysterious "talent",
whereas modern art is "easy." This essay is an attempt to
deconstruct and reverse this nonsense.
Mani de Li's "no skill no art" may be nothing more than the cry of the
bourgeois: my four-year old son could do that. A flippant answer would
be that of course your four year old son could do that:
the little tyke, before the educational system gets its
hands on him and you've had your chance to emotionally
wreck his ass, is probably a natural artist. This view is
caricatured, exagerrated and dismissed as Rousseau's views
on education, but I submit that other than Rousseau have held
it and it is borne out by the evolution of culture itself, in which
the child is historically father to the man.
I do not deny that the "skill and polish" in the work of the old
masters is not difficult to acquire, but I claim that it is
a laboring process of education and apprenticeship that someone
with basic abilities and motivation can acquire. I'd eliminate
the word "talent" from my vocabulary since while it has a meaning
it should not refer to a mysterious inner spark that some have
and some don't.
Classical music training is even more sado-masochistic than visual
arts training, and in the field of classical music and reproduction
the late Glenn Gould has a somewhat strange and shady reputation
among classical devotees and mavens. I feel that Glenn Gould
was a better pianist, say, than van Cliburn, not because he
had more "talent", or even because he worked harder (for he
refused to buy into the sadistic ethic of practice for practice's
sake), but because he was able through personal qualities of
integrity to preserve his boundaries vis a vis the outside
musical society. As Edward Said points out in Musical Elaborations,
Glenn Gould refused to buy-into the vulgar Philistinism of the
concert hall. In terms of Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction" of the
opposition of (pure, admirable, "talented") speech, and (debased,
lesser, painfully acquired but not innate) writing, Gould's unique
move in the later Sixties was to use electronic writing in the form
of recording technology to produce "written" performances in the form of
his Goldberg Variations and other works.
I believe Gould attracted resentment because in an industrial
civilization which actually de-skills all trades and professions,
the *haute* bourgeois want, when they attend a concert, to
see an exhibition of skill and control, combined with spontaneity,
that is roughly suppressed on the shop floor. Gould's re-recordings
produce an exhibition of skill and spontaneity WITHOUT the
sadistic treatment of the performer, who cannot make a mistake
in the one-time world of the concert.
I cannot understand as a musical layperson why some classical
music lovers don't like Gould. To my ear he sounds better than
van Cliburn and on a level, in his own way, with Alfred Brendel.
Although my ear has not been trained (and if I am right, this
"training" itself is a mixture of ideology and pure apprectiation),
I suspect it is Gould's relationship to musical sociology, his refusal
to adopt an expected stance of humility before the concert-hall
society, that results in his reputation today.
And what's invisible in the concert hall is the abuse that
Beethoven may have suffered at the hands of an alcoholic father
who knew of Mozart's financial success as a "child progidy" and
wanted to reproduce this success (cf. the recent film,
Immortal Beloved, for a reasonable reconstuction of the known
facts about Beethoven's childhood.) What's invisible is the
sexual mutilation of men up through the 18th century in order
to produce artificial counter-tenors. What's invisible is the
emotional abuse that may continue of talented young performers
as they are encouraged to treat art as competitive sport,
are prematurely drained of love for music, and who are,
in the case of Asian female performers, even sexually
displayed and exploited. What is all too visible in the classical
music field, and the visual arts, is the celebration of a false
equivalence: the equivalence of economic dominance and artistic
integrity.
For once, popular movies may have the emotional facts right: cf.,
besides Immortal Beloved, the recent film Shine, and the mid-1980s
film Amadeus.
Returning to the plastic arts, Mani's "No Skill No Art" is
a dysfunctional example of identification with the sadistic
term in this overall syndrome and it is connected with the flaming
nature of his comments.
Anyone who feels that, say, Jackson Pollock had an easy time of
it in painting his works should try their hand at a large
abstract canvas...my guess is that artists in the figurative
tradition have never, for the most part, painted abstractly.
The figurative artist who believes that abstraction is easy may
have fooled around with paints but almost never has he sat down
to do an abstraction with the seriousness of purpose and
subjection to materials he or she sits down to do a figurative work.
