Monday, February 1, 2010

01 - Chris Tyler: What is Art?

We live for the FRAME (frame, baby).

The issue of the frame, I feel, is essential to an understanding of what "art" is in the first place. Indeed, anything - a Tintoretto, a urinal, a blank canvas, or even a bleeding Marilyn Monroe look-alike hanging in effigy - has the potential to be "art." However, in order to be understood as such, the artist must frame it in order to endow the image, object, performance, etc... with additional aesthetic import.

Go into your kitchen. Look at your refrigerator. It's simply a refrigerator. Now, force yourself to frame it mentally as a piece of art. It's now taken on an elevated status, it's suddenly "art" in its own right. Observe the symmetry, geometry, and overall aesthetic of the work. Your appreciation for it should unfold quite rapidly.

What makes Marcel Duchamp (or any artist, really) so remarkable is not his technical ability but his ability to explode our understanding of "the frame." Even someone like Leonardo DaVinci, an artist considered by many to be a true champion of the technical dexterity, is ultimately legendary not for his technical prowess but rather for his recontextualization within the fine world of advances made by Renaissance scientists and mathematicians. In his case, he exploded the frame that surrounded the more traditional painting styles of his contemporaries by incorporating newly enhanced modes of understanding and perception.

I think it's important, then, to look at a work of art and first attempt to understand exactly that which the artist is trying to frame. Without a concerted effort to comprehend intention and the history that the work is either renewing or rebelling against, the question of "good" versus "bad" art doesn't really mean very much at all.

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