The Artist's Job

Introduction ~ Mira Kamada

"...it is the task and aim of art to bring in contact with our sense, our seelng, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Philosopher

Since the mid-60's we have seen a major shift in the philosophical approach of artists to their work. Art has become increasingly politicized - having less to do with aesthetics than political agendas for everything from environmental destruction to gender roles and social oppression. Painting and sculpture are no longer preferred - forms more appropriate for staid museum exhibitions than real-time, real-life drama. Vanguard artists now have less in common with their predecessors of the 40's and 50's than perhaps with labor organizers or publicists. Consider Suzanne Lacy, who organizes groups of people for mass productions. For example, she has successfully employed disenfranchised groups, such as female prisoners, to convert junk cars into monuments of protest against violence toward women. Therapeutic for the participants? Probably. Instructive for the audience? As one moved to tears, I would say, indeed.

Is she an artist? Well, she is cited in art history texts. Which brings us to our question, what is the artist's job?

Certainly, late 20th century artists are not the first to define their role as agents for social change. The great court painter, Francisco Goya (1746-1828), painted a searing portrait of King Charles IV and his family, revealing all the vulgarity and vapidity that fueled the revolutions of The Enlightenment. Eight years later, he raised his brush again to protest tyranny in his famous, "The Third Day of May, 1808." The painting depicted the brutal execution of commoners in Madrid.

Interestingly, Goya died the same year Hegel gave his remarkable lectures on aesthetics in Berlin. Hegel believed that the content of art should encompass all aspects of human experience, that art should force "... the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man's soul in its innermost and secret corners has power to experience and to create...and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime, to make men realize the innermost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of pleasure and delight...in order that the experiences of life may not leave us unmoved...."

As we meander through history we find many examples of political art, spiritual art, and art-for-art's-sake. We may reconcile that the artist's job is dictated somewhat by society's needs. However, the art of the avant garde-of any age-continues to mystify most people. Common 'Biedermeier' tastes prevail even when more substantial alternatives are offered. Without the aid of art critics interpreting the artist's content, revolutionary art, art that has the power to provoke change, often confounds more than it enlightens. Again we ask, what is the artist's job?

What is different today is the dazzling array of new media available, and the cacophony of competing popular culture. Our media-driven consumerism drowns not just the voice, but also the desire for something finer, more subtle in our lives. Entertainment replaces art. To make new art, young artists are encouraged to appropriate new media, such as video and computer graphics, along with slick marketing to promote their careers. We wait to see where the newest generation of artists-the sons and daughters of the artist-as-activist crowd-leads us. If history teaches anything, we will surely see the pendulum swing back toward more concern with aesthetics.

We humans have not really changed much in the 200 years since The Enlightenment. We are still confronted with the same pool of human fears, failings, hopes and joys that faced our forebears. Perhaps, after all, the artist's job is still to expose a bit of truth to our jaded eyes.

Bearing Witness ~ Elise Jerram

What is the artist's role? Perhaps we should first distinguish hobbyists from those for whom art is a lifetime pursuit. Among the latter are those who most influence society. Within this cultural drama, some artists fill leading roles, many settle for bit parts, while probably most remain faithful spear-carriers. But all are vital to the drama.

Today's artists confront new distractions, like the pace and din of modern life, that inhibit the creative impulse. And because science and technology now move so fast, keeping pace, leaves us mentally and emotionally breathless. Yet too much attention to the outer at the expense of the inner threatens creativity.

So one prime role of the artist is to maintain society's focus and inner balance. Beyond that, I think the artist's role today is to mirror back to us images of our tumultuous society in all its fragmentation, confusion, beauty and despair. To a limited extent, artists have performed this function throughout history, but today's artists are freer than ever to bear witness to what they see and feel.

Consider Alexei Leontov, one of Russia's cosmonaut-artists, who in 1965 was the first man to walk in space and a decade later co-commanded the historic Apollo-Soyuz Test Flight. Leontov brought colored pencils and paper so he could make man's first sketches of Earth from space. He writes that he felt obligated "to share my vision of space with people by means of the art I have at my disposal." Leontov's role as an artist was certainly history's "flightiest". And below him revolved that beautiful blue globe called Planet Earth, teeming with its myriad wonders and terrors, all grist for the mills of mankind's artists.

Alexei Leontov's quote is from "In the Stream of the Stars, the Soviet/American Space Art Book," edited by William K. Hartman, Andrei Sokolov, Ron Miller and Vitaly Myagkov, 1990.

Sanctuary ~ Robert Reese

Entering the Crocker Museum as a child, I would climb several imposing steps to an enormous double-door, through a small foyer-into another world. This was a place outside the ordinary day. Its size and silence were immense to a seven-year old, the profound stillness a counterpoint to the noise within my crowded mind. It was the only sacred space I knew, at once intimate and formal; I didn't need to be told this - I felt it. Only outside the door, in the bright summer afternoon, did I see the distinction from the main gallery of the Crocker to the familiar fabric of everyday life.

