Running head: CONTEMPORARY ART
Contemporary
Art:
Erin Peters
Spring 2005
The last time I visited the Hirschorn Museum of Modern Art, I was truly astonished at what was considered “art” and was worthy of display at one of the most famous museums in the world. I saw paintings that consisted of color blocks in two colors, mixed-media displays that appeared as though someone threw objects in a corner and walked away, and paintings that looked like a painter’s drop cloth. One painting in particular, Jackson Pollack’s Number One, drew my attention. I had heard of the artist Jackson Pollack, but since I was not very informed about the world of art, my exposure to his work was limited. Number One consisted of an enormous canvas painted tan and embellished with paint splotches that look like they were achieved by dipping a brush in paint and flicking the paint on the canvas. This painting didn’t look like anything recognizable and it didn’t appeal to me as beautiful. Jackson Pollack is one of the most famous contemporary painters and I couldn’t see how this painting could be a work of art. My first reaction was that this was one of his lesser pieces, but after looking at a few of his pieces in an art book, I noticed that Number One was similar to other works he has produced. Obviously, I could not think the same way that contemporary artists could. I couldn’t interpret the importance of the piece or how the contemporary art community understood their messages. I didn’t have any interaction with contemporary art, aesthetic or otherwise from contemporary art.
Key Assumptions about the Nature of Contemporary Art
Contemporary artists regard linear thinking as single-goaled and selective. They use a different style of thinking when interacting with the world, creative thinking. The most basic principle of creative thinking is that any particular way of looking at things is only one among many possibilities. Creative thinking continues to explore problems when a workable answer has been discovered and revels in the process, where linear thinking tries to stop the process and get to the goal. The purpose of thinking creatively is to look beyond adequate conceptions and to free ideas from cliché patterns.
Contemporary artists believe that emotion is an essential element in life and a lack of emotion has been instrumental in the decline of humanity in the modern world (Morgan, 1996). Generally in American society, public display of emotion is seen as weak and often creates an uncomfortable situation for participants. Contemporary artists reveal their own emotions through their work and attempt to get the receiver to display emotion or think about why they are harboring emotions. Rather than trying to create a world where emotion in public is uncomfortable for others, contemporary artists appeal to evoking emotion in public arenas. Contemporary artists do their utmost to explain to receivers how emotions are a vital part of being human. Art is created in order to affect an aesthetic emotion in the receiver and contemporary artists feel it is important to help people reach deep inside to contact and acknowledge raw emotion (Gaiger, 2003).
Contemporary artists do not strive to appeal to visual aspects of art in the way that photorealism does. Photorealism artists make every effort to make their work aesthetically the same as their subject. That is, an apple should look like an apple to a photorealist. The more the picture looks like an apple, the better the product. On the other hand contemporary artists feel that making a painting look like an object in reality shows technical skill, but little expression (Gaiger, 2003). According to Monica Stroik, a contemporary artist in Arlington, Virginia, contemporary artists show a higher level of thinking than photorealists because not only do the artists need to have good technical skills, the contemporary artist also needs to communicate a political, social or personal idea. Contemporary artists deny that there is a universal understanding of the definition of art, so they feel no need to conform to a known standard. They are free to create a representation that duplicates reality from their perspective and in doing this they represent their subject literally rather than representing their subject pictorially (Sylvester, 2001). Contemporary artists do not rely on a standard of beauty to create their art. Art that is considered beautiful by visual standards is called retinal art by contemporary artists because it deliberately depends on the stimulation of visual senses. Contemporary artists tend to reduce the visual stimulation so that the idea they are trying to portray is the central theme, rather than how the picture looks to a viewer.
Contemporary artists strive for aesthetic independence but have paid for this with the loss of overt and explicit reference to quality. Art critics have an easy job evaluating photorealist art compared with contemporary art. There are well established reference points from which to judge photorealist art and they tend to be universal standards. Contemporary art does not have common reference points since non-retinal art can be experienced on a cognitive level rather than a concrete visual level. Not everyone can agree on cognitive reference points, because context is required and this concept is understood by the contemporary art community. The idea that there is not one right answer is embraced by most members of this community. Contemporary artists have replaced the need to be accepted by the larger society for the need to provoke thought in the receivers of the art.
Contemporary artists consider a completed work to maintain a three part interaction: interaction between the creator, the piece and the receiver. To say that art is solely about ideas divorces the piece from the receiver. Before the contemporary art movement, artists of all persuasions called the person interacting with the art the viewer, because pieces depended on visual stimulation. Viewers would look at the art, determine how similarly it portrayed the subject and judged its value. The purpose of artwork would end with the viewing, otherwise known the concept of “art-as-art” (Morgan, 1996). Contemporary artists think that art should be more than just a pleasant visual experience. Contemporary artists want their pieces to have more interaction with the receiver, evoking emotion and making the receiver think about higher-level issues (Stroik, 2005).
