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07 July 2008
Art with issues
Went to the revamped Dowse gallery yesterday and saw some interesting stuff there, including an exhibition that was essentially a series of portraits of people who identify themselves as trans gender or trans sexual, called "Assume Nothing".There was a little sign at the start of the exhibition that said something like:
Warning: This exhibition, which deals with an important issue within our society, contains some nudity and images which may offend some people.
That's from memory, but that was the gist and I think I've got the tone about right.
I reckon it's fine to have a sign like that, but that relative clause, "which deals with an important issue within our society", annoyed me. First, seems very righteous to assert the importance and, second, seems like a weird assertion about the circumstances in which it's OK to show cocks in public. "Don't worry, this penis exposure is by no means frivolous!"
Beyond the signage, I found it interesting that the exhibition actually did deal with the issue it claimed to in a very explicit way, inasmuch as it was basically an entirely documentary thing about identity politics, consisting of the portraits, text from the subjects and the photographer, and then, for another layer of info, video documentaries about the same.
As a way of communicating ideas about an issue, that seems to be a much more successful approach than something that requires specialist knowledge of art history, post-modernist theory or both. The flipside is the exhibition had a very different feel from others in the gallery, and the photographer and film-maker both seemed fairly outside the art establishment - not in the sense of being "outsider artists" or savants or whatever, but in that the work shown was much more in line with a TV crew, a coffee table book or maybe a library display (barring the subject matter).
I found it all fairly dissatisfying, which has lead me to wonder if I ever like art to be about politics. I'd got much more excitement out of looking at some abstract felt pen drawings, some pretty photos of Antarctica and an incredibly detailed mock blueprint for a "brothel or prison" elsewhere in the gallery.
To draw a crude analogy to music, I much prefer to listen to lyrics that are either dumb and rude or arty and obtuse than to conscious political music. I like conscious political views, but I don't listen to music to get educated, and I don't know if I want visual art to be trying to educate me either.
Thinking out loud here, probably not as black and white as all this. Interested to hear what others reckon.
Labels: misc time-wasting
Posted at
12:08
4 Comments:
You listen to the Notwist? Weird.
Art and politics: to each his own. I personally would like to live in a world where I felt comfortable - and here this is between me and my conscience - making "art"/creative stuff purely for pleasure, both mine and the prospective audience's, rather than feeling driven to express content with a political slant. What I feel deeply comes out in my creativity, and I deeply, urgently feel things are fucked up and need to change, and one way that can happen is raising awareness.
Of course, outside of documentaries, I don't really explore "political" "art" or "creative media" any more.
Yeah, I'm not trying to express what art should be (limited to), just musing on what I find interesting / seek out.
Thinking about it more since I posted, I wondered if it's something about "wit" more than just the subject matter, because I actually do enjoy a bunch of stuff that is overtly political, but largely it's stuff that's satirical, ridiculously passionate and/or something I'd consider very incisive. Oh, and which I at least largely agree with. :)
To some degree it depends how everything-is-political you want to be too, because I e.g. enjoy issues-y books by Amis, Bellow and Coetzee, while not liking the reading I have of what they say about the world.
Art and politics are the same thing.
Okay, not really - that's hyperbolic in the extreme. But I do believe that every artwork does carry political content, from your Disposable Heroes track through to your Mondrian painting and all points in between. And when you're parsing things that intently, the reverse becomes just as plausible - politics has an artistry to it; reflecting on it reveals truths about humanity and society as an artwork might, or simply amuses like another performance could.
All of which just says that our engagement with art, politics, documentary-content-in-galleries, etc, is a product of culture, and as such is and should be variable from person to person and situation to situation.
I guess in my own experience, everything is so conditional that its hard to make much sense of it. I find it hard to talk about the sorts of things I like because that doesn't even seem a sensible question, most of the time. The communication/interactive aspect of creative production is what interests me at present - everything becomes process.
Actually I don't know if I have anything sensible to say about this at all. *pushes eject button, ejects through hole in roof*
Your last para kind of sums up how I've felt each time I've gone to write about this so far. :)
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