Having produced paintings, ceramics and various ‘technology derived’ forms of visual images over a period of many years, it was time to construct, for myself, a theoretical definition of what is art and what is its utility value to contemporary society (according to Puggy Booth).
Initially the layout of this attempt to describe what the years of practice and observation have taught, was to place what logically represented the natural beginning, the conventional elements of visual image making, at the beginning. Eventually it moved toward the other end of the project.
Why this became the more logical process evolved from the writing.
The original plan began with the basic elements of painting, being, Line, Form and Colour. Also included here was the concept picked up from the writings of 20th century teachers which include; the Frame and ‘Plastic Art’ (not meaning using polymer materials).
What become evident to me immediately was how much my early ideas have moved away from this traditional concept, but not just because technology has changed everything in every aspect of modern life. I still believe that ‘Line’ is the basic element of all visual perception and that preoccupation has increased in its significance to my mind. I find that now I can achieve an explanation for the creative expressions I am motivated to explore, using discoveries and theories that more commonly guide artificial intelligence investigators.
I don’t do ‘art’. I have no interest in producing attractive images or impressive visual effects. I respect and admire quality in draft-persons work but such skills are peripheral to the purpose of art, which is about contributing to our collective knowledge of the visual Language. Why this is relevant or even necessary, I intend to explore and justify, with the rational analyses, not of an engineer appended to the positivism of the 20th century but with a knowledge of the visual language, enlighten by the best practitioners of the past and the new revelations about ‘seeing’ and ‘believing’.
I have a basic belief which is that reading the visual language is a balance between ‘internal representation’ (the sense data, or the physiology of vision) and ‘external regularities’ (the acquired knowledge used to process the data). This process of learning to understand the image is the definition of intelligence (in the same context that the human, is an intelligent animal).
This ‘process’ is as compulsive as sleeping and eating. Recognising that such knowledge has a plasticity which defines the human species, and that it is daily remoulded, justifies the need for material that does the task. Some may consider this as a romantic notion, which it is, but an aspiration, not less worthy, for creatives that are up to the challenge.
It is inevitable that ‘art for the pure enjoyment of self expression will prosper. This is inevitable and acceptable. Celebratory and colourful images are ubiquitous in any large community. Their role is to decorate and entertain. Occasionally an iconic image emerges from this source but it is not the normal process.
I must accept that the coercive power of the visual image is boring to the ‘Me generation’ and all ‘natural’ bohemians. All artistically inclined persons in their early explorations, experience a desire to reject such restraining ideas. It is after all, the way it is, for these ‘difficult’ personalities, who are attracted to the freedom of the visual language and its apparent lack of rules. The ‘creative’ wants to invent the whole world, not just a part of it; but still be a part of it. In such an ephemeral world the ‘art establishment’ are the arbiters of quality, and commercial agenda’s drive the market.
For the more sombre and introspective creative, which obviously is where my sympathies lay, the challenge is to avoid obscure concepts such as ‘beauty’ and ‘taste’, when describing a piece of creative work. Such terms, amongst other similarly imprecise terms, inevitably become the agents of abuse when questions of quality need to be addressed. Therefore the initial requirement is to invent the meaning of ‘Art’, that can be expressed in measurable values. If this is in some way confrontational with the commercial art market, so much the better.
For me it was the realisation that although the main complexity in an intelligent ‘image’ might well be expressible in terms of the content (information), the content itself does not constitute intelligence. Rather intelligence exists in the context of an ‘image’ that exhibits an intelligent physical presence, created by the use of ‘Line’, ‘Form’ and ‘the Frame’.
In other words, intelligence does not exist as a mathematical abstraction, but is only embodied in the physical manifestation of the work. This might seem either an obvious or a purely philosophical point, but it leads to the development of an analytical vision paradigm where the notion of functional arrangement can be used as a structuring (or deconstructing) element for creating visual systems. The particular statement in this case, is that vision (being a form of intelligence) cannot be considered independent of its embodiment in an image.