The actual labor process of producing abstraction in general is
interesting. In a seemingly unrelated field, the mathematician and
computer expert Donald Knuth of Stanford University points out that
it is surprisingly difficult to think of a series of truly random
integers. People, he writes, tend to think so hard about what they
are doing that they, for example, avoid repeating sequences such as
found in 22933367, whereas in truly random series repeating sequences
often occur.
In yet another field, that of the theater arts, dance and movement,
one of the more difficult exercises to actually execute, rather than
think about, is to make a truly abstract gesture. In doing an
improvisational dance, people tend to engage in mimesis almost
automatically. Part of the theater and dance education process
that I've been exposed to is establishing the ability, through
labor, to make truly original movements which are transformed into
mimesis only after they have been refined.
As a figurative artist, I find that the most difficult passages
are my landscape backgrounds where I am liberated from the
requirements of reproducing the figure. Thinking about this
conceptualizes it as play time, but the existential fact is that
it is a confrontation with an infinite (and, in a mathematical
sense, nondenumerably infinite) number of possibilities. Sometimes,
just as Knuth's people avoid series and theater students
reproduce images from their subconscious, I come up with
humanoid images, such as a group of rocks in a recent painting
that look like a reclining figure.
This can result in interesting accidents, but it also can result in
premature images which committ the work to a particular result and close
off other avenues. Contrasting a "moderate" abstract expressionist like
Lee Krasner or Arshile Gorky with an extremist like Pollock, Kline or
Hoffman, the residual images in the former tie the work to a narrative
background whereas the complete lack of images in the latter make the
work independent and broaden its appeal. The latter is structurally
classic, Roman, in that it makes a universal statement, whereas Krasner
and Gorky make particularistic, ethnic and feminist statements. The
feminist critique of the "high" abstract expressionist is that this
appeal is hegemonic, but I find it difficult (perhaps because my Roman
Catholicism) to automatically assume that universalism is necessarily
oppressive (I have come to the very painful conclusion that Serbia places
on display the consequences of some forms of "multiculturalism.")
The key, I think, lies in an access to one's subconscious which
the commodified mass-media of our times discourages: for the
murmured narrative of our subconscious could not be commodified
yet is much richer than that of, say, the violinist Midori, or
Air Force One. It's when I am out of touch with what's going
on inside me that I produce an "abstract" image that looks like
a phallus, or almost any man produces as a material consequence of
his economic relations with other men an "abstract" dance in which
he is fighting off invisible enemies.
The forgotten Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of critical
Marxism, which was not usually a source of pithy phrases, called
the mass media "psychoanalysis in reverse." I shall try to
unpack this phrase and explain its relationship to visual
arts training.
Contemporary American speech does not have, as does classical French
in its opposition of the intimate "tu" and formal "vous", or
traditional American speech has with its opposition of "thou" and
"you" a way of marking off an uncommodified communication, one
that does not have an ulterior market motive. We think of tu/vous
and thou/you oppositions as aristocratic holdovers, but the
trouble with pseudo-democratic speech is that it becomes
more difficult to perceive and address ongoing inequality.
Instead, contemporary American advertising uses a sort of pseudo
intimacy that I believe the subconscious confuses with the intimacy
it needs. This may be what Horkheimer was referring to as he
and Adorno observed American culture in the 1940s.
Contemporary American films speak in this commodified manner
with the intimacy of psychoanalysis only to render the subject
less attuned to his personal narrative. The structure of this
is not, in my opinion, difficult to understand. For the literalness
of Hollywood narrative, and its avoidance of abstraction (and
its celebration of "talent") causes the subject to replace
his own story with that of Harrison Ford.
Theodore Adorno wrote (Minima Moralia, 1951) that "professional
warmth, for the sake of profit, fabricates closeness and intimacy
where people are worlds apart. It deceives its victim by affirming
in his weakness the way of the world which made him so, and it
wrongs him in the degree that it deviates from truth." Adorno
was no party animal, and his writing has a Germanic density
that makes it unproductive of Horkheimer's useful sound-byte. But
what this midcentury music critic and philosopher was saying was
that (contrary to the popular narrative opposition between
normality and pathology) that to a man the consumers of culture
today are victims of a history which repressed their real desires,
replacing them with ersatz satisfaction. Adorno witnessed the defeat
of Germany in WWI and the rise of Hitler, and he saw this rise as
connected with the introduction of American-style culture into
Germany of the Weimar period.
