For Art's Sake!!

It seems like everywhere I turn these days, in my art education literature, and online groups, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math), Design Integration, Maker Spaces, Media Arts, and so on.  And I'm here to flat-out tell you, I am so sick and tired of hearing about it. 

It makes me wonder why we art educators chose the career we are in.  Did we become art educators to train kids for careers in design? (Not that there's anything wrong with that).  Or did we become art educators to help children explore their creativity, to express themselves through the wonder of that creation?  And, if we consider ourselves artists (which I think most of us do, in one way or another), what, if any, is the relationship of our personal art and STEAM? 

I know for me, making art is a part of who I am, whether it is manipulating with 3-dimensional materials, or painting with a loaded brush, doodling elaborate designs with Flair pens, or even photographing nature.  The art I most care about making is simply "for art's sake".  Sure, I might design and create an article of clothing, or decorate a pair of shoes or purse.  Yes, I might create a whimsical trophy for  an event, and yes, I might enjoy doing these things, but ultimately, the art I care most about creating is that which I create simply because THAT'S WHAT I DO.  I am an artist, and I express myself visually, like a musician uses music for their expression.  My art is simply meant to be seen, to hopefully evoke something in a viewer.  It is not about STEAM. 

And as an educator, I most care about imparting my young students with that love of creating;  I want them to feel joy every time they dip a brush into creamy wet paint, enthusiasm when they put their hands into a bucket of papier-mache goo, surprise when they pull a vibrant print out of a tub of shaving cream, magic when they pull paint over a drawing done with white crayon and the image becomes visible.  I don't want them to feel that every time they make something in art, it automatically has to teach them a science or math or history lesson (Not that there's anything wrong with that).  I don't want them to feel that every piece of art they create has to serve some sort of design purpose beyond simply BEING ART.  Honestly?  I don't think I was originally hired with the intent that I was preparing kids for a design career.  I think the arts are included in a well-rounded education because they address the needs of the soul.  The arts make us human. 

 Let's face it, most of the artists we teach kids about in class did not create art for any reason other than something in their soul said that it was what they 'had' to do.  We know that Van Gogh painted because of a deep need inside, despite the hardships he endured because of this need.  Think of the lives of other artists we learn about.  How many of them were making art to serve any other purpose beyond that of creating beauty or provoking thought?  I mean, why else would my family and I build these ridiculous sand sculptures year after year, laboring in the hot sun, knowing that by the next day, the tide will wash it away?

Even now, why do so many people flock to art museums?   Often, to view a certain exhibition in a museum, you need to buy tickets in advance, that are timed, to handle the crowds.  We don't stand on line to see a Matisse cutout or a Chihuly glass sculpture or a because of how it will enhance a new technological discovery.  We choose to view the artwork for how it makes us FEEL.  People go to concerts to hear music, or to watch dancers simply to see them move, because, again, of how it makes them FEEL.  The most  important purpose of the arts, in my opinion, is not what it  does technologically, but how it makes us feel.  Why else, many years ago, did my family and I, and thousands of other people, stroll through Central Park in single-digit temperatures and an icy wind, to see Christo's "Gates" - billowing curtains of golden-orange fabric?   It evoked joy, on some level I can't even explain.  That's what the arts do.  (I wish I could find my photos of it; it was a "pre-digitial" event.  But since I can't, here's a photo from a Chihuly exhibit in Boston a few years ago, where people stood on line for HOURS to get in, simply to view art!) 

So, excuse me, when you talk about Design education and Maker Spaces and all the other buzz words of the moment, if you see me zoning out.  My students and I will be happily exploring the tactile world of making art with hands-on materials, just because, simply, we are artists, and that's what brings us joy.  And now, I will close this post with a photo of a moose on a roof. 

What makes an artist an artist?

 

A recent Facebook discussion about whether art teachers are artists got me thinking.  Like most of you, my little students always have told me that I am 'the best artist in the world'.  (Except for maybe their grandma.  Their grandmas are always world famous artists, evidently.)  The kids' impression of me as a world renowned artist always makes me laugh.  How do they see me as an artist?  They see me as someone who can make magic happen with a brush loaded with creamy tempera paint.  They know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I evidently can draw/paint the best cats, fish, lizards, and dragons in the world!  And they are aware that I can doodle like there's no tomorrow.  Furthermore, they see me as someone who can create the most amazing creature out of a plastic bag, some newspaper and cereal box cardboard, and a box of Art Paste.  And they know that I built my 5' dragon Lucy (in the Sky with Diamonds) and her baby Sparkle, and Sparkle's egg all by myself.

