A Critical Description & Analysis of Ali Beilke’s Aesthetic
Philosophy
Or
Why I’m a Stuckist AND a Conceptual Artist
Or
Why
Genius and Crazy Mean the Same Thing
Or
Why There’s No Such Thing As
Wasted Time
Or
Why I’m an Artist and You’re Not
Or
Why Art Should Be
Its Own Religion, But Not Really Since That Would Be Silly
Or
Why
Everything Is Everything Else
Or
Cases Where Contradiction Should be
Embraced Because Nobody Knows What They’re Talking About
It’s difficult to know where to start. You want answers? I’ll give you answers. Art is a word that many people use but few know what they mean when they use it. That isn’t to say that art is a commonly used word in most vocabularies. I do mean that among those who use the term art, it is a small percentage of them that can produce a coherent definition. This does not speak against the intelligence of those who talk about art. Rather, it sheds light on the complexity of the modern interpretation of art. Art has and can only have an open definition, if you’re thinking like Morris Weitz. He meant this in saying “Perhaps the only constant lies in art’s always being creative, always evolving in style, in purpose, and significantly, in definition.” Right now, I say that I’m an artist and I know I am because I make art. Some examples of my art are the paintings that I did for painting class last semester (all of them), the tiles and giant abstract puppy that I made in sculpture class last year. I did a self-portrait for the final project in drawing II; it’s art. My final project for 2D design is art. The line blurs at my unfinished work and at all of the color study work I did for using color. Those ridiculous color boxes/paint by number assignments are not art… Yet. I’m positive that if I wanted, I could use those learning tools and make something that communicates creatively, expressively, cleverly, and thoughtfully. Art, then, does communicate, but in various ways. Is communication the sole purpose of art? This completely depends on the meaning of “communicate,” and then on the content that one wants to communicate. If at its simplest ‘communicate’ means “to give to another” and/or “to be joined or connected” then I say that all art communicates. This isn’t implying what art ought to do. This is stating what all art has been observed to do. With this in mind, I think that even barriers can be used to communicate and join or connect people. Granted, they obviously impede communication between some bodies, don’t they sometimes bring together those who are on the same side? The barrier itself communicates something about those who, whether consciously or unconsciously, created it and their reason for doing so. To learn from the barrier, though, it would be necessary to a third party, unbiased towards either side.
This brings up the question of “correct” communication. If something is always being communicated through art, is it the right stuff? How can the viewers or experiencers know if they understand what’s being communicated? What if someone misses the point? Can they? I think this is where I’m a bit of an objectivist, if that’s the right term, but also a subjectivist. Everything is beautiful, everything communicates (which is why art also communicates- it’s not excluded from everything), but exactly what is communicated, what is beautiful, the correctness of a person’s interpretation of either is subjective. So, in this view, expressing emotion is a form of communication. But then one is led to ask what it means to “express emotion.” It’s kind of the same question, but deals more specifically with hormonal responses and the gut responses, as opposed to intellectual ones. An emotion may lead to a thought, and often does, but certainly a person can have an emotional response without cognitively labeling it. I sometimes get sad and don’t have any real reason to be sad. I also can be pretty irate at nothing in particular. But, I digress. This question is really whether a person can appreciate a piece of art only if he or she feels what the artist was trying to express through the art. Is it necessary for the appreciation of the art that the viewer be “pickin’ up what the artist is puttin’ down”? Aye, that is the rub.
