Writing and books about art abound. From experience, it tends to fall into a number of main categories. It is illustrated, descriptive, and often historical books about artists and art movements. It is technical ‘how-to’ books promising insight and guidance into the practice of making art. There are books offering insights into the psychological and cultural functions and processes involved in art. The diversity of these documents reflects the diversity of objects and practices that could be called art. In some ways, the same goes for the arts therapies. Jessica Kingsley Publishers has just under 400 books tagged ‘arts therapies’, see here. It is a lot to take in.
Ideas about what ‘art’ is abound. But there is a lot less written about what arts does. This website is about what art does and can do as research and as a form of learning.
Finding descriptions of what art does are rare things but I came across one which is very useful in terms of describing art in terms that might be useful to art as research.
It was written by an art historian named Irving Lavin. You can get the full document ‘The Crisis of Art History’ here . He wrote it in 1996 so some language sounds archaic, particularly around gender. Part of the underlying debate in art history revolves around being able to say if a thing is ‘art’. At the end, Lavin offers five tenets or assumptions about art, and the thing I found useful was that he describes art in terms of what it does. He describes art as a verb, not a noun. He writes…
“The credo consists of five tenets. I call them assumptions because I doubt whether, in the long run, any of them is demonstrably valid or invalid, underlying my conception of art history, which I defined as a “natural science of the spirit.”
Assumption 1: Anything manmade is a work of art, even the lowliest and most purely functional object. Man, indeed, might be defined as the art-making animal, and the fact that we choose to regard only some manmade things as works of art is a matter of conditioning.
Assumption 2: Everything in a work of art was intended by its creator to be there. A work of art represents a series of choices and is therefore a totally deliberate thing, no matter how unpremeditated it may seem, and even when “accidents” are built into it deliberately. We can never be sure that the artist did not know what he was doing or that he wanted to do something other than what he did-even when he declares himself dissatisfied with his creation.
Assumption 3: Every work of art is a self-contained whole. It includes within itself everything necessary for its own decipherment. Information gathered from outside the work may be useful, but it is not essential to the decipherment. On the other hand, outside information (which includes information from or about the artist himself) is essential if we want to explain how the work came to have its particular form and meaning.
Assumption 4: Every work of art is an absolute statement. It conveys as much as possible with as little as possible. The work of art is one hundred per cent efficient, and to paraphrase Leon Battista Alberti’s classic definition of Beauty, nothing could be added, taken away, or altered without changing its message. Alberti was referring simply to the relationship among the parts, whereas I mean to include the very substance of the work itself.
Assumption 5: Every work of art is a unique statement. It says something that has never been said before and will never be said again, by the artist himself or anyone else. Copies or imitations, insofar as they are recognisable as such, are no exception, since no man can quite suppress his individuality, no matter how hard he may try. Conversely, no matter how original he is, the artist to some extent reflects the work of others, and it is purely a matter of convention that we tend to evaluate works of art by the degree of difference from their models.
The chief virtue of these assumptions is that they help to assure each human creation its due. What it is due may be defined as the discovery of the reciprocity it embodies between expressive form and content. I do not pretend that my own work has ever met the criteria implicit in any of my assumptions. Yet they are much more to me than philosophical abstractions. They represent the obscure but persistent demons that prod me to think about a work in the first place. And, once the process begins, they are intellectual pangs of conscience that lead me to mistrust distinctions between conscious and unconscious creativity, between mechanical and conceptual function, between the artist’s goal and his achievement. Finally, they are what drive me from the work itself into archives, libraries, and classrooms, in search of illumination.”
There is a lot there in 555 words. So I pulled out about a third of them and made the statement more gender inclusive. Lavin says…
“Anything we make is a work of art. The fact that we choose to regard only some things we make as works of art is a matter of conditioning. Everything in a work of art was intended by its maker to be there. Every work of art is a self-contained whole. It includes within itself everything necessary for its own decipherment. Every work of art is an absolute statement. It conveys as much as possible with as little as possible. Every work of art is a unique statement. It says something that has never been said before and will never be said again, by the maker or anyone else. The chief virtue of these assumptions is that they help to assure each human creation its due. What it is due may be defined as the discovery of the reciprocity it embodies between expressive form and content.”
I present the summary on the basis that it defines art by what it does. We can make anything as art if we intend it to be art. As art, it works best if what you want to show is present in the thing you make, if the thing you make says this with the least effort and shows your unique subjective perspective. If these things happen (and they don’t always happen), it gives your work and your experience value, it’s due. It gives its maker their due. It values them. That value can be present if nobody sees the thing but you, the maker. This is one of the things that provide health benefits.
So. You are hungry. You look in the fridge. You don’t have much. But. You have things you like and know go well together that you bought. You choose the things you want and cook the meal just the way you like it. It looks and tastes great. As you eat it, you impress even yourself with how well you did with so little. You just ticked all those boxes above. It was just a sandwich, but it was art. You made art. But you are not an artist. So. Your partner comes in tired, and you do the same for them. They eat. They say, “Wow. Beetroot and spinach and leftover pasta, and bacon in a sauce made of tahini and mayonnaise. Who would have thought it! Carbs, proteins, fresh veg… It was delish. You are so clever.” And they give you a big kiss. Now you are a superstar artist. You have an audience. They are rapt.
The word art derives from the latin ars, meaning skill or craft. Here, the skill was in the choices you made with what you had, not a lot, and the craftiness was timing your cooking so you could feed your partner. Your reward was a kiss and two full bellies. Art can be very practical. It is art because you say it is, you made it so, but your skill was deployed with intention. Art making is a survival skill. It is the act of making some good thing, intentionally, with skill and with very little. But being practical takes practice. This is the reciprocity Lavin talked about, but with your own experience. You may have seen these things in other recipes, but you made this dish your own. That we don’t see this as art is the conditioning Lavin talked about. We may not tick all 5 boxes every time, but with practice, we learn to tick more each time
Moving Space 