A question of art; Is Art a Form of Communication?

What the devil are artists up to very much. I wouldn't hang a paycheck to see where it says Nangle worm went tonight. Ask me artists nowadays are just too lazy to learn how to paint. Them in your comments. Well such observations have led us to try to reduce the confusion surrounding contemporary art as we ask a question of art. A question of art. Each week at this time a question about contemporary art will be discussed by an art critic a scholar and a skeptic. Here is a skeptic producer of the series Walt Richter. Do introduce the panelists our central question today as it's art a form of communication. And as usual we have with us Dr. Gearhart Magnus a professor of fine arts and Lawrence an away artist in residence. Oh that's out of the university. That's what you like to talk a large question is our form of communication.

Well I'm tempted to say yes and sit back. But I guess I ought to say why I think it's a form of communication. Please. Yes. Better to do that I really have to say a little bit what I think communication is because communication in relation to art has come to have a bad reputation. I communication links to Art has for many people the idea of post offices with WPA murals of cowboys and Indians. Awful murals at the airport celebrating the glories of the state in which the airport is placed and so forth. So there has been a tendency to equate to God carrying small messages with communication and that isn't what I mean. Or reaching the largest number of people possible. Well with the greatest economy of means let me let me try to give a formal

definition of communication as we lose it as we think of it broadcasting as a sociologist thinks of it and that is the transmission of thoughts and emotions between or among individuals by the use of mutually meaningful symbols. Well you will see why I believe ought to be communicative. A far from what you said of what I what I wanted to do that is just the opposite. Some developments from that after example there is a fact that often a painter starts to work and he does not have a clear idea in his mind what he's going to do. But as he works he does a kind of feedback between the artist and his painting. The artist makes a mock mock as him information he makes another mark. So there's a loop between the canvas and I mean like a feller that says self as a communicative structure right there in the work of God.

Therefore he makes his work by doing it. He doesn't have a preexisting message which he wishes to transmit. It's only when the work is finished and his experience has gone into the work that it's what we really are what we call work on it. Now when a tool went when a spectator comes along and looks at the work the spectator should not expect to see state of the Union messages or whatever it is he shouldn't expect a pre-verbal is content and they get with the. This is what the art is communicating to him what they are maybe communicating to him is the unique experience of all of the artist at work in making the work. The way that that unique work came into being is part of is part of the communication often the larger part of the communication so that the structure of the message is. It is what's communicative not necessarily that the

pigeon of the think that the painting is a pigeon carrying a message which you decode as a Chinese fortune cookie or the traditional way of looking at art is that art should convey a sense of beauty. And it seems to me that there's this notion as seems to be violated at least by many of the contemporary artist as this as this and that is this a valid kind of communication to expect that we should we expect from a work of art a sense of beauty. Well I mean I think you know I would replace the notion of beauty by stand notion like structure because the kind of communicative situation I just described it's the structure of the way the whole structure of the work that is communicative. Now beauty on the other hand has a slightly different meaning. Beauty is now used by that many people to criticize contemporary art or

Modern Art. But in fact I think the count has become almost meaningless. Up until the 18th century it was the exact word everybody knew what it meant. It was derived from classical aesthetics and from classical art from Greece and Rome and a beautiful form was a form which was a form that didn't bend or bow and wasn't too flat. It was between the angular and the bulging. It had an element of measure and the golden mean about it. So it was measured it was smooth it wasn't trivial it wasn't grotesque. So beauty was a kind of fluent kind of form islanded kind of mass avoiding the extremes of drama or caricature. And this is what beauty meant in those days up to the 18th century when a set X was defined as the study of beauty. Now it would seem to me that ascetics has to be

something more like what you want to call it the investigation of structures would be what one might call ascetic. Yes that would certainly be a very large part of it. As a layman of course still expects to be emotionally moved he wants something to respond in him that he may call his emotions. And if he's unable to do this he feels that the work of art is not communicating. Well let's see Morgan said he doesn't know how to make money anyway. Of course we're going to get into the matter with elderly artists communicating our next program. But I'm I'm thinking for example of different notions of what might be beautiful I mean you've got the classic idea and it seems to me that even if one is looking for structure that one would is actually looking for it's for something that will give one the kick of beauty within structures and that whereas we can admire a very intricate

