ARTiculation

“it is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. for the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.”

“art is useful, after all, aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.”

“the fact is, all western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. it is through this theory that art as such— above and beyond given works of art—becomes problematic, in need of defense. and it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory”

 “whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance…”

first, i wish to define art. theorists have been attempting to do this at least since greek philosophers, so i know this isn’t a simple task. art is, i believe, a concept often put forth in a form of media such as language or visuals. it is not something inherently beautiful or painterly, or writerly, or any other abstract concepts we might have attempted to attach to it.

i find myself contemplating art as I scroll through tumblr (a website I use a lot for some damn reason)[1]. i listen to music, view images meant to stand alone and others with captions that add something to the visual… but it also has an array of ironic, post-ironic, humor, and anti-humor posts and blogs. for example, below as a screenshot from a blog with the user handle “officialunitedstates”. i use screenshots instead of text to keep the web framing of the art, which can be important to the understanding or intention of a piece. however, i also caption the image with the text that is important to the context of this paper.

 

coworker: [shoveling cereal down my shirt] me: what are you doing coworker coworker: giving you feedback me: what coworker: im feeding your back, it’s feedback, this is an ill-conceived pun post by officialunitedstates me: who’s officialunitedstates, what are you even talking about coworker: i just broke the fourth wall in the context of a text post me: whats a text post what are you talking about coworker coworker: ive said and done too much accessed here

  

sometimes i find posts on the site beautiful, or intriguing, or amusing, or boring, or overused depending on the format. but i came across a post, originally published on the same anti-humor blog, that is especially intriguing.

 

anonymous asks, "what defines art?" officialunitedstates responds, "art is when you think about something even a millisecond longer than you are required to"   accessed here

 

while the post may or may not be ironic, i’ve really come to accept this definition of art (making, then, the post itself a thing of art).

now, i primarily use art in this piece to refer to visual art. this is not to put emphasis on visual art over other forms, but instead to simplify the scale of possible definitions and infinite interpretations.

art conceived to have “content” and to “say” something can be valuable. i think in this vein we should appreciate what the art’s purpose and intention is, and also the effects of the art on the artist and the viewer.

many individuals use art as a mode to interact with abstract concepts, thoughts, and experiences that are difficult to articulate in other forms.

but pieces without a specific intended “content”, such as with many abstract creations, both creating and viewing a piece brings forth an array of feelings, opinions, thoughts, experiences, and histories, as art does not exist in a vacuum. thus, even pieces without a direct content are representational articulations of the feelings and thoughts the piece provokes.

 

“the images in citizen were intended to work in a similar way. i was attracted to images engaged in conversation with an incoherence, to use your word, in the world. they were placed in the text where i thought silence was needed, but i wasn’t interested in making the silence feel empty or effortless the way a blank page would.” -- rankine, on her use of visual art in her book/poem, citizen.

 

i find myself at odds with susan sontag's piece, "against interpretation"  (whose quotations are presented without comment at the beginning of this text). i agree that not all art has to be interpreted or justified. but her argument against interpretation, i think, goes against the art i have myself used.

consider this -- museums are often quiet spaces. a gallery invites the viewer to view and consider the work, and thus the environment is often kept as quiet as possible. but art, if it is inherently an articulation, cannot be silent. even if art is intended to create a silence, as with claudia rankine’s use of visual art in citizen, then her intent is still to articulate a silence. and while galleries, even the one her poem creates in its own paper-bound space, are often meant to be revered in silence, are not silent in the range of emotions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences called forth by a piece.

rankine believes that she creates silence with the use of her images. however, the reader (or viewer, as the case may be with the images) is then trying to see what the art is trying to “say”. rankine might then agree with sontag – that trying to interpret a content, whether present or not, is a “nuisance” to her use of art within her poem. but i want to problematize this notion with one that sontag herself brings up: that art does not have to be “challenged” to “justify itself”.

in a previous essay of mine, “trigger warning: s i l e n c e”, i place art throughout the text. this art functions however the reader of the piece interprets it. i cannot wholly dictate the audience’s reactions to the piece. my intent was to give visual examples of something that, while can be articulated through words somewhat, is exploded with feelings, emotions, and experiences that are not articulated in the same way through words. this idea is present both in the comic and the poem i put in my piece.

the poem i wrote, while revealing in simply what is literally written, requires some interpretation in order to truly get out of it all of the potential things i could be saying – and, in fact, the piece is meant to be interpreted, as i explicitly do not articulate some of the trauma i have experienced, but allude to it for the reader to gather.

sontag says that, before theory, art was defined as “what it did”. so by both my proposed definition and her idealized definition, art’s function is, simply, to exist and do whatever art does. the effects that art has on people do not need to be justified. if the audience poses to question the art, to interpret, to experience the art in whatever ways happen, then art is functioning just as it is supposed to.

given that art is, an articulation or embodiment of a set of emotions, thoughts, and experiences -- an embodiment that differs amongst people and changes over time -- art's relation to silence goes beyond rankine's use. art, be it the creation or the consumption of it, is articulation and thus, the opposite of silence.