If you ask me in a formal interview session to define art, I have a ready answer: art is philosophical statement, with layers of meaning built up through references and visual puns interacting with each other. A true work of art is entirely new: in visuals, in materials, in ideas. It adds to the world. It is not pretty pictures. Pretty pictures do not change the world.
If you ask me, that’s what I’ll say.
But I don’t really believe it.
I’’m learning that beneath words, beneath science or philosophy or any other explanation, there is beauty and mystery and wonder. And that’s where everything begins. I know this in the way explaining an eclipse does not calm my caveman belly when the light starts to fade. In the daytime, when the light is constant and clear, maybe I want ideas. And on bright, noisy, public days maybe beauty and mystery don’t feel like valid reasons for making anything. But it’s not true. Inspiration and creation belong to twilight, moments of low light when I’m not entirely sure if what I’m seeing is familiar or unknown. I don’t want to explain that any more than I want to explain the punchline to a joke.
I’ve been drawing for a few years now, exploring this relation between seen and unseen, clarity and obscurity, trying to find the nameless unease underneath the images. Pretty pictures may not change the world; it may not even be the job of an artist to change the world but rather to strengthen our connection to it. Art can remind us what lies beneath the questions that motivate us to look for answers. I want to try to capture a sense of uncertainty, for myself and my viewers. And that’s where I am now.
But that’s not where I’ve always been. My ready definition of art was once an iron-clad belief. There have been other bodies of work, made for outside voices and outside eyes, works of reference and philosophy, with as much time spent on research as on creation, great soulless works that I was sure would change the world. And, although at the time I found them so exciting I would jump out of bed in the morning and work all day, I look back on them now as I would a photo album of my middle school haircuts.
And that, really, might be the meaning of art, or at least of art-making: the ever changing idea of what art is, the looking back with embarrasment on past opinions. What I make today is not what I will make tomorrow (God help me if I’m painting Ben-Day dots until I die). What I make tomorrow should be a natural progression: a blend of all my previous art along with a violent reaction against all my previous art. When I struggle to answer such a worn-out question as “What is art?” the answer might just be the struggle itself.