This culture seems to have replaced the traditional German satisfactions
of going to church, swilling beer, reproducing oom-pah music (and,
it should be added, that of Beethoven) with the commodified
culture of the cafe. By replacing peasant satisfactions with
a cafe society, in which the nascent mass media was already
producing celebrity (and which the Internet continues, and
exacerbates), the new society produced an unhealable material
wound in those ordinary people who saw their isolation increasing,
simply because they lacked cash and celebrity. But it also put
on display the cost of being an outsider and going one's own way.
I wish at least one historian of the Holocaust would take notice of, and
try to account for, one interesting fact [2]. It is that the destruction
of the Jews and other groups was COMPLETELY UNTHINKABLE to to Kaiser
Wilhelm and the Hohenzollerns in general. The holocaust was thinkable in
the 1930s precisely because of the regime of fashion of Weimar. A regime
of stars and fans and fashion is a subconscious preparation for a regime
in which Jews are placed in cattle cars for a regime of stars and fans
and fashion precludes identification with the non-star of the hour.
American GIs were astonished that German civilians could sit in their
homes mere yards from the camps, and ignore suffering and death. It is
arguable that in the 1920s and 1930s the mass media were more developed
and more integrated in German consciousness than in the vaster spaces of
the American continent, and what the GIs (who grew up in small towns with
local traditions of resistance) witnessed was a foretaste of their own
country beginning ten years later: people atomized into passivity and
thereby hardened to suffering, like the New Yorkers who, twenty years
later, ignored Kitty Genovese, the gun nuts of today, and those who
applauded the destruction of Iraqi units, with no military purpose, at
the end of the Gulf War.
Adorno's was a hard sell, for the idea that there is such a thing
as "false consciousness" is very unpopular nowadays. It is
considered out of date liberal elitism to claim that ordinary
folks REALLY don't want what they actually seem to want, that if
only they were properly educated they would really want the
favorite art of the liberal elitist, Brecht rather than
Air Force One. Adorno's critical Marxism depends greatly on the
idea of "false consciousness." To be brief, if there really is
no "false consciousness", the Frankfurt School is a waste of time.
But today the neo-conservative and neo-liberal critics of
Marxism don't tend to actually produce arguments disproving
such a thing as "false consciousness" actually exists. The
usual argument is in Aristotle's terms rhetorical, rather than
logical.
For the argument as fabricated appeals to the "man in the street's"
resentment at being talked down-to and his transference of anger
at his real economic relations to a fantasized "liberal elite",
coded, post-Vietnam, by such media figures as Jane Fonda, and
coded, in the alarmingly parallel society of Weimar Germany, by
the Jews.
The paradox of this coding is that this elite is at one and the same
time oppressively responsible for the crisis of the small man, and
permissive and "liberal." It has a bogus intellectual sophistication
in that it lives with a paradox while at the same time rejecting a
dialectical logic that explains other and more real paradoxes.
The argument against false consciousness makes an emotional and
rhetorical appeal to one's sense of rugged self-determination without
doing any work to show that it does not really exist. It rests on
dubious assertions such as the notion that an elite, *qua* elite,
can really be liberal at all (anyone who's actually worked at an
Ivy League university in a subordinate position learns that Leonard
Bernstein and Jane Fonda were the exception, and not the rule.)
In the visual arts, this entire structure is repeated in the small.
There is supposed to be a cabal of modernists who at one and the same
time deviate from "skill and polish" while oppressing rather than
liberating the small man, in the form of the figurative artist. This
is pure fantasy, for what there is is a network of dealers and
critics partly determined by economic forces. This network will
sell what sells, and even in the heyday of American abstract
expressionism numerous figurative painters, including Andrew
Wyeth and George Tooker, enjoyed prominence among the cognoscenti.