work of one person might admire grid work of some sort of another person but might find beauty in a horse going over a fence which would leave the third person cold just for the sake of completeness we ought to recall another concept of beauty which at the end of the 18th century they called the sublime. Associated with all some landscapes for instance or a violent action and the sense of the sublime kind of in fact a participation in the in the work itself in terms of the response of the beholder. It became a very important quality. And this too in the 19th century became associated with the concept of beauty Majesty. Joe I thought of the sublime was antithetical to beauty.

It was in the classical sense definitely yes. And you had some of the sublime was grander as you say something that was awesome. As you do You couldn't be awesome. You had to be measured and humane. The sublime was a way of being. I got ganja on a gigantic What do you think of those hats that it becomes human really because the beholder was expected to participate in it. Well let's let's return let's return to the contemporary scene again and it seems to me that it has been indicated that the contemporary artist is not necessarily concerned with beauty as I write. Right. He is concerned with structure. And what I what other concerns are his in terms of wishing to communicate. Well that thing that Jerry mentioned about the sublime I think is relevant here because in America in the late 40s

there were several painters who were interested in the sublime. They were abstract painters they were the most I'm come from eyes in the abstract painters in the United States. They were bought at Newman Clifford still Mark Rothko and one of the one of these men human rights an article at that time above the sublime. Another of them left and still is on record as having talked about it you know it was like a subject on their minds. And although the paintings are absolutely non figurative they nevertheless have an extraordinary presence there. They tend to be lodge. They tend often to be a few colors a lot of human might have might just be $1 a blue a Mark Rothko could be four or five different meds a clip that still could be black with little nuggets of red and purple within it and the paintings were often on a large scale. They were trying I think to translate it by these words to

communicate by the structure of their whack some of the emotions which the earliest the blind and has done by fucking landscape that was purely in terms of the structure of the work and the function of. Do you think that the contemporary artist is having more difficulty in communicating than the artist of yesteryear. Well only learning as much as the artist today. Then he has a patron that don't don't you think. Whereas in the past he frequently had a painter. So usually the artist is working for himself and then the work has to find its audience. Yes and patrons are hard to come by for most artists. You seem to be starving or taking other jobs or taking refuge in universities. But that's another profit they have and I say

I do think that it is a consequence of with the breakdown of patronage. I mean various things happened there you know when church and state were no longer commissioning odds and saying what kind of art should be done. The artist for one thing I got his freedom. And one of the uses of this freedom has been to go his own way to pursue it as those things that he is most interested in those problems which go out of the practice of his art. So it is hard to communicate because we have to go further to him this retreat into a personal world. Has created additional problems in communication in the sense that the audience has been hard to find. They have this case here if there is a high degree of innovation and that the key here of course is the definition given earlier the matter of mutually meaningful symbols. One rarely is able to communicate with everybody one has to commute with communicate with

people whose frame of reference is the same as ours and as the artist having trouble that is in this respect and finding the symbols with which to communicate very well. Again what kind of symbols they certainly don't need to be figurative. They can be as abstract as as color itself. No matter what kind of pattern it may appear and what kind of mass or maybe a line there been a great many studies by at the beginning of the 20th century along these lines. When it was discovered that the plastic elements lined color texture and sought could communicate on their own without any further civilization. The gesture painters of the New York school in the late 40s and 50s explored this of course still further in contemporary terms their

alliances and authority on that. I think what a gesture of their right and like public drips and leaves the track does a boy dance like funs Klein who would sometimes make too long dragging strips of the brush on the Kansas and the best of his left naked invisible clad to see it as a gesture I say you can see the physical gesture of putting paint on so so much as it's possible to look to arouse emotion or feeling simply by using a certain kind of color a certain shape as this is what you're guessing that there is a general response to a certain shade of red which is almost universal or at least some of painter and fairest like Kandinsky believed. And an earlier conversation with Jerry we were talking about two things and I wonder if they would not be germane to this one was the expansion and contraction of time and the other was the artist. The