Contemporary artists believe that people are often caught up with their own personal everyday reality to think about other political, social or personal issues. They reach out with their work to people who don’t normally think in multiple ways and try to engage them in an intellectual discussion. They take old ideas as raw material and create new ideas and ways of seeing things from them (Think Like an Artist, 2005). Contemporary artists see their role in the world as the perturbations that help people recognize their humanity. The messages they send through their pieces are meant to jolt people out of their own personal paradigms and have the receivers think in a new way.
Living in a modern world has become more abstract because of the need to deal with bureaucracies and live among large groups of people who are virtually strangers. Contemporary artists think that most people overlook how abstract it is to live in large societies and feel the need to focus attention to it (Fer, 1997). For example, marriage is a very personal and emotional establishment, yet we need to apply for a marriage license and have this activity permitted by complete strangers. A completely personal act has been taken to abstraction through the approval of a stranger. Contemporary artists display how the modern world strips away valuable social connections, humanity and traditions. They see their role in our modern world as the purveyors of humanity. When people get so wrapped up in their daily activities that they forget what it is to be human, the contemporary artists are there to remind society to reach for their humanity.
Progressivism is a key concept for contemporary artists. It is important for contemporary artists to constantly try to be fresh and new (Ryan, 2002). If the work produced by the community of contemporary artists does not push forward, then the artists feel that they are no longer asking the public to question the status quo. Contemporary artists feel that they have failed if the interaction between artist, piece and receiver does not evoke a new thought. When the majority of the public accepts their work, they risk becoming mainstream. In this sense, contemporary artists face a conflict between provoking ideas and becoming a household word. When a balance between becoming industrialized through popularity and maintaining the cutting edge is achieved, then the contemporary artist feels that they have an optimal medium for their progressive message (Ryan, 2002).
Gaining Knowledge from Contemporary Artists’ Way of Knowing
During the beginning of the information age, people began in engage in more abstract concepts such as virtual societies in the form of chat rooms and information distribution through the World Wide Web. People no longer needed to go to a library and physically find a book for reference. Instead people could find electronic documents on the internet for their reference needs. The information age shifted some of everyday activities in life from the concrete to the abstract. Contemporary art helps in exploring the shift from visible to invisible and can help gain knowledge about the new world we live in. As people make sense of new forums in information, contemporary artists can reach out to receivers and have them question this new status quo. Contemporary art is a form of investigation about society that involves provoking the comfort level of the public.
In the 1930’s John Dewey wrote that art has become detached from everyday life and has been exalted so high that everyday people no longer have a connection with art. Contemporary artists recognized this aspect of “high art” and brought art back into the everyday. The main point of creating a piece is to engage the receiver and evoke an idea. Contemporary artists redirect attention to lost aspects of culture in our modern world. Instead of having elite groups determine the standards for beauty, contemporary artists decided there would not be a universal standard for their art. The essence of quality lies in the interaction between the art and the receiver, not in a list of universal standards.
The conceptual frameworks of contemporary artists often put them at odds with photorealists in a similar way that qualitative educational researchers find themselves at odds with quantitative researchers. The public tends to like retinal art because there is little understanding of the concept of art required to appreciate it. One can look at a painting that has a high similarity to reality and establish that the painter has talent. To understand contemporary art, one needs to contemplate the work at a higher level of cognitive demand. The receiver must also place the piece in a historical context as well as thinking at a higher level about the meaning of the piece. Many laypeople do not have backgrounds in art history, composition or color theory, so they tend to appreciate photorealist art more. Art that is more appreciated by the public tends to get more display space, and photorealist art tends to get displayed more often in public places (Stroik, 2005). In certain ways contemporary artists are like qualitative researchers and photorealists are like quantitative researchers. Qualitative researchers receive less funding and space than quantitative researchers, just as contemporary artists receive less display space than photorealists. The general public tends to take quantitative research as more valid than qualitative research, in the same way they see photorealism as more visually appealing than contemporary art.