Despite the fact that some critics, notably Clement Greenberg, saw
the task of American art as a self-internationalization (just as
the isolationism of Senator Taft at the same period was rejected as
irresponsible failure to address the Cold War), Andrew Wyeth was
forgiven the fact that he came from a family of uniquely American
illustrators because of his effort to paint realistically, but not
as an illustrator of books. George Tooker painted realistically,
in egg tempera (like Wyeth), and injected unfashionable social criticism
(based on a religious world view) but the dominant forces of the time did
not reject his work.
I therefore reject the story, gaining increasing prominence on this
newsgroup because of the nature of the Internet, of traditionalism
versus the modernism of the rejected Father. The only reason I
paint realistically, indeed in a style inspired by Tooker, is because
it's too damn difficult to paint abstractly!
NOTES
[1] Adorno is here reversing a Nazi slogan popular in Austria
just before the Anschluss or reunification with Germany. The
Nazi slogan was "never speak of it, always think of it." Adorno's
slogan here is "always speak of it, never think of it."
[2] Yes, I do need to read Daniel Goldhagen's book on Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust: Lucy Davidowicz also has information
on how anti-semitism grew out of German culture. But the
Hohenzollern monarchy and the aristocracy constituted, to the
best of my knowledge, a source of resistance to the anti-semitism
of the ordinary German: Frederick the Great in the 18th century
was a friend to the Jews, comparitively speaking. It was also
the German aristocracy that formed part of the resistance to
Hitler's racial policies. I welcome further information on this matter,
pro and con, because it relates to the important question of how
massculture in the American style produces Fascism,
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Marilyn
spino...@msn.com wrote:
>
> No Skill No Art?
>
> <snipped a thesis on the state of mind of this newsgroup>
The point that abstract art is so easy that an eight-year-old can
do it (used to be 3-year-old) and that only recognizable realist
art from the school of Ingres, displays any skill is often made on this
ng. I thought it was a conservative mind-set belonging in _general_
to the group of people who use computers a lot.
The idea that only sadistic practice will give one the skill one needs
to perform virtuostic works is well-ingrained. Of course it helps but
without the undefinable, mysterious, magic which brings together talent,
emotional expression, and training, art is not produced.
What puzzles me in the present day, is that as a culture, we North
Americans seem to have run out of original ideas, as almost everything is
based on a previous hit, song, movie, book, master-work.
Marilyn
Bryan Ayers
>abstract canvas...
does not make things more difficult to do per se it only increases the
needed primary brush size and the room for detail. Pollocks brush was
a stick that splashed paint.
>my guess is that artists in the figurative
>tradition have never, for the most part, painted abstractly.
I have and I would even defend abstraction by saying that
if the rules of composition apply that they apply with or without
reference to reality. This doesn't make an artist who completed
both esthetic geometry and realistic subject matter as raphael is
equal to one who one considers one of these.
>The figurative artist who believes that abstraction is easy may
>have fooled around with paints but almost never has he sat down
>to do an abstraction with the seriousness of purpose and
>subjection to materials he or she sits down to do a figurative work.
Some have but I feel from my own experience that it would
be hard for an artist who works to approach realism to give an abstract
work equal seriousness *during execution*. The placement of a body and
a red square may be equivalent but the sublte geometry of a face or
the placement of the eyes that make it beautiful or how to alter the
light to give a the figure a sense of spirituality demands more than
abstraction even if the artist in his nievity began to paint thinking
otherwise. I would go so far as to claim that the subtle consienceness
of geometry that the abstract artist searches for is no farther away
than in how he knows the world around him.
>massculture in the American style produces Fascism,
>
>-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
> http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Bryn Ayers
mail to: bay...@expert.cc.purdue.edu
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~bayers
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
"O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make
Gods by the dozen!" -- Michel de Montaigne (1533-92).
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Bryan Ayers
In article <348C6E...@trash.bin>, Marilyn <sp...@trash.bin> wrote:
>spino...@msn.com wrote:
>The idea that only sadistic practice will give one the skill one needs
>to perform virtuostic works is well-ingrained.
love their art?
