do you reference wikipedia? why is it useful?

Creative Commons Deed

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Loose writings on Conceptual Art 1

"When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.." (Sol LeWitt)

"What the work of art looks like isn't too important... No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea." (Sol LeWitt)

"Conceptual Art is good only when the idea is good." (Sol LeWitt)

Welcome to the world of ideas. Welcome to a world where thinking is valued and doing, unfortuantely, is more or less essentially useless, if we agree with Weiner that "the piece need not be built".

We have a very big problem here.

Why is a good idea = art? Why is a good idea not simply a good idea? We have a group of people who claim that art = a good idea or a good idea = art without making it clear to us why and how so. Perhaps (just perhaps) it is a reaction to things that came before.

Assuming that art = a good idea or a good idea = art, we are not given the slightest idea of what makes a good idea or what makes a bad idea. We are not told why or how one idea is more interesting or less interesting than another.

To quote my teacher, it's "navel-gazing". However, in the spirit of the book "But Is It Art" (I can't remember who the author is...a certain Cynthia-something), I am going to explore Conceptual Art by referring to actual artworks themselves.

***

Before I begin, I want to talk a little about what I dislike about Conceptual Art. Firstly, it places too much emphasis on the intellect. It has little regard for emotion or expression. Secondly, it is somewhat detached from life. (Think Sol LeWitt's cubes and Joseph Kosuth's investigations.) It reduces the role/function of the artist to an idea-generating machine. Of course I'm making generalisations here; things get more interesting with time.

***

Steam cloud, Robert Morris, 1966. I mean seriously, what does releasing gas in a gallery achieve? What does it mean? What does it say?

LeWitt NEVER proclaimed that ANY idea is art or ANYTHING can be art. He actually tries to suggest that there is good art and bad art (i.e. good ideas vs bad ideas), although he does not tell us how he makes the distinction.

... ...

I actually agree with one of Lucy Lippard's artists' cards, which might just give us an idea of what good Conceptual Art might be:

"Deliberately low-keyed art often resembles ruins, like neolithic rather than classical monuments, amalgams of past and future, remains of something "more", vestiges of some unknown venture. The ghost of content continues to hover over the most obdurately abstract art. The more open, or ambiguous, the experience offered, the more the viewer is forced to depend on his own perceptions."

The sad truth is, you can say the same thing for Duchamp's urinal or any of Joseph Beuys's drawings as well. (Then what's the point of saying it?)

***

From Wikipedia:

"Seedbed is a performance piece first performed by Vito Acconci on 15–29 January 1971 at Sonnabend Gallery in New York.

A low wooden ramp merging with the floor - it extends across the width of the room, beginning two feet up the side of one wall and slanting down to the middle of the floor. Acconci lay hidden underneath the ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating. The artist's spoken fantasies about the visitors walking above him were heard through loudspeakers in the gallery."

How this kind of crap can pass off as art is beyond me. How is this a GOOD idea? Now, in any debate, the onus is on the proposition to explain why something IS, the onus is not on the opposition to explain why something iS NOT.

Nevertheless, I shall try to explain why I think it is NOT a good idea. I mean, isn't there any law against this? Well, maybe there isn't, considering that people like Akon can sing a song like "I want to f*** you" and it gets aired on radio. Try saying this to the next stranger you see. Very soon, the law will have a hard time deciding what is sexual harassment and what is not.

Under types of sexual harassment, Wikipedia includes the following:

Great Gallant - This mostly VERBAL harassment involves excessive compliments and personal comments that focus on appearance and gender, and are OUT OF PLACE AND EMBARASSING TO THE RECIPIENT. Such comments are sometimes accompanied by leering looks.

Unintentional - Acts or COMMENTS OF A SEXUAL NATURE, not intended to harass, CAN CONSTITUTE SEXUAL HARASSMENT IF ANOTHER PERSON FEELS UNCOMFORTABLE WITH SUCH SUBJECTS.

a social good

in japan, legions of manga fans attend their comics convention every year.

a large portion of the work on display is fan created. maybe its a manga done by a secondary school's manga club. maybe its a group of friends who are manga fans.

who got together to make their own manga thats based on their favourite manga. it could have been samurai X. and their version could have a black girl as samurai X. or maybe it could have been a homosexual version. or an hentai version. or one with a different take altogether - maybe its told from the view of kauru instead of kenshin?

and all that culture would be impossible in a normal copyrighted world. because they would not have permission from the creators of the original works to base their derivatives on.

in uk, morrissey had this to say about EMI :

"Morrissey does not approve such releases and would ask people not to bother buying them. Morrissey receives no royalty payments from EMI for any back catalogue, and has not received a royalty from EMI since 1992."

we do not know how much of what we pay when we buy a cd from hmv actually goes to the artist. it'd help if every artist had his or her own website to sell their work directly to fans.

all in all, we have to realise that a copyright is a temporary distribution monopoly granted by the public to the artist to help him or her fund the next creation. the moment a work is copyrighted, it belongs to the public - the copyright grants only the distribution rights to the creator for a limited time - when the time is up, the work will be fully owned by the public. so that society will gain from the enjoyment of more creations. note that people created works even before copyright was invented. and artists who did not want to relinquish ownership of the work to the public can choose not to publish a work. copyright is supposed to encourage more creation.

if copyright starts to fail to encourage the creation of more works, then society should look at whether copyright is useful at all in its current form, and change it, or even remove it.

The Drain Cover Discourse

It began one morning when I decided to take a picture of wide open spaces. Next to the school where I teach, there is a large beautiful canal, and to one side of the canal, there is a grass area about the size of the canal. It is somewhat smaller than a soccer field, but it is nevertheless a wide open space. I began shooting, but after about twelve shots or thereabouts, what really caught my eye was a drain cover overgrown with weeds and grass.

The simple drain cover overgrown with weeds reminded me of many things. It reminded me of Duchamp's "Why Not Sneeze" and Tapies's "Palla i fusta" (translated into "Straw and wood"). The drain cover itself reminded me of the Minimalist Japanese window screens, while the grass and weeds were like the strokes of a Huang Binhong painting. I thought that it was the chance meeting of three great men, namely Duchamp, Tapies, and Huang Binhong.

Of course, I did not begin with the intention of producing an artwork which combines these influences, but I don't see anything wrong if I say the drain cover reminded me of these things. Indeed, it could be all these and more. Then again, a drain cover is just a drain cover.

This brings to mind a Zen saying: Before you study Zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. While you are studying Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers, but once you have had enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and rivers again rivers.

To me, the drain cover is simultaneously both a drain cover and not a drain cover.

And so I took a photo of the drain cover, for the angle I wanted was impossible to draw from. Then I printed the photo and drew from the photo.

At this point you say, "Stop! Wait a minute. Why can't the photo be the art? Why is there a need to draw?"

So, is my drawing art? What is the art and where is the art? Where does the art begin and where does it end?

Honestly, I have no answers to these questions... ...