A Celebration Of Failure
What we have seen endlessly in the arts pages of the press for years is a celebration of failure. For something like 30 years now the art world has been subverted by those who believed that progress in art was made by bypassing or suppressing previous conventions of making art.
That they haven’t succeeded entirely in this is a result of figurative art being a fundamental of human nature. They seem to have succeeded in art colleges though by turning them into a sort of advanced level play school.
Now having left no barrel bottom unscraped lo they discover drawing and painting again. The only trouble is that their graduates look as if the last art lesson they had was in the 5th or 6th form… which was probably the case.
But do we admit to failure? Do turkeys vote for Christmas?
Only in art was this situation allowed to develop. After all who other than those directly involved with it or those making big money out of it take it seriously? Certainly not the politicians who have more pressing concerns unless of course they think it might exploit it for purposes of street cred. The key to the freeforall that has seen in many instances price increases in inverse proportion to worth is the term Art’ itself. No one dares define it for fear of ridicule and it is not in the interests of the vested interests to have it defined. Nevertheless I believe that someone has to be rash enough to have a go. First however I’d like to consider how we got into this mess in the first place? In the early 60s art had always been the skive subject at school. Art school was the option for those not bright enough for university but who had a modest facility with drawing.
What the art establishment thought of this attitude can perhaps be surmised from the junking of the old National Diploma in Art and Design and the introduction of degree courses. This meant that students were more able to get grants while tutors got an upgrading of status and salary. But it also meant that applicants for the courses had to have more O and A levels and candidates with those were not necessarily the ones who possessed the key to visual literacy namely drawing. It was convenient therefore that the old mould of art had been cracked. We had Pop Art Op Art and something called Conceptual Art so who needed good drawing anyway?
Life drawing hitherto the backbone of art training became an optional extra and life classes began to close. In its place writing a clever rationale for ones work became as important as the artwork itself. A sort of miragespeak crept into the art scene designed always to just elude comprehension whilst looking good from a distance. But what did you do with an art graduate who could neither draw nor paint? Why set him to teach of course! And was he or she likely to encourage a student with incipient drawing and painting talent? No. I gather that students are nowadays actually threatened with being marked down if they persist in trying to improve their drawing. All the older tutors with solid groundings in painting and drawing retired or gave up.
A decade later and we were left with the supreme achievement of British art in the form of a light going on and off in a room every seven seconds. The media played a willing part in this decline. One could see their problem. Artists couldn’t cut off their ears every day. By fulminating about such like as the Tate’s bricks in the 1970s artists got the message: “No publicity is bad publicity”.
Writers and critics soon began to behave as though stunts were the only game in town. If they didn’t play the game they wouldn’t get invited to the party. In a world in which art can be literally anything the term has become meaningless and without a definable meaning who can be held to account.In the end it comes down to those practicing real art to pull out the stops and regain the attention of a public grown bored.
However I get the impression that we are all keeping our heads down waiting endlessly for a return to sanity. We are punch drunk. We have been deemed “the wrong kind of artists” by those in charge of the Arts Council and the national collections. And even the Royal Academies have caught the disease and are beginning to squeeze us out too.
By rights this should be the time for the pendulum to swing back but it is being held in check by vested interests.
Here is my definition of art. Art is a visual counterpart of verbal language. It takes one substance and transforms it into the visual appearance of another. Take a bicycle. A pseudo artist might hang it upside down strew it in bits crush it or even file it down and eat it. Any of these would require written accounts of why someone thought this a worthwhile thing to do.
Picasso meanwhile takes the handlebars and the saddle and makes a bull’s head. Not great art perhaps but clever and amusing and requiring no artist’s statement’ at all. Art is the ability to turn the rudest of materials into eloquent meaning. It is this that makes one an artist.Real progress in art is made at the personal level and might involve a lifetimes thought and practice. It has nothing to do with instant celebrity and a philosophy of “What next?”.I have nothing against all the stunts installations performances videos as such. Some might be interesting or even entertaining in themselves but please couldn’t they be called something else? Calling them art really does the real thing no favours at all. One suspects though that in most cases it is just the claim to be “Art” that is the only leg they have to stand on and that without it they would be a pretty poor anything else.
And is it an inferiority complex that makes photographers want to be thought of as artists? Photography as photography can’t be beaten but photography as art is mostly boring or pretentious.I realise that in seeking to narrow the focus of what is considered art I shall be accused of being narrow myself. But it is not “widening participation” to so broaden the scope that all focus is lost in a formless infinity. Success then becomes a lottery drawn for their own purposes by capricious manipulators and their yesmen of the media and the rest are left rudderless.Paradoxically it is the very limitations of traditional art that are its strengths and its openness. In effect they provide the “rules of the game”. No rules no game. And even if “rules are there to be broken” what is the point if rulebreaking becomes the whole purpose of the game as has happened in art.
Would millions continue to watch tennis say if its form was continually changed on the whim of a selfselected handful?The real language of art is as old as the caves and as modern as only skill and imagination can make it. It can inspire with the beauty of form and execution or conjure up whole worlds out of next to nothing. Those who have been taught to turn their backs on it have been cheated of a lifetime’s discovery and will never know the moment of magic when that little bit of coloured mud that you’ve been pushing around under your brush suddenly clicks into breathing life.
www.visionaryart.org
About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Gary M. James was born in wartime Slough England where Betjamins’ ‘friendly bombs’ missed him he was then raised in Kenya where the MauMau also gave him the miss. From 1960 he studied at St. Martin’s School of Art and with the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain in London. Thereafter he was Medical Artist at the University of Bristol ’till becoming a full time painter in 1997.
Concurrently with the medical art he exhibited his paintings regularly at the Royal West of England Academy and later at the Royal Academy in London featuring as TV ‘pick of the show’ at both.
The paintings are large up to 4′ x 7′ and detailed and are contained in frames built and frequently carved by the artist to integrate with the subject. As such they can take between six and twenty months work each. They sell as produced through the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg. And the location of these scenes? Africa just over the horizon the bit you haven’t seen yet.
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