Art isn't About You: The Key to Understanding Contemporary Art
There is no “complete understanding” of art. While we can connect to and feel things about art made by someone else, we are blinded by far more personal experiences and expectations than we realize. Knowing that there are things you don’t know is the key to actually understanding art, especially contemporary art. We must first examine what it is to be an artist from their perspective.
I’ve been reading Art & Fear, a book written by David Bayles and Ted Orland, who are two artists explaining what it feels like to be an artist. It describes all the possible insecurities or fears that come up for people who make art. There is one section titled “Magic”, that touches on a difficult-to-articulate idea about what fuels a person to make the art that they specifically make and their unique way of executing it.
“Whatever [other artists] have is something needed to do their work - it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it. Their magic is theirs. You don’t lack it. You don’t need it. It has nothing to do with you.”
They touch on other pieces of an artist’s identity, such as the feeling that if you, as an artist, were to stop making art, a part of you would die. And that the purpose of making art is most importantly to learn about your own art and yourself. Living your life as an artist means each new piece features a lesson learned from the previous piece.
“...if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible.”
The only person who can deeply understand the artwork is the person who made it. Every choice, everything that was executed, every failure and success, every edit, is what makes up an art piece. And further in that vein, every moment in that artist’s life and who they are as a person outside of their art is deeply woven into the art they create.
A common view you might hear from casual art consumers is that an art piece needs to be ‘good’ on its own without needing to lean on the backstory or hidden ideas. That is to say, the art piece must be visually appealing to an untrained eye with no knowledge of the artists’ story or intention for the piece, otherwise it is bad, pointless, or not art at all. This is one of the major points of critique of contemporary art. This idea is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of art, especially contemporary art.
There literally is no art without the artist. No art without the life lived by the artist. No art without the thoughts and ideas of the artist. To look at a piece of art and feel that, due to the relevance of the piece’s backstory or artist’s life, it is either bad art or not art at all, is to believe art is something it is not. I think there is a good reason that outlook is so common, though.
Why is nature beautiful? Why is a sunset or a flower or the ocean beautiful? Humans have evolved to find joy and positivity out of things that help us survive. We know the trees provide oxygen, food, and shade, the sky holds in all the air for us, the rivers supply us with water. It is the same reason that we can’t help but love our parents: they kept us alive. Even finding beauty in a dangerous beast like a lion, that is respect and reverence from the knowledge of what a lion is capable of. Our brains create emotional incentives in order for our conscious choices to be in the interest of survival. I think it is easy for the sense of beauty we feel in nature to be expected out of man-made art. Oftentimes, the most beautiful art we think of is the kind that faithfully depicts those exact things. Landscape paintings, sculptures of a woman’s body, music that embodies love, are all beautiful and resonant to us.
I admit I once subscribed to the idea that contemporary art was pretentious or pointless when the piece didn’t convey its entire meaning on its own. Especially when the piece was a really simple painting or an installation of regular objects with no obvious bigger meaning. But that is where art history is an incredibly important part of getting the full picture here. You might think backstories and artist intentions only matter when the artist isn’t good enough to make something pretty, and you’d be wrong. What made it all click for me was learning about post-war European art.
Let's look at Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures. Does it look like it means anything? It’s just a person standing there, and it doesn’t even look like a real person. Clearly no technique or knowledge of human anatomy, no dynamic pose or interesting colors, boring.
Giacometti was an Italian/Swiss artist living and working in Paris. He was around for the Nazi occupation of the city. When the German threat rose, France did not defend themselves or fight back, so as to protect Paris from bombs and destruction, so the Nazis took occupation. Access to food, electricity, and necessities for the French was severely limited, and their day-to-day lives were heavily policed. Despite France’s attempt to protect Paris, several synagogues and buildings were destroyed anyway. In 1941, Giacometti fled to Switzerland to escape the German occupation. When the war ended, he returned to his studio in Paris to continue his work. At this point, his art shifted drastically from colorful, impressionist paintings before the war to these cold, dark, minimal sculptures. When examining the conditions and story of his life during this time, is it starting to fit together?
Let's look again at these sculptures. The figures are incredibly slender. They look starved. The cratered surface texture looks like their flesh has been gouged out. They have no faces, no likeness. They aren’t someone, they are everyone. They are shadows, scars of the war that continued to follow millions of people for decades after the war ended. They are stiff, cold, and numbed. They are weighed down by their feet attached to the ground. It is as if the little weight they have left on their body is still heavy enough to burden them.