Is this still art or is it science? It certainly comes out of the literature of artificial intelligence, but it is perfectly relevant to the visual language. This allegiance may disturb some but it also is a much stronger logic and a sounder support to an empirical system that is not science, but is complimentary to it.
The human being, functions with a large amount of information. Where does this information come from? It cannot come from the genome, which although being large is not large enough. Nor is there any biological connection that can map information from one individual onto another (a data transfer). The obvious source of structured information is the world, loaded over the relatively high-bandwidth channels that are the senses. The process of mapping this information into the individual, specifically is ‘learning’. The primary tool for learning is vision and the visual language.
‘Art’ like many words in many languages has many definitions. In the English language and its equivalent in other languages, ‘Art’ has many discrete and contextually different meanings.
In my corner of the universe the colloquial term ‘Artist’ was a person particularly adept at improvising nonsensical and exaggerated claims (it is sometimes appended by a reference to bovine excrement). This remains for me the unavoidable default definition and is why I prefer to describe my interest as a graphical technician. I smugly consider it more impressive in the age of technology; but I am unique in this choice.
In the commercial world of graphical design and popular culture the more conventional use of the term ‘Artist’ is somebody doing ‘Art’. So what is art?
There are so many possible usages of the word, it is plausible to say that the noun “Art’, has no meaning at all. At least no meaning without it being attached to a more tangible noun such as ‘Sculpture”. Equally obscure the adjective “Art’, is nonsense and its use as a verb is so ambivalent that it defies any definitive interpretation.
The only clear usage of the word ‘Art’, which de-facto recognises the ambiguity of all other meanings, is its use in the phase; “there is an art to doing ‘…….’ (something/anything).
The interpretation of this phase is that there is some undefinable ability required to do something.
Meaning ‘Art’ is some undefinable quality and in being undefinable it cannot be taken to ‘mean’ anything.
Therefore the result of this initial search for the meaning of art is the first axiom. (according to Puggy Booth) which is that:
There is no such thing as ‘Art’, and a person purporting to do ‘Art’, is an ‘Artist’.
where ‘Artist’ is given by my local/original definition above.
Having sorted that out, right at the beginning, the problem still remains that ‘Art’ is still used in the common lexicon, although it has no real meaning. Strangely that may not be a coincidence because not all commentators on this topic have anything ‘real’ to say, or are disposed to being restricted to making rational or quantifiable statements.
In the 21st century, what claims to be art, appears to owe nothing to the traditional formats of the visual image. However this could be a delusion which requires some time and effort to sort through because it is correct that the medium in which the visual language today is expressed is so very different from that which went before. What is less obvious is the question which asks, does that mean the nature of the visual code has also changed?
As a painting practitioner, in the scientific age, it is appropriate that a career be a process of experiments in search of the illusive language of visual perception. Naturally it does change like all languages are modulated by common usage and the natural adding and deleting of words; in our case these are the visual elements. It is therefore justified to explain why the basic elements of painting should to be appreciated, even studied. It might even be the case that they need reinterpreting or even redefining in terms of the new media. Legitimising the search for this understanding, is the realization that most of the traditional elements have a contemporary equivalent. What the earliest experiments in the visual language have to teach us lies in the power of these images it produced, to cultivate an awareness of the ‘self’, a relatively contemporary term, derived from psychoanalysis, but practised for many centuries before dear uncle Freud turned his devious mind to it.
Styles and content, even abstract content, place a work in time and within its influencing factors, but this does not confine all contributions to these limits. There are those works that by some quality were able to transcend such prosaic definitions. This is an absolutely explicable combination of phenomena that devolve into a combination of the physiology and the psychology of the visual experience. The advantage contemporary creatives have over their predecessors in understanding this is that the physiological component is so much better defined and the large influence of the brain function leaves less to be explained by the psychology.