One lesson learned from the way contemporary artists understand the world is that without context, ideas are irrelevant (Morgan, 1996). Photorealist artists can be appreciated by the public because they portrayed their subject as a strictly visual representation, but many contemporary artists consider photorealists no more than technicians of their medium. Contemporary artists feel that photorealists do not show their work in context and reduce the power of the interaction with the receiver. In the same way I see a discussion between qualitative researchers and quantitative researchers in education that parallels the discussion between contemporary artists and photorealists. First, photorealist art has universal standards that guide the final product. If an artist strays from the formula, it is no longer in the parameters of photorealism. In the same way, quantitative researchers have standards that guide their work and if they stray from the given formulas, their work is called into question. Contemporary artists consider context in their work and must justify their worth to the public. In the same way, qualitative researchers tend to provide a narrative way of knowing and must justify their work’s relevance to reality. The small space devoted to contemporary artists also suggests a parallel issue that qualitative researchers experience in educational publications. Quantitative researchers are in favor with most funding sources and tend to have more space in scholarly journals than qualitative studies. Photorealists are more accepted with the public and tend to get the most display space, relegating contemporary artists to less public space. Contemporary artists feel that they ask receivers to interact on a higher cognitive level because photorealist art only engages viewers at a concrete visual level. Qualitative researchers describe causal relationships with context, whereas quantitative researchers describe only the cause-effect relationship as a black box, where A causes B but the causal mechanism is ignored. Perhaps in the same way chaos theory illuminated similar foundational structures among different disciplines, the way contemporary artists think could help qualitative researchers gain knowledge regarding conflicts.
Implications for Contemporary Artists’ Way of Knowing
In my undergraduate studies, my education revolved around becoming a physicist. Much to my disappointment, my studies were less about learning a new way of knowing, and more about being trained in the techniques of a physicist. I began my college studies with the hope that I could learn to think in new and better ways, but instead was forced into an established pattern of thinking and assessed for my compliance with these patterns. After years of learning in this manner, I felt that alternate ways of looking at things were irrelevant, or perhaps I forgot how to accomplish alternative ways of knowing. Had I embraced contemporary art during that period of my life instead of rejecting it as irrational, I may have questioned my education more. Since I did not question my education, it wasn’t until much later in my life that I was enlightened to begin thinking in diverse ways. For many years, I ignored scholarship in favor of the comfort of established routines.
Being rational was very important to me as I became a scientist, but I could also see rationalism take over other aspects of my life. I began to ignore intuition and regarded only rational decisions as having value. In making personal decisions, I would push away emotion in favor of choosing a rational option which resulted in the “right” situation according to traditional society. After making a number of decisions using only rational criteria for years, I found myself in a very safe world, but I had lost a spark for life. If I were thinking like a contemporary artist during that time in my life, I would have recognized the importance of my intuition and emotion in making decisions. I would have been capable of exploring various options, rather than the one option that was the “right” answer. I would have been less wrapped up in doing the right thing and felt free to engage in the messiness that goes along with life.
Contemporary artists explicitly challenge rules because they constantly question the status quo. They take the stance that the rules are only one answer, and there are many other answers. Too often I have suppressed my true thoughts and feelings because I found it important to follow the rules. After thinking like a contemporary artist, I see that having rules in place force people to think linearly. Of course, some rules are necessary, but as our society becomes more complex, some rules are being established gratuitously so that we can make sense of complexity. I can now see the importance of looking at gratuitous rules and questioning them. There are multiple ways in which problems are addressed.
I can now see that specialization in the world can cause us to underplay our humanity. There are so many responsibilities for individuals in a complex society that these responsibilities often outweigh our own being. For instance, in the 1920’s a teacher in an American public school only needed to teach content. Today, teachers are expected to be content experts, psychologists, child welfare agents, sociologists, special educators and parents to their students. As teachers receive more responsibility, they become more focused on exterior issues, and less time is devoted to personal reflection. Teachers begin to automatically go through their routines, rather than address issues involving the humane treatments of themselves and their students. The downplay of humanity in schools today is illustrated by the too frequent occurrence of mass shootings by students. Students wouldn’t walk into schools and randomly shoot other humans if they had any access to empathy. If the larger society could explicitly describe our loosening grip on humanity as contemporary artists do, then such extreme situations might never occur.
Practical Implications
Contemporary artists find strength in looking at issues in many different ways and to question traditional structures. They are never satisfied with the status quo and constantly seek more innovative ways to spread their message. As teachers we recognize that our students are individuals who think in many different ways, but we retreat to the standard form of teaching, because it is where we are comfortable. Contemporary artists often have uncomfortable feelings toward the public because they refuse to be judged by standard categories. Perhaps the teaching profession could break out of a traditional framework by accepting that there can be more than one way of judging the work of a teacher and that some of the activities in the classroom cannot be measured empirically. Recognizing the importance of emotion in our daily work can also help to ease the mechanistic ways we go about teaching students. Reflecting on what we do and evaluating the status quo need to be incorporated into daily educational activities so that we can keep humanity within reach.
Sometimes linear thinking is more practical than creative thinking. I would not want to be driving on the same road as a “creative” driver. There are certain aspects of life that are sequential and we would be wasting time and effort in trying to think about alternate possibilities to accomplish these activities. In assembling a bicycle, the factory made the pieces to fit in certain ways. Each piece has a function, and cannot do their jobs if they are not assembled in the established way. You could use trial and error to put the pieces together, but looking at the directions and assembling the bicycle in the traditional way saves time and effort. Some tasks can be done in a linear fashion more effectively.
I
revisited the
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