But an artist...  am I one?  What makes someone an artist?  If I'm an artist, what kind of artist am I? I seriously don't know. (Note: all artwork featured in this post, whether jewelry, sculpture, painting, or whatever, was created by me.)  Do I call myself a painter?  A photographer? A jewelry designer?  A Project Runway wannabee?  A crafter?  A sculptor?  What am I?

I think perhaps I have what I will call AADD - artistic attention deficit disorder. My first serious artistic passion was oil paint.  I love the depth of color, the smell, the way the paint feels on a brush. Oh, and doodling with Flair pens (which I still adore).  Then in a college freshman drawing class, I fell in love with giant sticks of charcoal.  And charcoal mixed with washes of colored ink.  But then, along came darkroom photography, and the associated dangerously wonderful fumes. That passion lasted for years, until I sadly no longer had access to a darkroom.  For a brief period, I was hugely enamored with rapidograph pens, doing tons of detailed ink drawings. (Until I got tired of cleaning them all the time; what an annoyance!) Meanwhile, I kept painting.  I loved typography and I painted posters and signs, and even the sides of a van, a bus, and a fleet of beer trucks.

I got interested in hooking rugs, and I designed and made a HUGE rug, still hanging in my home, and after I made a couple of pillows with the leftover cut yarn, I gave up rug hooking.  Then I fell madly in love with batik, and while I haven't done authentic batik in several years, I still have all the necessary equipment and I plan to batik again. Yes, another art material with marvelously enticing and toxic fumes...

I love fabric, and I have pretty much sewn all my life, and lately I've gone seriously 'Project Runway', getting adventurous with my sewing projects.  Should I have been a fashion designer perhaps?  And I love beads, and several years ago began making jewelry obsessively.  Since I retired, I discovered PMC (precious metal clay), my latest little (and pricey) jewelry-making passion.  And of course that fun Cool2Cast stuff I wrote about last week.  And then there was that bead embroidery I learned to do....

Somewhere along the way, teaching made me fall in love with both papier-mache and plaster bandage, and I often think that maybe I should have been a sculptor. 

 Somewhere along the way, I bought acrylics when I didn't have a place at home to paint with oils.  and lately I've done some acrylic painting incorporating textural collage. 

 And I finally discovered digital photography.  Photoshop?  I'm totally a beginner, in desperate need of a tutor.  But I take pictures ALL the time, and have approximately a million zillion on my computer in need of editing..

HELP!  What kind of artist AM I?  Will I ever figure it out?  Do I have to give up one for the other?
Am I less of an artist if I don't want to give up all these various pursuits in favor of just one media?  Am a photographer?  A painter?  A jewelry designer?  A multimedia artist?  Or just a doodler, a dabbler, a crafter (after all, I did recently make a purse of out of a gourd, you may recall)?  When someone asks me "what is your medium?", how do I answer?  I mean, just about the only artistic pursuits I am NOT real interested in are printmaking, videography, and ceramics (though I'd be happy to dabble with that, too, given the resources). 

 What about you?  Do you also have an artistic identity crisis?  Should this worry me?  Will it say on my grave "She dabbled and doodled."? 

One additional thought - in my college curriculum, Art Ed was a double major: education and art.  And you needed a concentration in art.  I had two concentrations: one in painting and one in photography.  But knowing I planned to teach, I figured it was important to have experience with as many different mediums as possible to prepare me for the classroom, so I took basic courses in ceramics and pottery,  in gold and silversmithing  (where I was, sadly, an abysmal failure), in printmaking, and in sculpture (where, ironically, we used NO materials that you would ever ever use teaching elementary art, where I ended up 9 years later).  With all my carefully planned experience, I still never used stuff like plaster bandage, tooling foil, tempera paint, cardboard, papier-mache, and so much more.  Maybe that says something about the design of my education program.  Perhaps that's another blog post, another day?

MASS MoCA - the Sol Lewitt retrospective

 With my husband and son, yesterday we spent the day visiting a favorite art museum, MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art).  I have so much to share as a result of that exhibit that I will have to divide it into probably at least two posts!  Lots of photos in this post!!!!

A row of hanging upside down trees greet you before you enter the museum!  Why am I always there at a time of the year when they have no leaves? Reminder to self:  Go to MASS MoCA in the summertime!