The iconic examples have a tenancy to break out of the common ‘straight jacket’; to have a social reference and a communal acceptance of individuality within a group, occasionally giving birth to a ‘school’ or movement. Although an occasional ‘lone wolf’, defies this pattern.
There is no doubt that the ‘meaning of art’, is problematic; especially if we remain attached to the use of ambiguous words. An equivalent ambiguous question is “What is the meaning of life?” This does not stop us from doing ‘life’; neither should ambiguity with handling ‘meaning’, stop us from doing ‘Art’. Already this is a complex concept which invites us to wallow in the ambiguity; or embark on the experimental researchers path, to a more accessible understanding.
This however brings a whole constellation of agenda’s and bias into the mix. It is a problematic zone where ‘the more you pay the more its worth’ world, comes into contrast with the ‘Arty, crafty set’. On another plane, the ‘autocracy of the museum culture’ is juxtaposed with the small band of independent technicians, the ubiquitous, ‘struggling creative spirit’, persevering in unrecognised oblivion. God bless the dedicated bohemian, what would we do without them.
If the term ‘Art’ is too abstruse, what description then can be used to represent the visual language?
‘Plastic art’ or ‘visual art’ have been used at various times but clinging to the ambiguous tag of ‘Art’, invariably compromises it. A derivation may sum up our ambition to replace ambiguity with a logical construct. The term ‘Plastic perception’ neatly encompasses the clear distinction between a mechanical reproduction of ‘reality’, with the necessary abstraction that a ‘human’ produced image engenders. The controversy between this pure condition and the ‘human driving the machine’ compromise can go unchallenged at this enumerate stage, but it can’t be ignored, just deferred.
As the cave painters of antiquity realised, the ‘human’ component is always the subject of a visual image, even when the apparent relationship with the content is more or less esoteric.
Although separated by the distance of time from the true immediate meaning of the earliest works of art that we have access to, their arcane references are not necessary to appreciating the meaning in the visual language. Scholars can not resist trying to decipher the recondite symbols embedded in the image; otherwise the image gives the contemporary observer a clear idea of what it meant to be human in the stone age.
What then is the ‘human component’?
‘Cave painters’ and ‘rock painters’ invariably incorporated human beings into their images; sometimes symbolically, sometimes as simple stick figures. Although the drama of most of these images appears to focus on animal forms, the human representative forms are present; as participants or observers. The fundamental significance of the object-observer relationship is a startling revelation that modern investigation has give great substance to.
In antiquity the graphic technicians discovered the ‘line’, or more accurately the ‘outline’. The images were strictly 2 dimensional but (in many cases) very carefully delineated forms (except when representing human forms). Detail inside the outlined form is minimal and ‘fill’ (or colouring in) was mostly ignored. What these early exponents were discovering is that, what the mind sees in the shape of the line, is the primary effect in any image. In their case it was the only effect they sort.
Consequently it has not lost its pre-eminence in the material phenomena of perception.
The mind considers the visual data from the eye, searching for hard edges it can construct as the line. Using this line it imposes a construction, or an interpretation, and from a catalogue of learned experience attributes what we can loosing say is the meaning.
Modern observers are denied the nature of the ancients experiences so can only see a shadow of that meaning.
As a signature, the creator occasionally included an image of their own hand, but they also left an imprint by the style and use of materials that spoke of the ‘human creative process’.
The minds interpretation of the abstract visual data coming from the eye was invariably influenced by the hand of the creator. It joined the creator and the observer in a mutual bond.
Such a trace has lingered in all works created up until the modern age of technological reproduction. It is what has given the ‘visual image its legitimacy’, and remains an intrinsic component of the ‘visual language’. It is seen in the brush strokes, the pencil lines and the texture of paint applied with the passion and energy that comes from self belief. This is not the ego of the creator but is the common ‘self belief’ of a social group. Everything else, and there is much more, is subservient to the unmissable hand of the creator (no religious pun intended) .