Giacometti continued to make these sculptures for decades after the war ended. That is a common theme for European artists after WWII. The destruction, physical, emotional, social, lasted for decades. It was an unfathomable scale of grief that so many had not experienced before. Lots of artists completely changed the kind of work they were making after the war. Everyone had experienced something unimaginable and it completely changed society and life. During this time, artists spent their artmaking trying to make sense of it all. That is literally all they could do, just try to reckon with what post-war life meant. What mass death and destruction meant.
I will give a more extreme example of art that does not look like art without its backstory. "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is an installation created by Félix González-Torres in 1991. It consists of individual pieces of wrapped candy piled up against the wall. Visitors are encouraged to take candy from the pile if they so choose. It is a living pile; the candy collectively weighs 175 lbs at its maximum, people take from the pile and it wanes over time, and when it is about to run out, the candy is replenished. How is this art? It is a pile of candy. He didn’t even craft anything, so how does it have any value or significance at all?
The title of the installation is a clue as to why it exists. It says it is a portrait of Ross. This is our hint that this candy, weighing 175 lbs at its maximum, which also happens to be around the average weight of an adult man, might represent a particular person.
González-Torres was a gay man, and he had a partner, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS in 1991, the same year of the installation. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s largely affected the LGBT community, and due to homophobia and the Reagan administration at the time, treatment for the condition was not being funded or supported, leaving many who were afflicted to die slowly while their immune system failed. Homophobia and paranoia were rampant, resulting in many LGBT people being isolated, ostracized, and afraid. González-Torres’ experience of watching his partner die slowly with no support and little access to treatment leads to a particular kind of grief that is impossibly difficult to reckon with and express.
Knowing this backstory, looking at the pile of candy now feels solemn. It feels like lifeless remains neglected, left to lie on the floor and slowly decay. Including viewers as active participants, taking pieces of candy from the pile themselves, shows a lack of public empathy and help. Not only were people afflicted with AIDS ignored, but they were actively hated and feared. So he shares his grief with the public, and everyone can either take from Ross themselves or watch Ross decay at the hands of others.
Contemporary art like this often gets the response “that takes no skill, anyone could make that.” It is true, anyone could call a pile of candy an art piece. But nobody else did, and nobody else has since González-Torres. You could make it, but would you? Would you have even thought to?
There is plenty of contemporary art that does not come from a traumatic, emotional place too. Ellsworth Kelly was an American minimalist artist who painted large, simple shape elements with very limited color palettes, and he created colorful installations and sculptures. He spent his whole life creating art like this, and it came from a deep love for and constant observation of light and shadows. He would paint shapes he noticed in everyday life that were made by an interesting cast shadow or the way sunlight reflected on something. The pieces look incredibly simple, but hearing him talk about that inspiration and looking at his massive collection of paintings he made throughout his life, his passion for light, composition, color, and nature is simply contagious.
Exploration of light is a common theme in a lot of contemporary artists. Some artists like Larry Bell, for example, has spent decades exploring a medium or idea deeply and pushing it to its limits. Bell’s use of glass involved working with an array of precise chemical treatments to create a particular reflective quality or finish to catch light in completely unique ways. He arranges treated glass in museums and outdoors, with the light source heavily considered, thinking thoroughly about how the shapes, colors, reflections, and shadows are all going to come together. Larry Bell spent his whole art career making these glass pieces and iterating on his process and goals. So, where a contemporary art piece’s story may lack deep emotion or trauma, you might just find love instead.
As touched on in the sections I mentioned from Art & Fear, artmaking is incredibly personal and so individual. One of the messages the book wants to convey to the artist reading it is that the art needs to be important only to you. You cannot be consumed by wanting people to like it, or wanting people to accept it as “real art”. If that is your pursuit, then you are doomed to create unfulfilling, impersonal, meaningless art. The thing about artmaking is that it truly comes from within you, as a cumulation of all your life experiences and ideas.
If you are not an artist, or even if you are an artist but are critical of art that doesn't immediately look appealing, here is what I want you to consider and take away from this. Non-commercial art is not really about you. Even when its put in a museum for public consumption, it was not made for you. I ask you to consider how unfathomably personal all art is to the artist who created it, and if you hope to see the beauty or meaning in it, you must engage with the story of the piece and the story of the artist.
