Drawing - the Perceptual/Conceptual legacy



"We no longer need an art that is perceptual. We need an art that is conceptual."

          Antony Gormley (Turner prize winner 1994)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fje0JEvzG50


Antony Gormley, Days of Fire, 2008



"The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance." - Leonardo da Vinci



Manual Skills

Should one should consider skill as the essential component to great art? I hope not. However, the above statement by Antony Gormley reflects the view that many post artists of today have toward the legacy of academic skills. An old battle to say the least, and Gormley does not seem to add much to the debate. As a winner of the prestigious Turner prize in 1994, one could hardly expect him to rally the troops in defense of Classical drawing. But as I believe the legacy of skill may still have some merit - even in these post modern times, I am compelled to respond.

 In a digital age it seems to be an uncontested given that artistic needs are defined in part for us, by refuting the skills of the past in order to justify the needs of the present. This seems valid since much has changed in the visual arts since Giotto. However, in the case of the video: You don't need great skill to be a great artist, the measure is that of greatness and not the purpose and application of skills to the study of art. I wonder how the discourse would have evolved if the question - Do you need skill to be an artist? was the premise of the video. Would manual skill have been considered in more depth?

Many artists with different skills and technology at their disposal, no longer have the impulse to draw with the academic tradition in mind, or consider it as a form of vital preparation for artistic study and art education. However, Gormley does not take into account the large number of studios and academic programs still in existence and valued by representational artists who do. Many of these artists would ask quite rightfully, who decides what our needs are in terms of the perceptual/conceptual debate.


Giotto, Navicella, pen on paper


 In the video the debate is premised on a statement, not a question. This in itself can be misleading. All those interviewed in the video make it clear that there are a variety of skills required to be an artist, both yesterday and today, but it seems academic skills bring out the daggers, especially with Gormley. It becomes the elephant in the room for him - a question of training. Perceptual training (an academic approach to learning to see through the act of drawing and painting) is for him  anachronistic, a skill used to make life comfortable. Whereas, today art is supposed to make life difficult. Which is why we need a conceptual art. Leaving aside the notion that there is such a thing as a great artist today, or even if that should be a form of criteria when exploring the nature of art, one should wonder why Gormley sets up a binary position when it is quite obvious, arm chair comfort is hardly a sensible reference point to start from. Perceptual art is peppered with difficult works. The history of western perceptual painting is ostensibly difficult.


Rembrandt, Saskia in Bed


 So for Gormley, it is a question of whether art can be taught at all. Another valid supposition. Yet the premise of perceptual drawing was intended to provide students with a way of searching out facts for themselves. Common property for sure, but certainly not found via formula as the post artist may surmise. Every route is unique, just as a fingerprint is. The conceptual component in perceptual art (I believe there is one) is the application of ideas. Only when they are transferred to life through art do they take on validity.

 Ironically, an artist like Gormley, is directly or indirectly a product of perceptual art and the skills naturally associated with it. So why question its purpose today, when perceptual art has always been about the idea of experience. Perceptual art is intended to be seen. The satisfaction being that what we see is tested also throughout the other senses. Two people can see the same object and draw it, yet neither knows what the other knows. Hence, drawing has always been experiential, and for the devoted artist, this usually included results worthy of examination, which in turn can lead to not only a valuable experience for the artist, but also a better skills set for visual conveyance. This is a result of seeing through our eyes rather than just with them.


Georgia O'keeffe, The Shell, 1934



Unfortunately in the video, the reasons perceptual art is no longer relevant or needed are not expanded upon in any other way other than death by association and date. By that I mean tradition and the accumulation of skills through what Gormley calls the known. For arguments sake the conceptualist must move into the unknown - whatever that may be to Gormley is anyone's guess. Jerry Saltz might say it is about deskilling - a fascinating objective:

"I’m interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or re-imagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks. If skill equalled greatness, 19th-century academics would be the apex of painting and Odd Nerdrum would be our greatest living painter. How much skill did it take to sign a urinal?" [1]

 But I suspect deskilling comes with a price, as with all art concepts. The history of perceptual art was always concerned more with life than art - or art for arts sake. With perceptual art came the laws of art that hinged on the laws of nature. With conceptual art we were introduced to strategic and tactical skills. Managerial skills in order to maintain detail and order over studio assistants. But it seems it doesn't matter for Gormley that the Classical base is still relevant - no matter where the artist may end up - even as a conceptualist. Ironic when one considers for instance, the skill required in making a hand made paper for a contemporary conceptual  printmaker.



John Baldassari, I will not make any more boring art, 1971



The answer to what we may or may not need lies in the progressives approach to conceptualism and the advancement of skills. Another tact taken seems to be the availability of skills. When so many people have supposedly  been trained to draw, why not outsource the skill to allow the artist management of the larger issues of creativity? Some call this conducting or as Sarah Thorton says - managerial skills. Just think of the Warhol factory or Jeff Koons Inc. and you get the picture.

The problem is there are not so many Masters around nowadays to maintain the apprenticeship system in all its varied aspects. Art education in the west is pluralistic and provides training in most areas of artistic expression, yet a Master comes with a premium and is rare. If traditional skills are marginalized in a society through deskilling, or considered nonsense, the less likely that society will produce a Master able to convey the importance of those skills today. Even so, many artists and art experts are hesitant to even use the term.


