Essays on the subject of art. 

 

 

The strange case of the red square and the green triangle 

 

I am choosing to start this essay with a blank canvas. I mean this literally rather than figuratively. I mean that a sheet of canvas has been stretched over a rectangular wooden frame and then primed (using either an artist's primer or ordinary white paint). 

 

I say that this is where I am choosing to start, because I could start at any number of different points in the creative process. For my purposes in this essay, the painting must not be finished. It must be a work in progress. However I could also have started with a painting that was half finished or close to completion.

 

The painting is being used purely as an example of something that happens when an artist works in an expressionistic style. Therefore I could really have used any example of the creative process, whether it was a musical composition, a poem or a novel. Or, for that matter, an architectural study, a handmade quilt or a contemporary, conceptual piece that combines freestyle dance with the original use of a pickled farmyard animal.

 

There are certain good reasons however that I chose a painting as my example. The first and most obvious is that I am a painter myself and therefore have some understanding of the process. But let's look at the painting in a bit more detail: It will be an abstract painting in a style that is, to some extent, geometric, but also painted passionately and gesturally. It is large, so that the artist feels that she has a certain freedom of movement, but not too big. When a painting is too big then size becomes a part of its meaning and identity. Lets say 50 by 65 centimetres. That should do it. 

 

Let's also be clear that the painting has no purpose other than being a painting. No one will wear it or live in it. Also it is not an attempt to copy or debate the world outside of itself. We might disagree with this, of course. We might argue that if the painting is not about the external world then it must be about the internal one. It must express something about the psyche of the artist. We then need to ask the question: what is a psyche? Well, some would say that a psyche is nothing but a lot of information from the external world put together to form a human personality. However you look at it this subject is not a simple one. We deliberately set out to create art that is derived from the self, not the external world. However in another way there is no distinction between the self and the world that it exists in.

 

In any case the painting will be as close as we can get to a work of pure self expression. The relationship between the artist and the artwork will be as pure and direct as it is possible for it to be. The artist will not be concerned with perspective, likeness, function or justification. The colors can never be too bright or too dark. The spaces can never be too big or too small. As long as the painting is an honest expression of the artist's character or psyche it must always be exactly what it is meant to be. Or, as Maurice Denis put it:

 

All that is necessary to paint well is to be sincere.

Maurice Denis (   1870 to 1943, French  Symbolist painter).

 

So why paint at all?

 

Denis also said:

 

It is well to remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. 

Maurice Denis.

 

When Denis said this he could not have foretold the advent of abstract expressionist art and this, we might argue, is a problem. You see our blank canvas already has many of the qualities that Denis was talking about and more: It already has form, tone, dimensions and even meaning. It might not have any color but if we look closely we will find that, no matter how perfectly flatly painted we think that the primer is, it will have both texture and tone. (We will probably also see some color as white tends to be reflective.) 

 

In 1952 experimental composer John Cage (1912 to 1992, American) made four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence: A performance, in three acts, of just that: silence, he explained his production like this:

 

They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second rain drops began pattering on the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.

John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4 ’33”.

 

In the same way a piece of marble is already an object before the sculptor gets to work on it. A piece of land is already home to insects and such like. A rectangle of fabric is already itself.  

 

We must therefore understand quite clearly that a blank canvas already has all the qualities that it will have when it becomes, in the perception of the painter, a finished work of art. The idea that the artist can improve on what is already there can only be pure arrogance. It takes genuine humility to clearly understand that all we can do is to change it. 

 

There is only one thing that the finished work of art will have, that the original blank canvas does not have and that is self expression. Expression of the artist's self. 

 

Time passes.

 

Artists work at different speeds and to different time scales. For example in 1939, (the year before his death) Paul Klee (1879 to 1940, German painter) produced 1254 works (mostly paintings but also some drawings). In case you are trying to work that out it is equivalent to about three and a half a day. In contrast L S Lowry (1887 to 1976, English painter) took up to a year to complete one painting. Personally I can take anything from two days to ten weeks to complete a forty by fifty centimetre canvas. 

