Is art really in the eye of the beholder?
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Eric Fishl, Salad Days 1984
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Yesterday while on a tour at the Seattle Art Museum called "People and Places", we passed a room with recent acquisitions by David Salle and Eric Fischl. One of the women on the tour, pointed to a room with an exhibition called The Remains of the Day, and said "I just don't get that work". I could tell our tour guide didn't want to deal with that particular exhibition, and responded by saying "sometimes art is in the eye of the beholder". I'm uneasy with this cliché, as it puts a lot of pressure on both the art (to appeal to the beholder) and the beholder (to have enough knowledge to understand what they are looking at).
Unable to keep my educator's hat off, I told the perplexed woman the names of a couple of the artists in that exhibition as we passed by it. The woman seemed eager to know more about the strange, seemingly incomprehensible work by Salle and Fischl. Her questions and dis-ease, brought me back to the first time I saw the work the work in the mid-1980s when I was studying art at university. I didn't get them at that time either. What was with this awkward painting and strange compositions? At the time they were known as good "bad" painters, which as you could imagine was a challenging concept for a young artist; we learned that their work wasn't about skill, but rather about ideas and meaning, and more specifically psychological content. They were considered to be definitive examples of postmodernism in painting. I began to find these artists both perplexing and intriguing, and as I spent more time engaging with the work, I could see Fischl's roots in Edward Hopper, and Salle in Max Ernst and but felt that something else was definitely going on here.
The robust economy in the 1980s enabled these artists to rise to fame quickly and they became relegated to the stature of "art stars". In light of their seemingly instantaneous notoriety, the depth and complexity of their work is often overlooked. Both Fischl and Salle are extremely articulate and thoughtful artists. Fischl has recently written a memoir called Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas (named after one of this paintings), and it is easily one of the best written artist memoirs I have ever read. This book presents a captivating narrative not only of Fischl's journey as an artist, but also to the meaning of what it is to be a painter. An interview of Fischl discussing his book and creative process can be found here: Here's the Thing. Much of the imagery in Fischl's work is the result of his complex relationship with his mother and the unspoken dysfunctional family dynamics that went on behind the curtains of banal of suburban living.
Salle, whose work often gets accused of containing images from soft porn magazines, has been involved in theatre and dance productions since the 1980s. The figures in his work are models who he hired and photographed to achieve a performative quality in his work. Salle speaks of relating the disparate images in his work to the various characters that might exist in a novel. Salle compares his images to the way a novel can work with many unique characters existing at the same time; instead of working through consecutive time (or "pages"), images (or "characters") in a painting are seen at all once. Salle's paintings are complex because of the varied visual images, and also because they are made of many separate physical components. The piece below consists of four panels carefully inserted into a rectangular frame, perhaps to emphasize the separateness of the individual ideas; giving the viewer the opportunity to see the images as individual chapters that make up a whole. A recent exhibition and catalogue of his Ghost Paintings reveals Salle continues to explore the psychologically enigmatic with visually complex imagery.
My experience with these two artists is that that art exists beyond the eye of the beholder, and that an open relationship between the viewer and the art needs to exist before a true understanding and appreciation can come forward.
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David Salle, The Egypto-Roman World, 1987
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Painting as Practice: From Exhibition to IdeaStarts Monday June 29
 This week-long workshop by one of the founding members of VISA, John Luna, will introduce you to many divergent ways of thinking about painting practice. John will give you ideas and direction through visual presentations, one-on-one feedback and group critiques.
Workshop will culminate with a mini-exhibition in the Slide Room Gallery to give participants the opportunity to contemplate and understand how exhibitions get put together.
There is still some space in this workshop, so if you are the type of person that likes to do things at the last minute, pack up your painting supplies and a surface to work on, and show up at the school at little before 10am on Monday morning.
Photo credit: Tony Bounsall
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For those who would like to bring some art back into your life after a busy summer, we have the Fall and Winter course schedule on-line.
There are a range of courses for both the complete beginner and the more advanced artist.
If you do have some experience with drawing and painting, courses such as Drawing Projects I or Painting Today I would be good ones to take if you are interested in investigating particular themes. Image: VISA instructor, Neil McClelland
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For more information contact Melissa in the office |
