So for the past two years in my art classes it has mainly been all about proccess. How to do things, and a little bit on why you do them, but nothing about what you plan to do with it later, or really any discussion about the point of it all.

I suppose this is kind of unique to the field of art. If you are a history major for instance (like my husband), you learn the stuff, it's fact, not abstract, you go to grad school and you teach the stuff you have learned. That's it. It's a real, respected, normal field of work.

Such is not the case in art. So in the course of two classes yesterday, I have now started to wonder about all of this.

In my digital media class (photoshop) we are discussing Post Mondernism (among other things) and ended up on this whole topic of why we make art and what we plan on doing with it in the future.

In the digital media class we are reading Postmodernism : A very short introduction and in my photography class we are reading The Bride and The Bachelors : Five masters of the Avant-Garde.

Needless to say all of this is making me question everything. The Postmodernism book is like reading another language and I barely understand any of it. The other book is much better, and though I don't know much about the Avant-Garde as an art movement, I find the whole concept very interesting. Not as something that I would potentially go into....but just as a way to throw a wrench into the way I think about my art in general.

The first chapter of The Bride and The Bachelors is about Marcel Duchamp.

One of the most intriguing quotes from him, "It's only one occupation, and it hasn't been my whole life, far from it. You see, I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered? It's a drug, that's all. The more I go on, the more I'm convinced of it. The onlooker is as important as the artist. ... The artist himself doesn't count. Society just takes what it wants. ... I don't believe in it with all its mystical trimmings. As a drug it's probably very useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as a religion it's not even as good as God."

Wow. What can you say to that. This is an artist who would go buy a bottle rack, sign his name to it and call it art, because he felt once he had removed the items functionality, it was then free to become art. Or who drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa and called it art.

I really can't say that I prescribe to this theory of art at all. It's one of those things that I can accept and appreciate even though it's not really for me. I guess it's just the liberal in me.

The next person we read about was musician John Cage. He makes very strange classical music, which I'm not sure I'd be all that into, but it's his theories on chance that I find fascinating.

A few quotes:

'In place of a self-expressive art created by the imagination, tastes, and desires of the individual artist, Cage proposes an art born of chance and the intermediacy, in which every effort is made to extinguish the artist's own personality; instead of the accumulation of masterpieces, he urges a perpetual process of artistic discovery in our daily life.'

Cage asked himself the question: What is the purpose of writing music (or engaging in any other artistic activity)? and answered with a restatement of his basic creed. The purpose, he wrote in 1957, is "purposeless play"; and he added: "This play, however, is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."

"An art that goes beyond individual expression."

"The true function of art in our time is to opne up the minds and hearts of contemporary men and women to the immensity of these changes, in order that they may be able to "wake up to the very life" they are living in the modern world."

I don't really know what any of this means, or where I am going with this entry anymore....just that I feel like I am at some sort of crossroads with my art. Don't know what I am doing or if there is even any point to doing it.

All of undergrad art programs are very self centered and focused other than technique, only on why YOU are making the art, what it means to YOU...they don't tell you anything, or teach you anything about who your prospective audience is, or if you are making anything that anyone will ever care about besides yourself.

And it's all very confusing and frustrating....and I guess this just means I am getting closer and closer to graduation. *lol*


Soundtrack: Tunnel of Love - Bruce Springsteen - 5.96 MB (cause you all put that info, I will too)