This brings us to the second axiom (according to Puggy Booth).
“The visual Language is expressed in graphical forms, which uniquely, must always include the ‘Human’ component, in its execution and in its content (although ‘content’ is a complex quality, which does not necessarily mean recognisable forms).”
In defiance of the ‘pragmatic’ world, which reduces humanity to the most fundamental levels of self interest, the ‘awareness of self’ in the visual language, is a common ‘self’. It manifests what we have in common; the gift of vision and the sensation of being enlightened and ennobled by the visual experience. You don’t get that in any political diatribe or religious ranting.
A world moderated by the visual language may not save every soul but it could avoid the worst excesses of a lack of communication between conflicted individuals, feuding nations, religious creeds and political bias.
It is worth giving it some space in our cluttered minds. The free spirits that trudge through the psychologically, ‘danger infested ‘swamps of the visual language, on occasions have something pertinent to express that has no alternative way of being shared. Occasionally this has moved individuals, tribes or nations to an accommodation with the rest of humanity; a facility well worthy of dedication from those human beings that see every soul on our planet as a partner in our individual dreams and desires.
Of course painting is not the only art, but the power of the visual image is that it is fundamentally a pure medium. Words are cheap, and ambiguous because they are primarily dependant on culturally biased interpretations. The world is confusing enough without the obscurity of words.
The visual language has an honesty that allows it to say what could not be said in words, even by the few brave enough to try. Such power does not come without an onerous obligation. In the words of the sage: the keys to heaven are also the keys to hell.
It may be a romantic notion but it is worth exploring; the idea that the visual image may reach across the socio-political divide, across the socio-economic chasm, and draw different peoples together. After all there is more that every human being has in common, than there is which divides us. The visual language is the only uncorrupted form of communication to explore these possibilities and it should neither be exploited or despoiled by vested interests.
In the past blatant propagandists have recruited it for their agenda’s.
Throughout history the means of sharing the visual language has been monopolised by the establishment. That still continues but the technology of ‘individual to individual’ communication is threatening to erode that inevitably; or at least weaken its tyrannical control.
Every visual artist is a moral campaigner because they communicate in a privileged spatial area of human cognition, and must appreciate the responsibility to utilise the medium appropriately. Freedom of expression in the visual language is no less a compromise than all of our treasured freedoms, on all sides of the political, religious and economic scenarios all over our planet.
Good artists must attempt to share the medico’s creed; do no harm.
In a similar way to which ‘bullies’, exploit the mass media; trivial and meaningless images can decorate the formal galleries and populate public spaces with their overwhelming mediocrity. Nothing can change that condition as long as those motivated to do it have the time and energy to continue. Alarmingly the depth of this pool of mediocrity is boundless and by its shear volume will be the dominate force in the free media.
This is the enigma of the visual language, it demands to be free; and by this freedom it must be inclusive and available. With this accessibility, it falls into a deluge of aimless expression. Every soul on the planet wants to be heard or seen. All forms of art immediately fail the basic test of authenticity when they deny this; it is a conundrum.
However for the observer all this visual pollution reduces the visual language to ‘white noise’ with the deluge of eye candy and advertising spam along with the additional offence of adolescent pollution in the form of vandalism and obscenity covering any available public space. The observer is neutered by a ‘denial of service’ attack on the visual senses.
No measure of excellence/quality can evolve because where the rare ‘worthy’ works emerge they are as rapidly overwhelmed by the next wave of visual spam.
No evaluation of relevance is possible because there are no sources of authoritative opinion.
In the mid 20th century this unresolvable contradiction lead commentators to resort to a ‘nihilist’ interpretation of the possibilities of all creative activities. Those negative commentators have not been silenced, but their view is framed in a pragmatic world of values that can only be expressed in material form.
It is the creatives goal to reveal the empirical reality that the image code embraces.
It must be devoid of ambiguous definitions, it must embrace the integrity of a democratic creative environment.