At any rate, this is why I’m into conceptual art. I like appreciating an idea. It’s the slice of life idea, right? Pulling obscurity from the mundane and ordinary. That’s pretty cool. I turn to the Stuckist’s Manifesto, namely (18), for my views on conceptualism. “If it is the conceptualists’ wish to always be clever, then it is the Stuckist’s duty to always be wrong.” I want to be clever. If this was the only condition for being a conceptualist, then I’d be a conceptual poster child. I guess this mostly reflects my desire to be known for being insightful. I don’t understand the Stuckist’s distaste for cleverness, especially by calling it the “mask of cleverness,” as if to say that behind all that knowledge and insight, the conceptualists are regular people just like us. Ah. Of course they are, sweetie. The Stuckists divorce a person from their mind, it seems. While I do not support intellectual elitism, if the intellectuals offer an explanation, why not listen? To be exclusive by using intentionally confusing jargon isn’t very nice, no matter the field. A person shouldn’t be shunned from being an artist just because they’re not in the know. Now, if they start excluding the elitists from “artistdom” they’re guilty of hypocrisy. My saying is, “It’s bad when the bad guy does it, so it’s bad when the good guy does it, too,” usually referring to some protagonist who resorts to giving the antagonist a taste of his own medicine. I’m not really into that. I love the idea of an artist exploring her own neurosis and innocence, but the Stuckists were stuck on painting. I’ll be honest. I love to paint. It’s probably tied with drawing for my favorite medium, but to say that painting is the only art… That’s not my style; that’s ridiculous and snooty. However, the Stuckist thought that through the making and displaying of their paintings, they were “enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience.” How sweet is that? Using their definition of art, then all art enriches society, and that is something I can agree with. I think that I agree with Kant, too. Art is recognized as art because it has artness. It’s kind of like beauty. I can know that I’m looking at something beautiful because I recognize the beauty in it. Though, true enough, I think everything has some kind of beauty- more like an essence, really. For art, I think it’s the object’s potential for artness that exists in everything. Some things are not art. I’d tell you what they were, but then I’d have to kill you. Not really, but if I described things that are not art, then my description, though not by any use of creative or flowery language, could by default be considered art. Does that make sense? But I’ll ignore that line of thought to develop this one-- things that are not art. This morning, my room-mate Stephanie made coffee. By the time I got up, it was almost all gone, leaving a mostly empty coffee pot. That coffee pot is not art. My brother Clint has in his room a dry-erase board, complete with a marker holder, which he assembled and affixed to his wall with masking tape. That dry-erase board is not art. These two examples both communicate something; the coffee pot, that I’ll have to mooch off someone else to get my caffeine, and the dry-erase board, well, in and of itself communicates a means of communication through reminders. (My brother is a boy scout. He’s always prepared.) These things both have the potential to be art, though. Certainly, I could paint or draw or make some mixed media piece about the empty coffee pot and use it to expose something about myself. Same goes for the board. I could even use the objects themselves to express something and essentially communicate, but I don’t think either Stephanie or Clint would appreciate it, unless I bought them a replacement. Even if I didn’t buy a replacement, it would still be art, I think. It wouldn’t be very nice of me. And yet I wonder. If I just took Stephanie’s coffee pot with no forewarning or permission but I made it into something that was generally agreed to be a great and marvelous work of art, would it be? Could Stephanie see it as anything except a stolen coffee pot? That would make art into a sorry excuse to ignore people as equal individuals, and give any artist the right to do as they please. I could not will it as a maxim that every artist can take things without asking as long as it’s used in the creation of some wonderful and creative piece of art that enriches society. Greatest good for the greatest number of people my big toe. That would be selfish and it would throw the world into contradiction. No one would trust a person who claimed to be an artist because artists would all have a reputation for hyper-egoism acting outside of common courtesy. I would have very little regard for such a person and would give scarcely a glance to pieces made by him or her. I guess now what I’m saying is, “That’s not art, that’s self-righteous poppy cock.” The question here is whether the artist has the right to offend. I believe not. Art should be brought about with sincerity and genuine efforts, regardless of its intended effects. How does this relate to things that were never intended as art? What if I took my room-mate’s coffee pot and made a shrine out of it, and if the deity or whatever for which I was making the shrine required that I get all the materials in some clandestine fashion? So I end up with some thing of ritual, constructed creatively and expressing much emotion, not because it’s art but because my religion calls for those things in its practices. Let’s say that I die without showing anyone my shrine, but my family finds it and they love it so much that they decided to display it locally. Then it gets more widespread attention and eventually winds up in some high and fancy-to-do art museum. (Bear with me. I have delusions of grandeur). But in the public’s frenzy over all my fabulous and for some time, unknown masterpieces, a well-known critic of my work comes across some of my long hidden and very creepy diary entries where he then leaks to the public all my terrible motives. The public would probably feel betrayed, especially those who saw me as an innocent, naive, cute, little artist girl who “just really likes art. Heheh.” But there would probably be some folks who “knew all along” that I was a conniving, dark, and twisted girl. They’d like my art more. There would be a great controversy about my state of mind and my morals (or lack thereof). And at the end, I’d come out of hiding, where I was hanging out, watching the whole thing, and tell people the whole story, but probably in slurred and mumbled sentences, since I hadn’t had anyone but myself to talk to. An even greater slew of people would be upset and write mean things about me and start Anti-Ali cults just to protest my inherent wickedness and my adverse effects on society. But, by golly, if all that really happened, I would be an artist. Only a crazy person(or a genius, which actually means the same thing) would live such a life, and as everyone knows, all artists are crazy. I mean genius.