>What puzzles me in the present day, is that as a culture, we North
>Americans seem to have run out of original ideas, as almost everything is
>based on a previous hit, song, movie, book, master-work.
Every Idea is original in that it is flawed. People only make
progress in physics by considering the best knowledge of the past.
Those who start over don't naturally make progress but I do see room for
calling their work more authentic because it does not consider the flaws
of the past either. The trick is of course is to consider what has been
done that is wrong and what is right. Taking what is right and then
starting there. Of course if we are decieved and pick the bad as a
starting point all is lost. This is what needs to be done in all fields.
>Marilyn
Bryn Ayers
mail to: bay...@expert.cc.purdue.edu
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~bayers
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Brother Alphabet
For some reason, people take offense to the notion that skill and
talent are required to make real art. Perhaps we should momentarily
remove any references to ART from the debate in order to clarify the
matter for the numb of skull.
Let's say we need to build a house. What should we do to go about
beginning this project? Should we grab just anyone, hand over some
nails, some wood and a hammer and tell them to get to building? Would it
not be prerequisite for the person to have a carpentry/construction
background? Would it not also be to our benefit to hire someone who was
actually good, or rather SKILLED, at building houses? Better yet, would
it not be best to find someone who had the knack, or rather the TALENT,
for building as well as the skill?
Apply the question to anything of relative importance. Is it better to
let a guy who owns a plane fly you somewhere, or would you rather travel
with a skilled pilot?
Would a guy with a sharp knife be better suited to remove your gall
bladder, or would you prefer a skilled surgeon?
Why is this ideal so difficult to apply to fine arts? Just because
someone owns paints and brushes does not make them instantly aware of
how to use them. Skills are required.
In addition, a person with paints, brushes, AND tecnical training is
STILL not guaranteed to be able to USE those things. Plenty of people
fail medical school. They dont get to be doctors if they don't pass the
tests. Why can't we allow people to fail the art test?
What makes it such a crime to tell a person that they can't be an
artist?
The ability to create meaningful/significant works of art is not
granted by schooling nor by personal whim. The artist's eye is innate.
Diplomas and discipline do not give a person insight. Every person comes
into the world with a purpose. Not every purpose in life is to make
pictures. Some people were just not meant to be artists. Some of the
people who seek to be artists are, sadly, those same people.
People with no ability to see reality always try to claim that there is
no way to define what is and what is not 'art'. Of course, these people
are morons. Art is defined absolutely. Anyone with vision knows what
that definition is. It only harms the overall culture to continue to
allow the spineless to dominate popular opinion. It is well past the
time to shun the talentless, and also those who refuse to notice lack of
talent.
If we continue to allow the view that 'everyone can be an artist if
they really want to' we will continue to see ourselves diminish in
importance to society. We see already how laughably artists are
portrayed in pop culture. We see already how maligned art is by
political powers. This is because we allow the freakshow to continue. We
allow hordes of hacks to parade the streets of the art centers piercing
their nipples and smearing poop on walls and calling it all art. We
allow crass women to shove hangers and pistols up their privates and
call it art. We allow so-called photographers to arrange flowers in
decapitated skulls and call it art. We allow any fool with a limp and a
blow torch to weld together garbage behind his shack in the boondocks
and call it visionary outsider art.
Perhaps all of you agree with the morons. Perhaps art will never again
be taken seriously in America. In fact, it is increasingly true that the
American art scene is a joke. We are a fading power because what we do
is now more for the moment than it is for eternity. We have no immortals
left besides the ones who hide and sputter.
All of this can be blamed on the stupidity that has remained in power
since the 1960s. Pop Art began the ruin, and the rubbled aftermath
leaves us with postmodernism, outsider art, conceptualism, performance
art, installation art, environmental art, and the rest of a nation full
of wannabe hacks.
Grow a spine, America. Gather your courage and expel the infidels.
Either that or wither and die and know that the only painters left will
be the ones making greeting cards for Wal-Mart. The only sculptors left
will be the ones making neon eyesores for the next casino to be built.
The only real artists left in this pitiful nation will be the ones who
rot in their graves, spinning eternally at the tragedy of ignorance that
America has become.