 

In any case time has passed. Our painter is making good progress. In the bottom left hand corner of the painting is a. . . Well, lets remember that this is not a real painting. It exists only in my imagination. It is up to me to choose what characteristics and qualities the painting will have. Out of all the shapes and colors in the world I need to choose one of each. Though to me the choice is arbitrary to the artist (my fictional, made up artist) it is crucial. let's say a red square. Not too big. Just a part of a fairly complex (but not too much so) image. 

 

The artist stops work and examines the painting for (what is by her standards, whatever they might be) quite a long time. After a while a strange kind of knowing crystallizes in her mind. What she knows, without any possible doubt, is that where there is a red square in the bottom left hand corner of her painting, this is all wrong and must be removed. Instead there absolutely has to be a green triangle on the top right hand side (but near to the center). This knowledge is not terribly important in the bigger scheme of things. It is not comparable to finding a cure for cancer or the slogan that will win a political campaign. However to the artist it is vital information. Indeed without it she could not be an artist at all.

 

So she paints two areas of white into the picture (this is one way of doing it). One where the red square was and another where the green triangle needs to be. She puts the painting to one side until the white paint is dry. She paints in the green triangle and she fills the remaining white areas with whatever they need to be filled with. Then, over a day or a week or a year the shapes and colors are changed and changed again, until the artist finally believes (or perceives) that she has achieved perfection, or as close as she has the courage and stamina to get to perfection. 

 

Let's suppose that this artist has attained some level of success and that, in due cause, the painting finds its way into an exhibition. Maybe a big exhibition, maybe a small one. Maybe a group or a one woman show. In any case people will be coming to look at the painting. Know the artist can (and will) never hope that the viewer, coming across the painting, will ever say (or think) thank god for green triangles (in top right hand corners, but close to the center). Because a red square (in the bottom left) would have been a disaster.

 

In short we can never hope that the viewer will ever see the absolute need for each shape, color, tone, brush stroke, intensity of paint, texture and thickness of paint, to be exactly where it is and as it is on the canvas. At best we might hope that the viewer will like, enjoy or be uplifted or inspired by the painting. We can never hope for them to understand it or to see what we see when we are working or when we have finished working.

 

But there are alternatives to Expressionism in art.

 

I see art therefore in terms of self expression yet self expression is itself endlessly problematic. It is partly due to these problems that many people have seen art in terms, not of expression or aesthetics or craftsmanship, but instead have seen it in terms of meaning. As the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto (1924 to 2013, American) put it:

 

to see something as art is to be ready to interpret it in terms of what and how it means.

Arthur Danto.

 

 

 

 

It is largely because of this way of thinking that we have come to find our art galleries swarming with soup cans, pickled wildlife and men dressed as teddybears. Because in an art world dominated by meaning, nothing but meaning matters. 

 

One might even go so far as to suggest that the specific meaning does not matter. Only that the work means something. You probably sense more than a hint of sarcasm in my general tone, yet isn’t this a better conception of art than my own idea of Expressionism? I do not think so: Lets remember that Danto said “what and how it means”. He did not say that it means. However are there not many versions of what and how a work of art means? Is it not possible that my interpretation of a work of art's meaning might be different to how you interpret it. Which might in turn be different to how the artist intended it to be interpreted. Let's look at two specific examples of the application (or intended application) of meaning in works of art.

 

In 2007 the contemporary conceptual artist Doris Salcedo (Born in 1958, Colombian) created a crack that ran lengthways along the floor of the basement (Turbine hall) of the Tate Modern gallery in London. Salcedo commented that the crack, titled Shibboleth, “was” (her word not mine) “the experience of a third world person coming into Europe” and was therefore an allegory for “segregation” and “racial hatred”. Now, for the life of me, I could never have interpreted what is essentially a hole in the ground as an allegory for racial hatred on my own. Nor do I except it as a valid explanation, even though I have it from the horse's mouth. For example, if we except Salcedo's version of what her work means then are we also expected to believe that all cracks have the same meaning? Have they always had that meaning (and we just did not know)? Alternatively how can one crack in one place have a profoundly different meaning to all other cracks in all other places? Because, in terms of meaning, there is really nothing to separate one crack from another.