I have never forgotten the texture of those visits. Whenever I recall them I am moved, not so much by individual paintings, but by the collective effect of museums and artists - the role of art and artists.

For myself, one essential role of the arts is to pull the rug out from under the assumptions we've made about the world, to question the pact we've made with life. We often think we live in a world that makes sense. Then - sometimes vividly - the rug is swept from beneath our long-held assumptions. We temporarily misplace our strategy for life. The narrative we've created about our world no longer has meaning beyond the temporary arrangement of images. Perspective starts listing this way and that - and the truth about the world is disclosed; it is larger and infinitely more complex than we could possibly imagine. Spending time in a museum with a great painting can sometimes demonstrate this point.

Another role of art and artists - equally important - is to provide sanctuary. All of us know the sensation of reading a book or visiting a museum and feeling ourselves so uplifted that we can hardly conceive the circumstances of our ordinary lives. In this sense, the arts serve as a kind of rescue operation for us. Art provides a kind of humanizing salve for the ills of contemporary life and creates "cushions for the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to". Art provides reminders of serenity.

What Wallace Stegner wrote regarding nature is equally true for art: "The reminder and reassurances that it (nature) is still there is good for our spiritual health, even if we never once in ten years set foot in it."

At the Edge ~ Ray Kamada

What is the artist's job? Postmodernists may tout that, "It's whatever the artist says it is". To me this may seem valid, but also as vapid as the art viewer's common refrain, "Well, I can't explain it, but I know it when I see it." Since a sweltering summer day in 1966, I've hoped someday to say a little more.

I was 17. The Pasadena Modern Art Museum had just opened - a place more palpable than my school friends' heady and endless debates over existentialism, beat poetry, and Zen. Through the curvy, speckled beige entrance, past the Picassos and Miros, and down the spiral staircase were the new ones: Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg. There were the multiple Marilyns and comic strips writ large, stacked soup cans, mad nests of paint, collages born of pain, Kienholz's gutted entrails across the wall from Rothko's amber meditations.

Here at history's raw and dangling edge, square and arid landscape and portraiture had given way to pure spasms of expression - work that tore open the packaged fifties life of post-war America. I was awed, intimidated, and really didn't get it. So I kept coming back, trying to relate. I've wondered about the point and purpose of Art ever since.

As with any fertile field - first there's a discoverer and acolytes, then critics and reviewers. Finally the masses accept, if not quite comprehend, still puzzling over Freud and Einstein's century-old epiphanies. So, as yet another viewer/bystander I've been slow as well to surmise that the artists' job is to explore and expand the nature of aesthetics. And what is that? Perhaps, in ancient Greece aesthetics was about beauty, balance, and proportion, which now we might term symmetries. But those same elusive symmetries extend as well to profane, ugly, or simply banal subjects. So, I suspect that Art is really about how we individually and collectively respond, at every level, to the ever-changing nature of reality, how it shapes the way we perceive, how we organize and try to make sense of it, how it really makes us feel.

By really, I mean something more than 'shock' as marketing ploy, something beyond numerous depictions of the 'thinging' of female flesh that also assure the artist-subject of continual exposure. For example, Art often illuminates ideas also posed in other fields. In the 1950's, a generation before French postmodernist claims that Lyotard initiated their era, American sociologist Marshall McLuhan had predicted that the expansion of leisure time would beget mass boredom, to be appeased and diluted by packaged entertainment filtered through mass media. Shortly thereafter, it was Warhol, the cogently non-verbal philosopher, who began to explore the cultural tension between mass reproduction and meaning. In one show he littered the floor with a thousand finger paintings done by chimps. So his patrons had to walk on some to view and buy the pricey framed ones on the walls. And they did! Just a juvenile prank? Look again. In retrospect, we say conceptual and performance art and note the multiple symmetries of irony, but what social psychologist has ever arranged so succinct and glib a laboratory setting to underscore such deeply simian displays of status, fashion, and fortune?

At the same time, it is not in everyone's nature to climb new peaks. Because we continually forget and need reminding, another path over the same hill is valuable, for each individual view is a personal exploration, subtly, sometimes starkly different. In this sense, Anselm Kiefer's broken warplanes may illuminate dark aspects of teutonic history that still resonate today. But while a Kiefer works in limelight, another hundred thousand true artists labor in near-anonymity to harvest and replenish no less large and vital truths from stores within their own psyches.

A century ago, photography freed visual Art from a superficial realism yoked to history's archival needs. So we now let it explore the ugly and profane, the boring and mundane, free to pierce seemingly lofty clouds wherever they seem to shroud the truth. But is it yet free to reject the fashion fits that still inhabit and inhibit Art? Can it be pro- not just re-active to technology? When will it transcend old Marxist/ capitalist cliches, sexist/feminist diatribes, absurd attempts to reduce it to politics or feeble redefinitions like text? Does it yet have the courage to confront not just the elegance and ugliness of the id, but whatever may lie beyond?

Still, we hear the thrumming of a collective drum. This is our time, our curious world. View it, feel it, regard, react, and revel in it, for this is who and how we are. We have entered the new millenium. Let Art explore and expand within it freely.