(Jason A.) Hutto
(Who'll be hopping the first available plane to Germany given the
chance.)
mdeli
On Mon, 08 Dec 1997 13:12:28 -0600, spino...@msn.com wrote:
>No Skill No Art?
>
> " 'Immer davon reden, nie daran denken'
That's a good one for you to think about before your next filibuster
snip
>Returning to the plastic arts, Mani's "No Skill No Art" is
>a dysfunctional example of identification with the sadistic
>term in this overall syndrome and it is connected with the flaming
>nature of his comments.
>
It sure seems to inflame your cerebral hemorrhoids.
>Anyone who feels that, say, Jackson Pollock had an easy time of
>it in painting his works should try their hand at a large
>abstract canvas...my guess is that artists in the figurative
>tradition have never, for the most part, painted abstractly.
I have sold big bullshit drip schmier paintings under another name.
>The figurative artist who believes that abstraction is easy may
>have fooled around with paints but almost never has he sat down
>to do an abstraction with the seriousness of purpose and
>subjection to materials he or she sits down to do a figurative work.
>
This bozo is dreaming. Abstraction is a part of all painting. Look at
my web page.
...Another long tangent deleted
>This can result in interesting accidents, but it also can result in
>premature images which committ the work to a particular result and close
>off other avenues. Contrasting a "moderate" abstract expressionist like
>Lee Krasner or Arshile Gorky with an extremist like Pollock, Kline or
>Hoffman, the residual images in the former tie the work to a narrative
>background whereas the complete lack of images in the latter make the
>work independent and broaden its appeal. The latter is structurally
>classic, Roman, in that it makes a universal statement, whereas Krasner
>and Gorky make particularistic, ethnic and feminist statements. The
>feminist critique of the "high" abstract expressionist is that this
>appeal is hegemonic, but I find it difficult (perhaps because my Roman
>Catholicism) to automatically assume that universalism is necessarily
>oppressive (I have come to the very painful conclusion that Serbia places
>on display the consequences of some forms of "multiculturalism.")
Artspeak
...huge tangent snipped
>I wish at least one historian of the Holocaust would take notice of, and
>try to account for, one interesting fact [2]. It is that the destruction
>of the Jews and other groups was COMPLETELY UNTHINKABLE to to Kaiser
>Wilhelm and the Hohenzollerns in general. The holocaust was thinkable in
>the 1930s precisely because....
nothing to do with the subject
>But today the neo-conservative and neo-liberal critics of
>Marxism don't tend to actually produce arguments disproving
>such a thing as "false consciousness" actually exists. The
>usual argument is in Aristotle's terms rhetorical, rather than
>logical.
You should talk about 'logic.'
>In the visual arts, this entire structure is repeated in the small.
>There is supposed to be a cabal of modernists who at one and the same
>time deviate from "skill and polish" while oppressing rather than
>liberating the small man, in the form of the figurative artist. This
>is pure fantasy, for what there is is a network of dealers and
>critics partly determined by economic forces. This network will
>sell what sells, and even in the heyday of American abstract
>expressionism numerous figurative painters, including Andrew
>Wyeth and George Tooker, enjoyed prominence among the cognoscenti.
>Despite the fact that some critics, notably Clement Greenberg, saw
>the task of American art as a self-internationalization (just as
>the isolationism of Senator Taft at the same period was rejected as
>irresponsible failure to address the Cold War), Andrew Wyeth was
>forgiven the fact that he came from a family of uniquely American
>illustrators because of his effort to paint realistically, but not
>as an illustrator of books. George Tooker painted realistically,
>in egg tempera (like Wyeth), and injected unfashionable social criticism
>(based on a religious world view) but the dominant forces of the time did
>not reject his work.
Question to others, Does this guy have a loose screw or am I imagining
it?
>[2] Yes, I do need to read Daniel Goldhagen's book on Ordinary
>Germans and the Holocaust: Lucy Davidowicz also has information
>on how anti-semitism grew out of German culture.
ETC>
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
Check out my web page at http:/www.interlog.com/~hugod/