Above is a time-lapse of the poly-technic's British Art show 'Off site' project there is a little bit at about one minute thirty where Kate rips a hole in the cardboard so we don't block off the timelapse camera and I tidy it up with the Stanley knife - I like this bit as it says something about keeping an eye on the ball - looking towards the point where I'm sat here thinking 'that looks nice, especially the curve and the curve of the paper' rather than looking a flat sheet of cardboard blocking the lens and wishing we had thought about it at the time. The project was called "My world" building on a theme from school and attempting to use the work in the British art show as a starting point, I'm not sure how well it worked but perhaps that is a story for another day although it does explain why we ended up at Leeds city art gallery talking about participation in the context of the British Art show.
Our session was called 'Why does it have to be so fucking/bloody difficult - just tell me what to think' This evolved from the fact that the young people we worked with found the show difficult. We then decided that the show was actually quite difficult. Although many individual pieces of work were not that hard 42 artists in one gallery was overwhelming. It felt like trying to find a film on Netflix, flicking between different genres, trying to avoid the things you had seen before or anything with Adam Sandler as the star and ending up making a commitment to re-watch breaking bad because at least you know it's good. At the moment art in galleries feels under pressure, a lack of money a bit of a lull in the historical flows of thinking, a massive crises of post structural identity and a near apocalyptic association with market capitalism, forgive the Brit artists for they know not what they did.
The foundations of our workshop were actually very positive, we had decided that the reason art persists had something to do with the fact it opened up spaces of confusion - a counter narrative to logic and science and the dominant sense making of our time. I emailed my good friend Johan Siebers who I like to think of as one of our greatest living philosophers or at least the greatest living philosopher I know. This is an edited version of our exchange.
Steve: I’m doing a talk in the new year in Leeds about the British art show it’s called “Just tell me what I’m supposed to think! “ I’m wondering what value impenetrable art has - some of the work is so esoteric it is like it is written in nonsense rather than a foreign language - or one of those strange personal; languages twins make up to speak to each other. For a while I thought it was arts knowing or unknowing response to post -structuralism but I am starting to think that this is wishful thinking.
The context of the talk is that the not understanding or even not even trying to understand is serving a need and that is why art persists. I’m basing it on the idea of father Christmas - I’ve always thought that we tell our kids that father Christmas exists so they learn that their parents lie to them and often it is in their own interests to lie back - as they get older they learn to lie to their parents and pretend they still believe in something which is useful when they become teenagers. I wonder what it is about artworks been so difficult that is useful for people but not in a daft psychology way more in an ontological way - or maybe a not yet way - the demonstration that there is something we can’t understand or beyond understanding and the vague glimpses of what we think is understanding opens up spaces of possibility suggesting that there is more?
What do you think?
Johan: Yes, I agree that the not-yet is "activated" in art partly by that which escapes us, or is obscure, difficult, unclear, that were the work is more or other than what it is.
This is the nature of the elusive itself, as it were, and the Utopian is always the elusive.
Bloch would say this is precisely the Utopian function of art, of the cultural surplus: something's missing - also from our understanding. There is a clip from an interview where he talks about this with respect to music: it can make us feel that we almost got it, we are almost there, can almost grasp it, but not quite. He likens it also to the frenetic or feverish babbling of a small child that is first discovering speech.
And there is pleasure in such not-knowing. There is also a pleasure in difficult texts that has to do with this. I always think academic writing is cheated out of this by the contemporary mantra on clarity. Some things in the world are not clear, you distort them by pretending you can be clear about everything.
It is indeed an ontological as much as a psychological reality, and closely linked to our need to be in touch with not-understanding. In a way the more classical view of art as fiction / imagination is related to it. A fictional world exists because we "suspend our disbelief", we don't ask the question "real or not".
This function of art opens up possibilities by reconnecting us to what is beyond understanding.
have a look at On Not Knowing - How Artists Think, by Elizabeth Fisher, who has joined Middlesex not long ago:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Not-Knowing-Artists-Think/dp/1908966297
I heard her inaugural lecture and thought it was very relevant.
When is your talk? I'd love to hear it...
Johan
The session went quite well I think although I was expecting much more of a fight, I thought we were presenting a polemic, not playing devils advocate but trying to say something that questions a set of foundational beliefs about the social function of art and the idea that it is a form of communication between individual and audience. An alternative title to the talk had been 'Art Now from Shaman to village idiot' another more positive title than initially thought in the context of the fool and Jung As the day went on and the discussions got deeper and more specific I considered our question in the context of the average gallery visitor. I wrote on the table cloth 'Perhaps like a fish finger or an unopened book by Marx the art and the show is not inherently difficult, it's very easy to ignore' . I'm still thinking about this and the phrase grasping the difficulties comes to mind, as Johan says there is a need for many of us to have something beyond our understanding, I think although I could be very wrong here that Johan would call this the constituted gap- Brecht's 'something missing' the nowhere space we all share that we can so easily partially fill with love, or hate or grief, loss, fear revenge or faith or for some of us art, fish fingers or Marx. At the end of the day in groups we were asked to come up with some thoughts to send to Edinburgh which is where the show goes next. My favorites were
IS IT FINISHED?
IS ANYTHING EVER FINISHED?
I think Johan would be pleased.
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