My sudden thoughts at night before falling asleep, May 2010, Hue, Vietnam (this photo isn’t from Vietnam. It’s from a reclining Buddha in Ayutthaya, Thailand): To do Art History well, one needs to know history.
Maybe that was my problem. The more I read things like ‘Kowai E (Scary Pictures)’ and listen to things like ‘A History Of The World In 100 Objects’, I realise that these authors’ skill is in understanding the time and place from which the objects of their enquiry came from. They are able to inferring and conclude many things because they are able to situate these things within a historical and cultural context. Knowledge of these times and places give clues about the art works, and from there deeper understanding can be gained about the work itself.
So back in my first year and second year university days, I found art history a real chore. I found the topics interesting and I was intrigued by a lot of the art work we saw, but I could not, for the love of life, do visual analysis (ie Hoch’s montages use images that have been torn by hand, and this rough edge creates a sense of unease in the viewer, the tension is further enhanced by the way the woman’s eyes have been torn out, the colours are cool colours which gives the image a subdude and tiring tone etc etc). I still hate visual analysis for the sake of visual analysis (fair enough that first year art history requires students to do that), because it often seemed to bring too much back to the individual artist. There is plenty of validity in this approach, but I found this limiting and frustrating.
What I didn’t realise, until recently is that what I should have done was to take the step from the artist to the society s/he was working in (so the previous analysis should read more like: Hoch’s use of montage, which juxstaposes the mundane and crude mass produced print image with her organic painting style, is making a statement about the frantic pace of contemporary life in a society which is realising the limitations of modernity and industrialisation, and this point is further visible in the choice of muted and soiled colours she uses etc etc). Because obviously artists are from historical and cultural contexts too. And add more primary and secondary sources, like other historians, to paint an image of the world at large. It seems as though I was too caught up in the individual’s life and individualness, I forgot the ‘historical’ part of art history.
So in a nut shell, what I should have done was: take a piece of art work, describe it, situate it in a time and place, and then from that time and place make inferences about the work. You need to know about the time and place from which the art and artist came from to make sense of it. By understanding a bit about the context of the artwork, you can further think about what the significance of that art work is. It took me a while to realise this fact (because, you know, I’m not so tuned in on things like that and I’m not such an art freak).
So the other reason, probably, that I couldn’t make this mental leap was because back then I didn’t have such a good grip on history. My idea of history, while probably not so narrow compared to my peers, was still not very broad. I was only getting a sense of the fluidity of categories and ideas, of the movement of peoples and thoughts. I knew of certain events and people, of some ideas that have shaped our world and so on. And it’s only really recently, while on my travels, that I’ve really felt what this all means. What I mean is, I think I’ve got a much more grounded feel for human history.
And asking a 18 year old to be able to mix that historical understanding with visual art analysis is really asking a lot, I feel.
It might sound like I’m suggesting this is what art historians are trying to do, and that’s the approach they should take; a broad historical one in which art is one of the things that can be studied. That’s not what I’m saying, but I do feel this is more towards my preference. Like I said earlier, there is merit in studying more closely an individual artist’s biography and philosophy to understand art, and I find this is particularly useful for studying modern artists. Especially since there seems to be a case were the identity of the artist has become core to a piece of art work, the genius artist and the artist as an avant garde who challenges the established world order and ways of thinking and all of that. But my personal interest is in the large scale. The broadness of the world, the ideas that construct our world and realities, the transformation and migration of thoughts and world views, and how this is expressed and inherent in the visual artefacts that we create.
No comments:
Post a Comment