Today I went to my first ever art lecture. It was at the National Gallery's east building - you know, the one I never visit because it's full of modern art - and despite the auditorium being disgustingly outdated (I'm talking olive velvet seats, beige everything else, triangle cut-outs in the ceiling, and a carpet that smudges just like velvet), it was actually a lot of fun. Hell, I even learned some stuff.
But the best part of it was when the artist in question,
Glenn Ligon, told one of the curators leading the discussion, "Let's not make too much of that."
I guess for that to really sink in and mean anything, I should explain the context. Ligon and the two curators who were leading the discussion focused on one particular piece of his (it's that thing to the right); technically untitled, it's generally referred to as
I Am A Man, and it's basically a giant canvas that's painted to look like one of the more iconic civil rights protest posters (seen
here and
here). One of the first things the curators mentioned about this painting was how it was actually done on top of another, which, via x-ray-chromatographic-mystery-machine-things, they discovered was painted over in black paint. Now this was a
very shocking revelation, as apparently the normal money-savvy (i.e. poor) artist re-purposes their canvases using white paint. But Glenn Ligon, a
black man painting a
white sign based on the
civil rights movement on top of a re-purposed
black canvas?
Race relations! shouted the curators, with no degree of subtlety. And Ligon said "Let's not make too much of that."
Later on, the curators asked him about the mix of oil and enamel paints that he used for the white background; one of them commented on how great it is to "hear" how Ligon tried to "stage" the "conflict" of the civil rights movement "through the medium" of
I Am A Man. Ligon told him that, while that's an interesting observation, things like that just sort happen unconsciously in the studio.
Near the end of the discussion, Ligon shared a quick anecdote, where he told us about an art student who asked about the significance of the black text on the white background as a statement on race relations. He explained that while yes, you could say that, it's also just like a newspaper or a book or a cue-card: black text on a white background is normal.
I guess what I'm trying to explain without directly saying it is that this is why, on some level, I hate art. Rather, I hate Art. I hate the institution - the "scholars" and "historians" who, under the pretense of... of... of I don't even
know what, try to label the value of a sculpture or a photograph by comparing to its predecessors, be they fellow artists or social theorists or a bunch of sewage plant workers with signs. It is so hilarious to me to see people like the curators at the National Gallery try to assign meaning to something that was really just a matter of convenience: why would Ligon waste money on white paint to re-purpose the used canvas when he had plenty of black paint in his studio?
I've been in a number of similar situations; just a couple of weeks ago, I presented a piece to my prose poetry class for workshopping.
Hell, for kicks and giggles I'll even let you all read it yourselves:
Royalty
(After Rimbaud’s Royalty)
A storybook island, of perfect white sand, of crystal waters and endless verdant green; a brother and sister, scream to the perfectly tanned masses. “My people, I wish to be your savior!” “Nail my brother to the cross!” He raises arms to silence. As she pins him to the cross, sparks. The island bows, silent, and he asks if it knows the meaning of insanity.
The silence is perpetuated by fire and lead, made beautiful by spores, turning the red seas purple and gold, pushing the island’s beaches to infinity as he burns his sister on the cross.
My professor and my classmates talked about my poem's value as a narrative of a brother/sister relationship; they looked at the religious implications of the crucifixion scene, as well as the juxtaposition of drugs in the piece; they analyzed the contrast between the "perfectly tanned masses" and the suggested need for salvation; they looked at its "uncompromising refusal to make conventional sense" (and yes, that
is a direct quote from one of my classmates).
Of course, little did they know that the entire poem was inspired by
Far Cry 3, a very violent video game released a couple months ago. I took lines from the game's antagonist and put them,
almost entirely verbatim, into a poem and gave it to my classmates and my professor. Why? Because I couldn't think about anything else when I was doing this assignment. I wrote about a psychopathic video game villian, they saw it as a Jesus analogy. Go figure.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I hate about Art with a capital A: no matter how simple or base the motives behind a piece are, some "professional" is always going to give your work a meaning that you may not have ever wanted it to have. Use a certain word, and it's a story about incest; use a particular color, and it's a commentary on race; use a certain shape, and guess what? Congratulations, it's a penis.
It just gets frustrating after a while.
