By Scott Schultheis
Today, two thoughts, aside from the usual pleasurable or pesky ones, like should I have one egg or two for breakfast, or should I floss this morning or evening…or both??? have been on my mind. One is from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” that he wrote in 1889, in which he says “What we have to do, what at any rate is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of lying”. He is talking about what artists must do.
The second is a thought from New York artist Shannon Plumb: “I like that my work’s universal. It’s silent. I don’t get art that makes people feel stupid”.
Plumb’s video work is disarmingly funny and I am looking forward to perusing her website. However I was caught a little off guard when I read her statement. First, she seems to be making a connection between the lack of dialogue in her films and its universality. Second, by way of this inference, she opines that she doesn’t get (Understand? Enjoy? Support?) art that makes people feel dumb, and the unwritten but implied conclusion is that art that is not universal often makes people feel stupid. At its most harmless, it is just an opinion-driven reflection on one’s own artistic practice; but otherwise, it is shoddy logic. I think the ‘universal’ quality of Plumb’s films is not simply derived from their lack of spoken word. And there are innumerable examples of video and film that have universal appeal and dialogue too. But the end of her remark is the more misguided, because it illustrates a deceptively straight line from artist to viewer: it says that some artists make people feel stupid, without the possibility that people might feel stupid in front of art that had no intention of making them feel that way. It also stresses legibility and illegibility in art, which does more harm than good to a collective understanding of art making and looking. It is true- many people, especially those without a background in the arts, feel confused, unworthy and out of the joke as it were, in the presence of certain types of art. But this is rarely, if ever, the intention of the artist(s). Rather I think it is a symptom of the unsatisfactory means and ends of art education. More often, our feelings of intellectual inferiority- with art or any other body knowledge- come from a lack of exposure to that realm. Some students do have to take introductory survey courses in art history in high school, but evidently these do very little to diffuse the perceived opacity of modern and contemporary art for people at large.
Feeling inadequate in front of a piece of art, literature, music, etc. is a very disarming and unsettling experience, but I think it comes from two related things: one is the comfort of ‘what we are used to’, and another is the inherited expectation that art is, like a text, going to tell us something. Both of these lead to regrettable consequences: unwillingness to discover enjoyment in what is strange and new, and disappointment with art that is not didactic, clear, linear or easy.
I am likely being unfair to Shannon Plumb, who may not have meant to imply half of what I infer. But I would have hoped that a fairly successful young artist would first focus on how art can make people feel smart, before using the negative logic that Plumb does. I think her response warrants a discussion about artists speaking about art; if artists have any stakes in how the perception of the arts evolves, they should be caring about the words they use, when they use them.
I invoked Oscar Wilde’s essay because of what it might suggest in response to Plumb’s thought, and the way we look at art. His thought is that artists must abandon any faith in fact and accuracy and give themselves unto the realm of the false, the illogical, the idealistic, the imaginary to make truly touching work. As Josh Blackwell, another New York artist, summarizes Wilde, “Art doesn’t have to abide by the rules of reality – its logic is unique, even fantastical”. This of course puts it at risk – a worthy risk – of being misunderstood, or even not understood at all.
http://www.shannonplumb.com/index.php
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/decay.html
Plumb’s video work is disarmingly funny and I am looking forward to perusing her website. However I was caught a little off guard when I read her statement. First, she seems to be making a connection between the lack of dialogue in her films and its universality. Second, by way of this inference, she opines that she doesn’t get (Understand? Enjoy? Support?) art that makes people feel dumb, and the unwritten but implied conclusion is that art that is not universal often makes people feel stupid. At its most harmless, it is just an opinion-driven reflection on one’s own artistic practice; but otherwise, it is shoddy logic. I think the ‘universal’ quality of Plumb’s films is not simply derived from their lack of spoken word. And there are innumerable examples of video and film that have universal appeal and dialogue too. But the end of her remark is the more misguided, because it illustrates a deceptively straight line from artist to viewer: it says that some artists make people feel stupid, without the possibility that people might feel stupid in front of art that had no intention of making them feel that way. It also stresses legibility and illegibility in art, which does more harm than good to a collective understanding of art making and looking. It is true- many people, especially those without a background in the arts, feel confused, unworthy and out of the joke as it were, in the presence of certain types of art. But this is rarely, if ever, the intention of the artist(s). Rather I think it is a symptom of the unsatisfactory means and ends of art education. More often, our feelings of intellectual inferiority- with art or any other body knowledge- come from a lack of exposure to that realm. Some students do have to take introductory survey courses in art history in high school, but evidently these do very little to diffuse the perceived opacity of modern and contemporary art for people at large.
Feeling inadequate in front of a piece of art, literature, music, etc. is a very disarming and unsettling experience, but I think it comes from two related things: one is the comfort of ‘what we are used to’, and another is the inherited expectation that art is, like a text, going to tell us something. Both of these lead to regrettable consequences: unwillingness to discover enjoyment in what is strange and new, and disappointment with art that is not didactic, clear, linear or easy.
I am likely being unfair to Shannon Plumb, who may not have meant to imply half of what I infer. But I would have hoped that a fairly successful young artist would first focus on how art can make people feel smart, before using the negative logic that Plumb does. I think her response warrants a discussion about artists speaking about art; if artists have any stakes in how the perception of the arts evolves, they should be caring about the words they use, when they use them.
I invoked Oscar Wilde’s essay because of what it might suggest in response to Plumb’s thought, and the way we look at art. His thought is that artists must abandon any faith in fact and accuracy and give themselves unto the realm of the false, the illogical, the idealistic, the imaginary to make truly touching work. As Josh Blackwell, another New York artist, summarizes Wilde, “Art doesn’t have to abide by the rules of reality – its logic is unique, even fantastical”. This of course puts it at risk – a worthy risk – of being misunderstood, or even not understood at all.
http://www.shannonplumb.com/index.php
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/decay.html