 

An artist cannot just dictate meaning to the audience and quite honestly we should be offended if they try to do so. If meaning exists at all it has to be there in some other way. Some way that the viewer can find for themselves. Or look at it like this: I already know what a crack is and I already know what racial hatred is, so what is my reason for making the fifty minute journey to Tate Modern in order to observe one apparently representing the other? You might argue that Expressionism is a selfish approach to art. However it seems to me that Symbolist or Conceptual art can be even more selfish. The viewer is indeed cut out of the process all together.

 

 

Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973, Spanish painter, originator of the Cubist movement) consistently 

insisted that his work was not “symbolic”, but he made an exception for his mural sized painting

Guernica. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 as a response to the bombing of the village of the

same name, in the same year, by the German and Spanish air forces. 

 

The painting is overflowing with allegorical meaning. Some traditional, some contrived by Picasso specifically for the picture. For example the light bulb at the top center of the painting is an interesting example of a “mixed” metaphor. It might be thought to represent the sun, shining the light of truth on an evil act, or the false light of the torturer's cell. However it is also generally thought to be relevant that the Spanish word for light bulb is bombilla making it a complex image of both the evil act of the bombing and the good symbolized by the light of day. To the right of the light a floating (possibly angelic) being holds a lamp, also possibly a symbol of reason and good. The horse, a working animal, is perhaps a symbol of the people while the dead soldier has marks on his hand that could represent stigmata (making him almost a saint).

 

I could go on but you get the idea. The painting is a profusion of meaning and counter-meaning. Perhaps the most interesting image in the painting is the bull. Picasso commented that the bull was not a symbol for Fascism but that it represented brutality. Now, coming across the painting by chance, should we be expected to know what the bull means? Does it indeed mean whatever we, as individuals, want it to mean? Being a star sign, the bull is a particularly diverse sauce for symbolic meaning. In Celtic symbolism, for example, the bull represents physical strength, power, virility and (therefore) fertility. Druids associated the bull with solar energy (and the cow with earth energy). As cattle were a source of income the bull also came to represent luxury and wealth.

 

As a winter symbol in chinese astrology the bull represents endurance, perseverance and hard work. Of course the bull represents rage, stubbornness, anger, destruction and (getting back to Guernica) brutality, but it can also represent protection and guardianship.

 

But think about this. What does a bull in a landscape by Constable (1776 to 1837, English landscape painter)

symbolize? 

 

 

Yet more time passes.

 

The idea that art might have no meaning at all is clearly silly. Art can often literally overflow with meaning. The trouble is this: 

 

• that there is really no reason to think that the meaning intended by the artist and the meaning perceived by the viewer of art are the same. 

• There is no one interpretation of the meaning of a work of art that outweighs or outranks any other possible interpretation.

• there is no clear case for the idea that any one person's version of the meaning of a work of art is more correct than any other person's.

 

Our relation to art is organic. No-one, not even the artist themselves, can tell us what it means. If you don’t accept that then look at it another way: time passes. Eventually Selcedo, Picasso, Constable all die. As more time passes we seem to know less and less about them. About what they intended when they made art. What is eventually left is each person's individual opinion of what the artist intended and what the art work means.

 

Another way of dealing with this problem might be to put the word 'meaning' to one side and instead look at the word 'communication'. If Picasso intended his bull as an allegory for brutality but the viewer sees it as embodying any of the other meanings that I have been discussing here, then what hope is there of us ever communicatin? Indeed, isn’t the truth the exact opposite of what Danto thought it to be: that to see something as art is to be ready to see it as having no meaning at all, at least not one that the artist and viewer can share? 

 

The artist, alone in her studio for many hours, and the viewer, after a hard day's work in an office, inevitably start from different places. On top of that we must consider differences of time, gender, culture, outlook and so on. It is folly to think that they will somehow connect whether it is over a green triangle a bull or a hole in the ground. If one wanted to communicate with the viewer would we not more profitably use documentary or more direct means rather than vague suggestion or allegory. What, in any case, comes of this kind of meaning in art? Do warmongers metamorphose into men of peace? Do racists embrace their fellow man? No! Clearly this is not the case. This is not what art does and those that want this to be what art does must quickly become tired of flogging such an obviously dead horse.