First, briefly about MASS MoCA - it is, as its name says, a contemporary art museum, one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the country, located in North Adams, MA, in the lovely Berkshire Mountains. Each time I'm at this museum, there's stuff I love, and stuff I... wellll... stuff I don't love.  But I'll talk about that in another post.  This post is about an exhibit that I most decidedly loved, though it did provoke some serious conversation with my family about what it means to be an artist.  I'll share that concept later in this post.

Me.  Overwhelmed by the huge wall drawings in the Sol Lewitt Retrospective.  I have greatly cropped the wall drawing behind me for this photo.

So - this post will focus mostly on a giant retrospective of Sol Lewitt's giant wall drawings. (Yes, I just used the word giant twice in that sentence.  I'll have to try not to  use it any more in this post.)  This installation will be at the museum for 25 years, so take your time; it will likely still be there when you go for a visit!  Let me share a number of the  pieces with you here, and then I'd like to talk about them a bit, as I said above.  I have photographed people in proximity to the artwork so you can see the monumental size of this artwork. The young man in the white hoodie who appears in several photos, including the one directly above, is my son.  Please forgive me, but these pics are not posted chronologically.  Sorry!

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

When my son was little, he loved driving around little matchbox cars.  A wall like this in his room would have been great; all those black lines would make great roads for little cars!

 

 

 A note about the piece directly above.  I am enthralled.  I would like it to be a wall of my living room.  My husband positively cringed when I told him that.  But can't you just see a sleek couch, in a bright primary color, directly in front of that wall?  It would make me feel so very sophisticated!

 

 Please take note that the walls of this amazing museum are as terrific as some of the artwork!

 

 My son thought the lines in this piece looked like lips and butts.  I also saw sewing needles.  Below is a closeup of the lines in this work.

 There's a mathematical thought process for the arrangement of lines in this piece.  Below, a closeup.

 

 

Two walls of straws

 

 Above are extreme closeups of the work below.  It is all made of layers of overlapping pencil and colored pencil lines.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of lines.  They are probably 1/4" apart and cover a huge wall.  Crazy.

 

The piece below is a small section of a piece, consisting of...well... lines.   The 'artists' who drew the piece on the wall were given Sol Lewitt's directions about how many lines to draw, and information about where lines should go from/to, but a lot of the decisions were made by the actual draftsmen.

Above is a closeup of a section of the painting below.  Three 'artists' painted this wall, one with each color, taking turns painting their line based on the line they were next to.  Does that make sense?

 The painting below is a carefully organized progression of colors.  As in many of the other colorful pieces, the paint is an acrylic ink applied with rags in layers to achieve the desired tones.  The color progression started with gray, then the primaries, then the primaries  mixed with the gray, then the primaries mixed to make secondaries, then the secondaries mixed with the gray, then all of the primaries mixed together, and then all the primaries mixed with the gray. The last two sections are missing from my photo.

So, are you still with me?  I promised to share some of the provocative discussion I had with husband and son as we viewed this exhibit, and watched a short video about the production of the pieces in the show.  I told you we had some discussion about the meaning of the word 'artist' which I have put quote marks around in paragraphs above, as well.  So here goes...

The exhibit is a retrospective of Sol Lewitt's work.  But the actual drawings on the walls were created by others, according to his specifications.  But his specifications were not always totally specific. For example, the specs for one piece might say to draw a certain # of straight lines and a certain # of curved lines that intersect in a specific # of places, but then it is up to the person who puts it on the wall to determine exactly where those lines go.  The people who drew and painted these lines and colors all over the walls were referred to in the video as artists.  There was a huge wall-size chart of who was doing what, and when.  It was complex choreography.  But is someone an artist who simply places colors on a wall according to specs?  Or are they just draftsmen/ladies?  Or is someone an artist who simply gives someone specs to follow but doesn't actually paint or draw the colors and lines?  Who is the artist here?  The person with the creative inspiration, or the people who brings that inspiration to life?  What do you think?

We couldn't come to an agreement, but we did nevertheless enjoy the lively fun colorful work.  Meanwhile, I'll be talking more about the nature of art when I post again, in a couple of days, about the other work that we saw in the museum.  

Please weigh in with your opinions! I'll close here with a couple of visual reflection photos from the museum.  By the way, all these photos were shot with a Canon Powershot point and shoot camera.