I was recently prompted to blog about this by an exchange I had with Julia who writes the immensely enjoyable Historic Fibers blog. I recently enjoyed her post about Art Appreciation, though I disagree with her admittedly tongue-in-cheek assertion that the way to deal with inscrutable artworks is to maintain that they are ‘about the environment.’ While I am sympathetic to a point about the plight of the baffled Art-goer who fears appearing ignorant in the face of an inscrutable Artwork, and while I understand that I am naturally biased in favour of Art Criticism owing to my extended education in that subject, I am also very wary of approaches to Art which eschew or nullify the debates surrounding it. I think Art is richer for being problematic, complex, conflicted and difficult and I think that not understanding Art and being confused and frustrated by it are as important and as valid as thinking it’s the best thing ever; it’s all about the terms of engagement and about what you choose – imaginatively – to invest in Art. And there are many ways to explore what great Art is, from criticising it, to owning it, to aping it, to celebrating it.

Lego Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the mind of someone living, by The Little Artists, AKA John Cake and Darren Neave, seen at the Affordable Art Fair in 2007

For this reason I am deeply suspicious of concepts like ‘Artwank‘ or reality programmes like the current media circus that is ‘Saatchi’s best of Britain.’ ‘Artwank’ is a deeply conservative term that has arisen out of the unfortunate shortfall between Art education and the demands of the professional Artworld. As a practising artist you are expected to be able to explain your work in clear terms, articulate your ideas perfectly in language, and précis explanations of your work down into 300 words for funding proposals and suchlike. But some artists understandably feel that concentrating on developing these linguistic skills drains the creative energies required for their other creative endeavours, and so they either write badly or incoherently about what they are making, or leave that job up to the critics. Furthermore, many exciting concepts lie at the borders of what language can explain and require a certain amount of fumbling about by anyone attempting to write about them.

Taking these complexitities into account, I find the term ‘Artwank’ to be supremely unhelpful in clarifying or extending the exciting, imaginative concepts that lie within contemporary Arts practise, and I think the whole idea of writing off all explanations that are badly written, unclear, uncertain or complicated, is unhelpful, lazy and judgemental. I think the term ‘Artwank’ limits the conversations surrounding what Art is, and minimises the terms of any Art-discussion enormously. If you want to be entertained, the world is full of entertainment. If you want to look at pretty pictures, the world is full of pretty pictures. And if you want to be transported by the sublime or transcendental qualities of Art, this country is absolutely full of religious paintings and sculptures that were created hundreds of years ago – and which will still suffice – for this very purpose. But surely it must be clear by now to anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last 30 years, that Art performs many different functions to these, and that part of the fantastic energy and imaginative freedom surrounding Art concerns the debates and conversations that surround it.

I think one distinction that doesn’t get made enough in public debate about Art concerns what we are happy to own and have in our own houses, and what we value as Art outside of these terms. In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal here that my favourite personal Art objects include a newspaper centrefold featuring many different, historic toasters, (sent to me in a package by Colleen) a felt-picture made by Caro and featuring Monkl’s smiling face, my self-assembled collection of knitted fruits and vegetables and a selection of vintage, 1950s washing-up related advertisements. Also, a massive stack of experimental sound Art CDs, including Peter Cusack’s Your Favourite London Sounds and J. Frede’s Unprepared Piano, which I love for its simple, brown-paper packaging and its deconstruction of the sounds of my favourite instrument, the Piano. These objects affirm what I believe about the world around me, they celebrate the banal and the everyday in unexpected ways, and they nourish my personal sense of fun. I also derive great aesthetic pleasure from their presence in my home. However I am extremely glad that the world of Art is not confined to objects which perform these functions, and extremely critical of any discussions on Art that reduce it to this privately gratifying function alone and shrink our consideration of the value of Art down to questions of personal taste.

Colleen’s gift of toasters; one of my favourite images

There is an extended Artspace which exists beyond the home and beyond the realms of what is comfortable or familiar, and this extended Artspace, I believe, enriches our collective, imaginative experience of being alive. Consider the impact of Bobby Baker’s outrageous and brave explorations of food, feminism, identity and domestic life in works like Kitchen Show, or the intense materiality of Anya Gallaccio’s Red on Green, in which 10,000 red roses were placed on the floor of a gallery and allowed to expire. Consider the fact that nobody travelling Northwards near Gateshead can escape their own curiosity concerning the infamous Angel of the North, or the joyous way in which London’s public descended on the TATE modern to explore the giant fissure that was created along its floor in Shibbolith. None of these works can exist in my bedsit, or, I assume, in your house. And wouldn’t Shibbolith have lost its entire life and energy if confined to a private context beyond the public gallery, where people couldn’t play in it, pose with it, get lost in it?

Mark falling off the world in Shibbolith

These are all non-ownable* Artworks which only make sense in the context of a public performance, or open gallery exhibition, but I am grateful for their existence and glad for what they teach me about seeing the world differently. Endless variations of the question ‘what if…?‘ are made possible by the presence of these objects in the physical and mental landscapes of contemporary Western society and I am glad that sometimes I don’t understand Art, that sometimes I find it complicated or baffling, that sometimes I don’t get it because I think that is partly the point of mentally engaging with it. We have had hundreds of years to acclimatise to the idea that the roof of the Sistine Chapel is Great Art, but only a couple to get our heads around Emin’s My Bed or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the mind of someone living.

