Duration ...

I'm not exactly sure what I was supposed to be doing with the duration assignment (I know: bad student! BAD student!), but I've been thinking about writing something related to clay and this class experience anyways ... First of all, this class has made me think more seriously about what it means to be an artist than any other class, thanks to the professors, the readings, but also my peers. I'm still horrified about the thought of defining 'art' and 'artist' to myself, though, something I think is essential if I will have any chance at becoming an artist. I was actually given two books concerning the very theme ('what is art?'), and only after reading just a few pages of the first book, I read things I thought was pretty wise, for example this: (from memory) "You know fate is in your own hands, but you feel your hands are week." Which is absolutely true for me. On the other hand, they say that "not everyone can be a Mozart, or a Picasso, and most of artistic achievements are through hard work, and not some God given 'talent' that only one in a million is given." I think I will like the rest of the book also ...

It is hard to put a finger on exactly what I feel like I have learned most about clay through this term, but I feel that I have learned a lot. Maybe not so much about clay per se, but how to think about what you are trying to communicate, and why, and what can happen when you do it. I like Elisa's comment from one of the talks over the readings when she says that art is (something like this) "something that makes your regular pathways in your brain stop, and they try to find other, unfamiliar, and new ways to get out ... "

I also thought Jeff had a great comment in his blog-report for the last reading–X Marks the Spot–with casts and negative spaces, and his thoughts about Pompeii: "Maybe the most surprising casts ever made, these empty cavities revealed the final moments of people dying from the volcanic eruption. Shocking and poignant, but there is nothing left of them but empty space…"

From my discussions with Brandon I remember best his reaction to me when I was saying "I think that art also is, you know, Art For Art's Sake" were he looks at me surprised, and says "oh? no ... I don't think you mean that ..." And that was a very interesting answer to me, and I'm still not sure why I shouldn't mean that. I mean, for me, Art For Art's Sake is a pretty harmless, selfexplaining, but also non-sensical statement that means nothing unless you first define what art is. 'Art For Art's Sake' is also, I believe, a response to the Arts and Crafts movement that was so strong at that time (late 1800), meaning it doesn't always have to be a decorated thing (commodity?) ... OK, I couldn't remember all my facts, so here is something from wikipedia:

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"L'art pour l'art" (translated as "art for art's sake") is credited to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Some argue Gautier was not the first to write those words. They appear in the works of Victor Cousin, ^[1]Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe argues in his essay "The Poetic Principle", that

We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake [...] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.^[2]

Gautier, however, was the first to adopt the phrase as a slogan. "Art for art's sake" was a bohemian creed in the nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of those who — from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism — thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. "Art for art's sake" affirmed that art was valuable as art, that artistic pursuits were their own justification and that art did not need moral justification — and indeed, was allowed to be morally subversive.

In fact, James McNeill Whistler wrote the following in which he discarded the accustomed role of art in the service of the state or official religion, which had adhered to its practice since the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century:

Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like^[3]

Such a brusque dismissal also expressed the artist's distancing himself from sentimentalism. All that remains of Romanticism in this statement is the reliance on the artist's own eye and sensibility as the arbiter.

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It seems that this view (aesthetic and decadent movements) goes a little further to the extreme than I was aware of. Apparantly, the Arts and Crafts movement was not something the Aestethic Movement opposed, rather the opposite it seems ...

Oh, well ...