art reflecting modern technology or something of this kind. It seems to me that this goes hand in hand with the communication we're talking about would you would you like to take either of these and expand on them a little bit. Well if the artist has not so entirely retreated into his own private world that communication is impossible. He must still reflect his own human condition in his time. The whole subject matter or range of art has grown so enormously like common experience in which the object objective sensory a world in which we live seemed to be a kind of confinement which can be almost infinitely extended by our instruments and by by science and by technology. This whole

range of experience must necessarily be reflected in art because art is concerned with life no matter how private these worlds may become or how specialized a little corner the the artist may choose to cultivate. And this is bound to change his relationship with the with the world outside of himself. The world inside or the world and the unseen world has become so full of the different kinds of concepts and ideas which cry out for an externalization for some sort of objective corelate of as T.S. Eliot would would call it. And this is really in my opinion what has brought about this thing we call modern art or contemporary or contemporary. I don't know. It is as as a response to the changes of society.

Definitely. Lars Well I'd like to pick up on a bit of that not the whole argument but where is B.J. when you talk about artists retreating into the private world as you did because the sheer paranoia I don't believe it really happens. OK well good because it seems to me like one of the most public things you can do is to paint a picture without knowing its destination and then to send it to somewhere that becomes available for displaying the way that it seems to be a highly communicative gesture it's not like painting a picture and locking it up. It's not even like keeping a journal where you're communicating to yourself. It seems to me that AAT is still I whether however many people read or do how many people share these signs that are being used it seems to me that inherently our art is communicative.

It might be secretive but secretive just sometimes but that just means you don't want everybody to get the message you want some people to get the message. So it's still communicative it's still communicative if it's inciter. So it seems to me that you know whether if the artist wants a small audience or he wants a bill he works for the big one either way. He is basically engaged in an act of communication in which he addresses an unknown public a public he doesn't know yet but enough for whom he is willing to who like to pair this structure for them to witness when those documents say anything can while has to think of the person who's going to look at it. Because just as I said these few words in German I would communicate with people to whom the symbols were meaningful and I got a blank look from at least one person at the table. How how can the artist expect to communicate if he doesn't think about the people with whom he's trying to communicate and he doesn't try to find the symbols to use it seems we have a communication

that occurs from a situation which you described as purely accidental. No because there are various ways of learning what the mutually shared signs are. If you see one painting by artist it's hard when you see two you've got more than double the information because if you see two you can compare them and you start to see what's constant when you see a half dozen paintings by the artist. You begin to know what his characteristic form is. And it's this characteristic structure which is intimately related to the artist as a person. It's this which because it becomes in the end communicative not a bit of literature which has been put in visible form but the structure which is special to that individual. So it just requires a knowledge of the work you see and to many people who object to odd and contemporary art maybe just see a single item of it now and again and it imitates them. Whereas you

have to have the in a comparative situation with the works of the man you're looking at. Larry and I said yes. I think what Lauren says is undoubtedly true. These characteristics this common denominator in a work or let's say a discernable process of development or working out of an idea. And this is communicating in itself. But I think what the layman finds very difficult is that he he needs translation. These are concepts which are primarily visual must constantly be translated into words. It shouldn't have to happen. One shouldn't have to talk about art or or write about art but critics are very necessary. This is one of their most important functions I think.

I think I think a central part of the business is kind of awesome communication as it is that OT is part of our culture and our culture transmits a great deal of its information from generation to generation that really I think that any visible art has a physical base. I really do and you can read Christian paint and you can read Christian all to pieces you know without and that is you know the Christian mythology involved in you and you get that by via literary. It's one I can't read classical paintings unless you have a classical dictionary so you know you know which woman wears that helmet otherwise you don't know it's me nothing and something. Kandinsky you have to read Kandinsky book to find out what he thinks of the various colors symbolize. I tell it to you read Kandinsky you can't tell that

