Howard McCalebb
Image - Symbol - Sign - Word
Image - Symbol - Sign - Word
Although art making is an investment of feelings and intuitions, it can also provide an opportunity for intellectual exchange. Verbal discourse fashions the general critical context within which art objects exist, are produced, and are viewed. Words are the tools with which the ideas concerning the practice of art making, and with which the subject of the art works themselves, as emblems of the cultural/artifact record, are examined. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and writing is almost always considered supplementary to the primary work of visual artists. For the artist, writing is an awkward deviation from the essential practice of art making. Visual art is a language of its own, but the situation is that the visual artist operates in a culture dominated by words. Verbal communication is central to human relationships, as one anchors oneself with language. When words are most important, we hear them with little visual distraction. The wordless impact of visual art is made to express things that cannot be spoken. Art is visual, its graphism is about looking and seeing and thinking visually. There is a sensuous knowledge in the depths of artistic experience that cannot be grasped with the forceps of the word. The artist, whose personal motivation and politics is subject to endless speculation, is challenged by the labyrinthine relationships between art and public discourse. The literary and the visual arts can be just as much opponents as colleagues. Great art cannot be created in a vacuum. It is important to discuss art, argue about it and even judge it. Most controversial subjects, as art often becomes, are so complex that their analyses are often matters of interpretation. Public scrutiny, peer review, and qualified criticism are all essential for an energized dialogue, visual or otherwise. Verbal dialogue with other artists, intellectuals, interested, and interesting people in general, contribute to the artists’ ability to formalize, reformalize and crystallize their purposes. Because the still unsettled issues of meaning in visual art may not reflect the conditions that inspire the artists’ imagery, a willingness to engage the problems of the relations between art criticism, critical theory, art history, and artistic practice, could be a worthwhile artist`s purview. Cultural artifacts do not write their own story, and with every question on art, the credentialed experts ruminate for years to find their critical spin. But significant visual art is not the product of the specialized efforts of the historian, art critic, or philosopher. Philosophy, for example, with its rigour and knowledge of the broader intellectual and argumentative contexts, the antecedents and the backgrounds of a subject in question, conform to the demands of validity inherent in the conditions of verbal discourse as an ideological construction. Modernist reductionism, cultural utopianism, xenophobic nationalism and a host of other bad ideas are just a few examples of how the words of the credentialed experts have attempted to overtake the culture of visual expression. Words either support or protect whatever dogmas the speakers are promoting. Although the artists’ passion for art is usually not matched to an ability to write a graceful sentence, it can be in the written form where dialogue begins to have at stake. The artist is the genuine eyewitness to the events unfolding as a work of art comes into being. It is this genesis that others have spent centuries mythologizing. In the tradition of artists’ writing their observations in times of crisis and opportunity often compels them to speak out in writing. When advancing a theoretical or political position, the artist can be enormously animated, and prodigiously articulate intellectual force. But the artists’ primary calling, visual art, is always expressed in the first person. Determining what voice to speak in is a significant problem for the writer. The posture of authorial distance, the third person (other), is something that cannot be attained in art work that is produced by the artist’s own means. It is very difficult to imagine an energetic visual expression couched in some kind of pseudo-objective voice. The artist properly works in the first person (despotic voice). Most of what is represented in art are his/her expressions, values, beliefs, and ideas. Visual art is a language of its own, and the best examples resist literal interpretation. The primary operation that brings art into being takes place before the fact of the text. The more poised and complicated minds on display in the most accomplished art is what we look for as viewers. When we read and write we are looking for something else. The art of the future will be the product of the culture of the future, reflecting all of the imagination, effort, and unforeseen accidents that will create it. If I could describe what it would be, at this current moment, I would make it now! Howard McCalebb New York |