Lego Tracey Emin’s My Bed by The Little Artists, AKA John Cake and Darren Neave, seen at the Affordable Art Fair in 2007

To my mind the two most unimaginative and boring questions concerning contemporary Art are ‘is it good’ and ‘do I like it?’ Surely more interesting questions concern what Art makes us experience and what Art makes us think of. In terms of Emin and Hirst you could ask how have Artists – for the first time in history – achieved such super-epic levels of fame, and how/why has our culture produced Artists like this, and how have their aforementioned works attained such notorious and legendary status, and what do we think of or experience when we engage with that work? And by engaging I do mean checking out the inescapable reportage, the words, the books, the exhibition catalogues etc. which now comprise a fair element of the work’s overall presence in our culture. It is also worth investigating the new works that have been made in relation to those works as commentary, as decendants, as continuation, as question, as debate, like the lego versions of these artists which seem to simultaneously mock and immortalise the pop-culture status of the YBAs with their cunning use of the same material (LEGO) that is used to commemorate other pop-culture events, like films. But it is not possible to formulate our own uncertain opinions in the face of being judged as ‘Artwankers,’ or when we feel obliged to trot out some line which makes us look clever, like ‘it’s about the environment’ when we discuss or compose our thoughts on Art.

I also think the question ‘why is it Art?’ asked so many times last night on Saatchi’s best of Britain is a lazy one, especially coming from Tracey Emin. I am a great defender of Tracey Emin’s work and am intolerant of the lazy criticisms and comparisons that she attracts; however I think that My Bed is the greatest example of ‘it’s Art because I said it is’ since Marcel Duchamp’s infamous gesture with Fountain, in 1917, and I was amazed to find her demanding an answer to this question from young artists having – in the eyes of the general public at least – failed to explain her own work in these terms. Watching the bizarrely old-fashioned questioning taking place between the panel and the young Artists being interrogated by them on television last night, I found myself thinking again about the descrepancy between professional, practising Artists, and the world of Arts education and wondering whether the producers had gone mad when they chose Saatchi, Emin, and Kate Bush (who curates some of the most ground-breaking shows, in my opinion, at the Barbican) to apparently undertake some bizarre re-appraisal of the modern meaning of Art. Surely the whole life-drawing exercise on ‘Saatchi’s best of Britain’ is comparable to a store-cupboard classics cookery programme head by Heston Blumenthal and entitled ‘what is Food, really?’ and getting young, training chefs who are expected to professionally compete with Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay to make toast and boiled eggs ‘in the traditional way.’

Saad Qureshi’s More Apparent than Real in the 2007 Oxford Brookes BA Graduation Show, 2007

I think Saad Qureshi (who went to Oxford Brookes, incidentally, where I am currently studying) also exclaimed at one stage that this question ‘why is it Art?’ is sort of a crazy question to be asked in this day and age, and he has a point; you are looking at a generation of artists who been taught to accept the greatness of Duchamp, the genius of Emin, the legacy of Picasso and the audacity of Martin Creed, and whose education has been more focussed around creating meanings through appropriation, reinvention and adoption and less around practical drawing skills or traditional Art values.

While I celebrate many elements of a contemporary Arts education, it seems to me that one major pitfall is that the Artists who are going through it seem universally ill-equipped to defend, describe and discuss their practise to others. Whatever you think about Saatchi’s X-Factor style instalment of culture, you have to admit that it is only one such arena in which the Artist is publically pressed to defend and discuss their work. Other such situations include writing funding applications, making gallery proposals and attending public discussions, and if we expect our audiences to invest a little time in understanding what we are trying to do, then I think they can expect an explanation for, say, a handle attached to a wall with a whistle strung from it.

I do not think that it helps the contemporary Artist to see their critical-engagement and writing skills as being distinct or separate from other areas of their creative practise. I think that language is becoming more and more essential in the dissemination and discussion of Art, and that as Artists, we must be increasingly willing to produce it ourselves and embed discussions in our work, and work in our discussions. If we do not, then we can expect our work to exist in the laziest and most unimaginative of debates, and to lose the richness of Art to the tiredest levels of consideration.

In order to honour the bargain between Artist and audience, we must be willing to publically fail, for our language to be sometimes unclear as we search for the right words, for our concepts to be challenged as well as challenging, and for our work to be rejected. But as long as we resist the difficulty of Art, avoid discussing it beneath vague platitudes like ‘the Art should speak for itself’ or reduce it to the stupidest of questions, we miss out – as both audiences and Artists – on the rich, imaginative potential of what Art is. So let us speak not of ‘Artwank’, nor of Art being ‘about the environment,’ nor of ‘why is it Art?’ but let us instead think of what is possible, of how we can understand or see the world differently, of where the mind and the heart can stretch to, and of the infinite elasticity and malleability of meanings, language, sounds, and imagery, because those are the things at stake when we consider the great, conflicted territory of Art and its immeasurable, imaginative power and those are the things we damage when we limit the debate to a reality-TV level and questions of personal taste.

*unless you are Charles Saatchi or a similarly wealthy collector