a certain dirty bed for him as well the morbid. I mean you know you can't get that he insists of course that you can't. Yes but I doubt everything until you've read until you've read the book. You can't just like you know at the end in every country the meaning of the symbolism of color there is anyway yes. So I think that any of this your experience has to have a partial of the whole last autumn as well. I would agree though that list is not necessarily a popular view. While the abstract expressionists by large who seem to have talked and written about their art on practically any group of artist in modern times except the cubist perhaps. But don't you think that you think it's I found it necessary to be as articulate and verbal about their art as they have been. Right and this is what I think about his communication because well there isn't a common

ground of shared patronage shared religion whatever it may be. I what's tended to happen and it's been happening what at least since the days since the 18th century as a very persistent pressure on artists of making their own books and statements. It starts in the 18th century and in any serious way with God. Sir Joshua Reynolds Hogarth and many more all through the 19th century all the letters of the Impressionists exchanged the Cubists writings leave not up to date the artist has provided us with the verbal basis for the full understanding of the work that is that he has done what the culture used to do for us automatically isn't as something contemporary abstract artist expecting a good deal more of his public than did say the representational artist of the last century in previous centuries. I mean I did art we got the artist going out and saying look come and understand me.

This is me I'm unique and you really ought to know me as a Isn't he much more selfish and gross to say that. Then I remember I think what it is. The culture has the artists and you know a visual artists and the big audience don't happen automatically shared culture. We don't have automatically shared faith. We don't have automatically shared culture which provides visible symbols of the be all in agreement on how to use and how to how to decode. Now in the absence of that you know and it's you know in the absence of that what do we do. I think the artist's willingness to provide verbal common tray. It's like the first stage of a blustery you know fest agent a rocket blast off. You know that's to get off the ground. I think if I think it's arguable that they've been willing to provide as with that expendable the

true information to orient is towards the way I once were oriented you don't have to keep reading books. In other words if we have a desire to wonder to find out what contemporary art is all about we really should do a lot of reading before we look at pictures of it right. Yeah how did you think it would be. I don't I mean I don't know I'm I'm exploring this whole notion of program series there are no free gifts. I saved it. But and yet with fewer words I think it would be easier to appreciate real buttons and Titian and the rest because it's there I mean you look at that you have something to look at to start with as you said in an earlier program you may completely misunderstand the work of art the first time you look at it. But each time you go back to it your understanding of the increased. Oh yes I get it if you are you are misunderstanding and yet the neophyte into facing my face in contemporary art takes one look at it and shutters and walks off. And I said last time it looks as he may not even know that there is any x explanatory literature available either from the artist or his or his critics to get art as the artist expecting much

more from his public today. I think it's the other way around I seems to me that the public is expecting a great deal from the artists they people speak as if the artist I were under some obligation to the public. So you know it to be to be understood by them. I why should the artist I should have as great a solicitude as to what strangers I he does what he can in the making the work accessible and why is he why should he brood about the people to whom this is not adequate. All right then we come back right to the key question as our form of communication is the is the artist really concerned at all with communication or simply and expressing himself to his own satisfaction for himself. One of the charges leveled an abstract expressionism for instance and which is used to account for the return to more figurative art is that the Abstract Expressionist did not communicate. And so now is the return

to the familiar images of our mass culture and soul. Laura Well I wonder whether I know where I want to pick up I mean really how 25 seconds left so. OK well you see it's really easy. It's seems to me that you were suggesting that if the artist is not communicating with a number above the statistical point he isn't communicating. Whereas I think in fact communication may not be for every soul in the United States instantly but nevertheless for a sufficient number yes this is a fallacy which isn't calculated by our saturation and mass media. Everything must be grasped on the instant or it isn't worth it. And I guess we're lucky because our final cupboards lead us directly into the topic of Lex. week's program which is with home does the artist communicate. John is that all just. It was.

A question of art featuring art critic Lawrence Callaway and professor of fine arts Gary Hart Magnus is produced and transcribed by the SEIU Radio Network. This is Steve Betters speaking join us again next week for another question of. This program was distributed by the national educational radio network.