Abstract art

Helen Frankenthaler

Talking about abstract painting, and attitudes towards it in general, countering some things I've heard said many times over the years, sometimes about my own work. Modern painting is easy to relate to what we do as drummers— in both disciplines we deal in simple forms, and the craft of it is not always obvious. People who don't know anything enjoy not respecting either of them. 

Some drummers are happy to be— no disrespect— pure knuckleheads and live their lives strictly in paradiddles and flam taps; I like people who have interest in art beyond that. Therefore, some things to think about approaching this other art form: 

What's similar, and different
It's easy to see an improvisational element in music and in that kind of art. They seem to be analogous to each other, both coming from a similar cultural place and time, with a similar hip modernity. For a long time, though, I could only see how they were different. For example: 

Painting is production craft, music is performance craft. Art happens in a work shop, like any other artisanal endeavor— woodworking, pottery, wine making, jewelry— producing objects to sell. Unlike those applied arts, art-art is made to be somehow enriching for being what it is, as a kind of visual literature or music, inspiring some kind of feeling of emotion or creativity in people. Or whatever someone is looking to inspire.

If paintings have an applied purpose, it's to decorate a wall in a home or business, and some of it is strictly that— commercial decoration. The difference between the two is like a quasi-poetic greeting card vs. legit poetry. The difference may be real obvious, or not. Some artists have gotten very skilled doing abstract art that looks great and is visually impactful, but doesn't say a lot. 

Of course painting is visual and static, and music is aural and changing. Either way we want sustained interest— for people to look at the picture longer, or to listen to the recording again. 

Ellsworth Kelly

Which is where some artists lose me— not enough reasons to look longer. They'll function as an attrative design element as part of a larger space, but there's not a lot to look at in the piece itself. You see Ellsworth Kelly's work in the picture here— he was a great, appealing, creative artist, his work in total is a master class on design possibilities, but there's not a lot to look at in individual works, once you get the initial design idea.  

Some have tried to make painting a performance art, but if the main thing is not the end product, then you're really just doing avant garde theater. As long as the end product is the point, it is a production, work shop craft, no matter how you stage its creation. 

Likewise, with music, whatever you do with the performance aspect of it, the thing you listen to is the sound. Take that away, you're more doing performance art, or a theatrical spectacle, with incidental music. I don't know if anyone ever bought and listened to a Gwar record, for example. 

There is a “performance” aspect in painting, in the sense of real time application of skill, with some or all of a painting are done “live”, in one sitting— alla prima, it's called. Or freehand drawing. Which is usually what we do in music, playing complete performances at once. Commercial music and art, in the interest of production, use a whole range of technical tools and techniques to minimize the need for that real time pure skill performance. More so in commercial art. 

“I could do that.”
In fact, yes, you could. If you chose to. In art or music. Many or most of my drum students can deliver credible performances in some type of music, without being full time players. Anyone can do it, and should. It doesn't make it less good, or worth less. But you have to do it. 

Getting that easy money faking a career as an artist would require renting studio space, outfitting it, stocking it with materials, and then confronting the problem of trying to make something other people want to look at, that people who look at art all the time would approve to show in their gallery, and that someone might want to spend money on to own it. You would find that it takes many hours of your time, and considerable dedication, not to mention financial investment. You would also have to be able to convey belief in your own work, which you can't do cynically— hard to get away with it, and sustain it. After you do all that, you really are just an artist.   

Art likers will counter this with, no, it really is amazing, it is really hard, and piling on the superlatives, which is really not the point. Something does not have to be hard to do— or time consuming for the artist— to be worth looking at. Elvin Jones played Up 'Gainst The Wall in three minutes and thirteen seconds. I'm sure this very large Jackson Pollock painting below was done in an afternoon. What's the difference?  

Jackson Pollock

As a technical matter, anyone could have composed John Cage's 4'33". They would have to think of it, and then present it, put it into a performance. Then the real trick is getting it published, and publicized, and getting others to perform it, and listen to it, and have it be persistent in the culture as a work of art. Even if you're convinced that the work is a pure fraud (you'd be wrong), John Cage had to organize his entire life around perpetrating it, he could only do it if he had built up some credibility as an artist. You couldn't say he wasn't committed.  

There's more below the fold....

What is it
It's a common question, and for some a source of deep annoyance: what am I looking at.  

In his essay Form And Spirit In Art, which you should read, Aldous Huxley says purely abstract art can achieve perfection “within narrow limits.” He points out that some of the most powerful representational art may actually be mostly abstract, but:  

[O]ther things being equal, a work of art which imposes aesthetic unity upon a large number of formal and psychological elements is a greater and more interesting work than one in which unity is imposed upon only a few elements. 

