More on Conceptual Art

So just in case anyone is reading this blog who isn't in my Internet for Educators class, let me preface this next post by saying I had this really great assignment for the class to follow ten people on twitter who are related to my professional practice and then to profile one of them. I really liked the assignment and wanted to share part of my findings here as well as on our ning.

I chose Yoko Ono.

Yoko Ono is a household name (like Picasso, maybe), but she is often thought of not as an artist but as John Lennon's wife, the source of the Beatles' break up, or a political activist. I am ashamed to say that I too did not know she is an artist until I learned about her in art school myself. John Lennon described her as “the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”

In art school, I learned that Ono's art is conceptual and based in performance. One of my teachers told me about a performance in which Ono took a family heirloom vase and smashed it, giving once piece of it to each member of her audience. She told the audience that they would meet back together in one year to put the vase back together. It was conceptual performances like this one that made Ono stand out in the art community. Her twitter account is full of similar instruction based performance ideas, like the kind she wrote about in her book Grapefruit. The book is made up of instructional poems like “hammer a nail into the center of a piece of glass”. Similar to Sol Lewitt's work, the instructions are the artwork, the performances are records of the work.

One example from her twitter account of these instructional expressions is from 2:00pm on March 8th: “Draw a window on the wall to remind you of the sun”. And again, at 1:01pm on March 18th: “Have as many wish trees as you want in the garden”.

Now I'm wondering if each of these statements (and Lewitt and Ono are not the only ones who do this) are like mini artist statements in and of themselves?

What more would the audience want to know about this work, and why would the artist share more information?

I'll explore these questions next time.

If you have questions, just comment and ask!

In an effort to try to constantly reflect on my writing, I have reflected on my second blog post and I've realized that an outsider looking in might have questions about it. The foremost question you might have reading this is "Who the heck is Sol Lewitt?"

I often take for granted my four and a half years of art school. I know that there are some household names (like Picasso or Van Gogh, for instance) that are known to most people, but most modern artists are unknown to the general public. Lewitt is pretty "famous" in my mind, but he might be on the outskirts of common knowledge. I'm going to link to the wikipedia page for Sol Lewitt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt.

I'd say the really important point I wanted to highlight about Lewitt was that he took conceptual art to extremes. Wikipedia says "Sol LeWitt was one of the main figures of his time; he transformed the idea and practice of drawing and changed the relationship between an idea and the art it produces. LeWitt’s art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the ideas behind the works that surpass each work itself."

If you click on the third reference on the Wikipedia page it brings you to an artinfo.com page: www.artinfo.com/news/story/21215/the-writing-on-the-walls-sol-lewitt-at-diabeacon.

This page describes Lewitt's drawings as paint-by-numbers, and this is a good way to understand it. Lewitt wrote instructions for drawings, he didn't actually do the drawings himself. If you go see a drawing of Lewitt's in a museum, it wasn't him who actually drew it; he wrote the rules for the drawing. The page quotes a couple of Lewitt's drawing instructions (1,200 in total): "Wall Drawing #97... Ten thousand straight and ten thousand not straight lines" and "Wall Drawing #118... Fifty randomly placed points all connected by straight lines". These drawings are applied directly to the wall, eliminating the boundaries created by surface or frame.

It is crucial to understand that when Lewitt was writing about art, he was writing about conceptual art, specifically. Conceptual art is exactly what it sounds like: art that is based on a concept or idea. One could argue that all art is conceptual because all artists have an idea they are trying to portray. But what is important about Lewitt's conceptual art is that to him (and to conceptual artists) the idea is the most important element of a work of art, even more important than the form it takes.

Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship

Part of what it means to have "Digital Citizenship" is having a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration and learning. That's what I want to do with this blog: I want to teach and to learn. I hope that readers will comment on my posts so that learning will become a collaborative experience: you learn from what I write, I learn from your comments, I rewrite, you comment again, etc.

I decided to write this blog because I believe in writing artist statements, and I want to share what I believe with others. In the comments section of every post, I can receive feedback. Because my blog is open to the public, I feel a responsibility to provide valid information to my readers. I can't just say whatever I want, insult people, or behave in an inappropriate way, because then no one will want to know what I have to say.

Although I don't have students right now and don't have to worry about getting parental permission for the use of this blog, it is still smart to be smart. Therefore, I will not talk about my personal life on this blog. I'm not linking this blog to my twitter for that reason. I take this blog seriously, posting only things that I've thought a lot about and mean a lot to me. This isn't a diary. I take responsibility for this blog, and I will only post things that I'm comfortable sharing with everyone, even my future students and their parents.

Expressing my ideas is paramount, but I will not generalize or use disrespectful or negative language. I will support my ideas with evidence, and if I make mistakes, tell me and I will fix them.

I would expect my future students to act in a similar way. Therefore, the following is a sample contract I would have my students read, understand, and sign before using a blog for my class:

CONTRACT FOR FUTURE STUDENTS

I have a responsibility to be respectful to my readers: I won't be insulting or inappropriate.

I have a responsibility to my school: I won't talk about my personal life, and I won't link to my personal email or any other social networking sites.

This blog is serious: I will only post things that I've thought a lot about, mean a lot to me, and feel comfortable sharing with everyone.

I have a responsibility to tell the truth: I will support my ideas with reputable evidence, and I will fix the mistakes I make.

Signed: Lorraine's future student :)

(thanks to these sites for providing source information for this post: http://nets-implementation.iste.wikispaces.net/Digital+Citizenship, http://tinyurl.com/ydh2yml, and http://livingstonweb20.wikispaces.com/bloggingguidelines)

Artists are not apes.

Sol LeWitt provides some insight in writing about art in the article "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (Artforum magazine, June 1967).

First of all, the article hopes to justify the dismissal of "the notion that the artist is a kind of ape that has to be explained by the civilized critic." I take this to mean that some people have the idea that artists are wild animals to be studied by the civilized person. Some people think that only "the civilized critic" can decipher art work and it is the job of the critic to explain the artist to the world. LeWitt argues that the artist is not a wild animal and not an enigma. I would say that artists have the ability to explain themselves and do not need critics to do it for them. As artists we have the inside knowledge of what our work means and what we are trying to say. It is up to us to divulge this information.

All art is subject to criticism. To the artist, the work might mean one thing, and to the critic it might mean another. Because art is an image, It is the nature of art to be up for interpretation. We all view images with personal biases and make associations with images that the artist may or may not have had in mind.

The artist statement is one tool artists have to clarify their work and to give the work some context, history, or meaning.

I think it is smart to write artist statements so that critics have a context in which to consider my work. Not only does the audience have the physical work, but they also have an artist statement to consider. The statement informs the work with informs the statement.

One last thought from LeWitt seems to apply to writing about art: "If the statements I make are unclear it may mean the thinking is unclear." It is up to the artist to write with clarity and fluency to convey the desired meaning or message to his or her audience.

Quoting Art

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? We'll find out. My goal for this blog is to provide resources for teachers and artists to write about art.