Antonio Lopez Garcia, Maria, pencil on paper, 1972


A more sensible approach to me comes from Hans-Urlich Obrist, Director of the Serpintine gallery in London, who asserts that: "process and learning expanded the notion of skills, just like our expanded notion of art."  Therefore drawing is as relevant and necessary a skill today, as management or marketing skills may be. The objective being to continue to expand our capacity for skills without neglecting the time honored ones.



Annigoni, Study for the Queen



Perhaps probing the psychological and imaginative aspects of drawing would provide the necessary sensitivity to drawing as aesthetically relevant and contemporary. In learning to draw one doesn't experience the sense that as a skill it is perceptually limited. It is something to be applied and expanded as one's art expands. As a result an artist like Pietro Annigoni, who derived much of his skill and artistic baggage from the renaissance Masters, also framed his vision within a twentieth century context. He was adaptive yet traditional. Likewise so was Giotto. Both artists are as contemporary today as John Baldissari is.




Annigoni, Hands, Study for the Queen


 
Rendering the Third Dimension

Generally, there are reasons for the decline in drawing and its contemporary recognition by the mainstream establishment. One of the great fallacies within the contemporary art establishment is that there is a belief that in art history, perceptual art depends only on manual skill - a rendition of a three dimensional world - something to deceive the eye. Therefore, drawing was part of a magic act and no longer to be trusted. Many conceptualists presuppose that this type of art was only about the illusion of the third dimension - a manual skill historically acknowledged, yet no longer serious or needed for most contemporary strategies. Ironic in light of the wide spread use of the computer monitor in present day installation. Another screen in our long relationship with illusion.


Alex Colville, Rat, Serigraph


Nothing could be further from historical truth in dismissing the legacy of perceptual art. The magic avoided  by the contemporary establishment, came with the help of symbols descriptive of the visible world. The magic - if you want to call it that, was tangible reality, not the description of it.

In academic training, the art of rendering without perceptive thought was frowned upon. Drawing also required the use of all the senses. It was one of several skill components used to probe the nature of time, space, visible reality and the landscape of the mind; all contemporary traits in artistic exploration. The same challenges facing artists like Antony Gormley.


Annigoni, Bernard Berenson on his Death Bed, China Ink





The Gulf

But Gormley's deductions takes place in a twenty first century society, with a different artistic order and hierarchy - and indeed objectives. So what may seem to be photographic when viewing a Caravaggio for us, was not to the general viewer in the painters own day. Realist representation for them was not a trick, it was a form of visual realisation. Their thinking was not just adaptive, as we like to think of ourselves today. Their respect for painting came with a general knowledge of art as an aesthetic mediator between life and expression. The art they produced with manual skills, was also an art that preferred reality of content over appearance.


Isabel Bishop, Noon Hour, Etching



Skills are important and help develop vision and expression. They assist the artist in making life more difficult, more interesting and more complicated. The abdication of skills from a certain century is one path to take. But the embracing of past skills and an understanding of their purpose, does not mean one's expression is antiquated. Skills don't have a shelf life like yogurt. Applied with respect they are timeless. The most interesting artists have never let appearance interfere with their reality of content. Just as the skills that have yet to be unearthed will be important to us in the future, the legacy of skills acquired are no less contemporary. They too need to be maintained.



Picasso, Bacchanalia, Etching



Note - [1]Frieze, Oct. 2005 - Jerry Saltz, Righting Wrongs



Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS 







Comments

  1. A thought-provoking series of reflections. Two thoughts are immediately provoked:

    1. The attack on skill risks being a mimetic assimilation to an increasingly inhuman social order. We are big fans of Georg Simmel, who described in the first decade of the 20th century the increasing imbalance between an impersonal, objective culture and the withering significance of the individual subject - the rise of an anti-individualistic social order (one justifying itself in the name of individual freedom while all the time emptying that freedom of all significance). Although skills may seem like aspects of that bad objective culture, surely in the practice of the skilled artist they exist as elements of his/her subjective life - they represent tradition internalised and unified with the life of the individual extending the range of his or her expressive abilities. The attack on skill then risks siding with the forces that are emptying the riches of the individual subject, leaving only an impersonal conceptuality - singing the praises of abstraction as if it were the absolute form of liberation.

    2. For someone schooled in the philosophy of Hegel, what Gormley says sounds horribly undialectical. He says, in effect: "The essence of art is the ability to probe the unknown. Everything to do with skill is to do with the known." The naively undialectical conclusion is: Skill can be rejected because it has to do with the known. But Hegel was at pains to point out at the dawn of the 19th century that there is no unknown without the known. The unknown only becomes perceptible as holes in the known. The two can only exist together. The same applies to perception and conceptuality. Even Kant understood as much: Concepts without perceptions are empty, and perceptions without concepts are blind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "The attack on skill then risks siding with the forces that are emptying the riches of the individual subject, leaving only an impersonal conceptuality - singing the praises of abstraction as if it were the absolute form of liberation." This for me is significant to the brief video debate. Many a system of thought or visual expression where skill is fortified by expanded study, has been refuted and left by the road side discounted by a subsequent generation. I can see that we as a society have historically broken through barriers in the arts (and philosophy - though not my metier) and for good reason, but sometimes to our dismay, we forget about that essential 'present' and as Gormley contests we then conceptually probe the unknown ill equiped. Notwithstanding the notion of the Tower of Babel, skill to me is a sort of scaffold for individual expression, each level adding to the content of the next..

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Passing through Dildo and toponyms to remember

The Saving of Everett Lewis

What really happened in Marshalltown?