Basically, he says not having the representational element at all results in a more limited work. That may be. Maybe we're limited as drummers only having the two tom toms, and a couple of cymbals, or if we play as a quartet vs. a full orchestra. Or if we don't have a singer. Maybe a haiku has less power for all the syllables they didn't use, a silent or black and white movie is lesser to one with sound and color. 

I think they're simply different things, and the particular attraction of one is not compatible with the other. One may be larger-scale, more grand, longer, more whatever than the other, but we're all filling time with some sound, in a particular way. Or filling some space on a wall. 

Often I'll see a painting I like, thinking it's an abstract work, only to realize after a few seconds, oh... it's a mundane picture of some cows, or of a quirky old coot. They have imposed aesthetic unity upon a larger number of elements, but one detracts from the other. Imposing aesthetic unity— meaning “they finished a painting”— also imposes psychological unity on me in viewing the thing, and I can only see an old coot, semi-abstractly or expressively rendered. I don't generally find works that demand I think of old coots to be interesting.   

Some common subjects aren't so loaded— landscapes, nudes, interiors, still lifes. But the more particular they are, the more they take you out of the free land of abstaction and into mundane illustration. Not that something can't be great that way, but it becomes something different. 

Even if you were a skilled illustrator, you would have to edit out a lot of things in the world that would be visually confusing in an artwork— a lot of objects that are mostly obscured by another, that would be unidentifiable and unaesthectic in a painting. 

People don't fully understand how disordered ordinary visual reality is; it's highly abstract. A big mess, and with many elements that would unidentifiable if you put them in a painting. The only reason you put up with it in your daily life is that you can move around and identify things that bother you. Possibly that's where some of the negative reactions come from when viewing abstract work— Where am I? Why did you bring me here? What are these objects? 

“[Bryon Gysin] was, of course, the inventor of the cut-up method, which did introduce an element of chance into selection of material for writing. And of course then he realized that life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, you're conscious is being cut by these random factors. So it's really closer to the actual facts of perception.”

Sol Lewitt

Deep meaning 
Some feel that when they see a painting, some demand is being put upon them to take it seriously as having “deep meaning.” They can be very irritable about that. There may not be deep meaning. If we're dealing with minimalists, they may be just illustrating a simple mathematical logic. You just look and let it run through your mind for a moment, and go to the next thing.   

Price tag
People will object to the high price put on something they don't like, that looks easy to them. Those same people mostly do not object to the bass player in AC/DC making a lot of money doing what he does. I don't know if it's harder to be Cy Twombly, or the bass player in AC/DC, or somebody who owns a toilet paper factory, or who inherited a billion dollars and invested it in the stock market. People get money for stuff, not always in balance with their labor, apparent talent, or perceived value to us.  

And art speculation and the art market is different from the art itself. This country is insanely wealthy, and any items deemed to be valuable, or unique, or historically important will be extremely expensive, out of all scale to the actual thing itself. So artworks may exist that are only of passing interest to you, but are valued at many millions of dollars. But the art is still the art— it says what it says, regardless of the economics surrounding it. 

Willem de Kooning

What I like
I like some mystery, some magic. I don't want to see how it was done. I think that's where the difficulty of some work comes from— the plain fact of the picture is so obvious that they don't sense any mystery. 

I don't care for production work, I like paintings to look like a war zone, that there was some conflict in it, an evolution. It shouldn't look too easy, I want to see that someone took some pains with it. 

I'm not deeply moved by obvious feats of skill.  

I want things to communicate as a piece of design— it doesn't have to be the dominant element, but it should be there. 

I do want work to be conventionally attractive somehow, I don't need it to challenge me by being repellent, I have been sufficiently challenged. 

I don't want to sense the machinations of the social scene in which the work was produced. Increasingly I'll look at a work and just see the artist's ego and career ambition, and be thinking about who was sleeping with who. 

I don't want theater that's too bound up in theatricality— the artificial vernacular of the thing they're doing. Maybe in music that manifests in genre— like with Blues musicians bound up in bluesiness. Literature about literariness, songwritery songwriting. There is a similar thing in art, and when you sense it, the work gets much smaller. It's most analogous to theater, and it can be very difficult to avoid. 

There you go— a big, messy post in the aftermath of yet another heartbreaking United States election. I've got other projects to tend to. More drumming stuff coming this week.