Made in Astoria gallery is pleased to announce an artist talk and Q&A by Paul McLean, in conjunction with his exhibition "VALUBL OBJX. The event will presented at Made in Astoria in historic downtown Astoria on Friday, August 25, 2023, at 5:30PM. The subject of the presentation is “Art is more than what you can say about it.” Paul McLean is an artist, thinker, writer and educator, whose theoretical focus is dimensional systems. McLean is based in Astoria.
EXHIBIT INFO:
“VALUBL OBJX”
Art by Paul McLean
Exhibit Dates: August 12-September 6
Opening reception: Saturday, August 12, 12 - 8pm
Presented by Made in Astoria | Confluence Gallery
Business Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 10AM - 5PM
1269 Commercial St
503-791-2759
astoria.handmade@gmail.com
Social Media: @made.in.astoria + @valubl
“Art is more than what you can say about it.”
By Paul McLean
1
I disagree with Walter Benjamin, who, long before he wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” wrote the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” “All that is asserted here is that all expression, insofar as it is communication of contents of the mind, is to be classed as language. And expression, by its whole innermost nature, is certainly to be understood only as language.” This assertion is remarkable. In a sense, it is a provocation. I would characterize it as a willful fallacy.
Benjamin’s argument ignores the shared record of human expression. Prior to any incidence of written language, we have prodigious examples of human expressive artifacts in the form of pictographs, petroglyphs and carvings. This sort of expressive means dates back tens of thousands of year prior to any known or documented linguistic expression. The phenomenon is a global one. From the Caves of Lascaux or Chauvet, to the rock walls of La Lindosa in the Amazon, ancient people applied themselves to the visualization of experience. China, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Russia, Scandinavia, the Americas - rock art is found in all these places. You can find many examples here, along the Columbia River. The sheer quantity of prehistoric expressive evidence suggests that the creative urge to render life in images and form anticipates language, as such — although one cannot know with certainty what other methods our ancestors used for communication, besides visualization. What we can say with certainty is that people all over the planet were capable of beautiful renditions of their environment, and the plants and creatures with whom they shared their world. As to their world views, we can mostly only speculate, although their aboriginal or indigenous descendants contend otherwise. The question is whether Civilization as such blinds itself to answers that Civilization itself does not produce. We can talk about this more, later.
One other point along these lines. In the Western traditions of Philosophy, and in our exploration of the world through language and ideas, expressed through text, there exists a fracture separating art and the Word. I don’t believe that describing this schism as a fundamental ideological prejudice is excessive. Plato, in formulating his Republic, expressed a very dim view of art and artists. He went so far as to entertain the idea of expelling us artsy types from his imaginary Ideal state. [An interesting take on this can be found HERE. — PJM] We can frame this conflict as a formal competition, between writers and philosophers versus art and artists. I would argue that the picture will win this competition, if that is what it really is, hands down. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” the old saying goes. If we consider the state of culture in our present day, can we not agree that the visual has obliterated the two-plus millennia dominance of the Word? Still and moving images drive our society today, in a way that renders Plato practically obsolete and invisible.
Benjamin quoted artist Paul Valery’s visionary essay, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” to introduce “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this text, Valery envisions the technology for delivering all kinds of communications “into our homes.” He essentially predicts the Internet. Valery contends that it would not be Art, but Music, that would be the preeminent mode of and vehicle for cultural ubiquity. He wrote, “Of all the arts, music is nearest to this transposition into the modern mode. Its very nature and the place it occupies in our world mark it as the first to be transformed in its methods of transmission, reproduction, and even production. It is of all the arts the most in demand, the most involved in social existence, the closest to life, whose organic functioning it animates, accompanies, or imitates.” In “The Age of the World Picture,” philosopher Martin Heidegger writes, “To be ‘new’ belongs to a world that has become picture.” In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger wrote, “Form and content are the commonplace concepts under which anything and everything can be subsumed.” Heidegger thought, wrote and lectured incisively and influentially (for me) about the Thing, art and technology, and their relation to Being and Modernity. Eventually, he came to prefer poetry as a primary means by which what is most valuable in humanity can be expressed in our problematic present and future. I am fond of this verse from Poetry, Language, Thought’s “The Thinker As Poet:”
When the wind, shifting quickly, grumbles
in the rafters of the cabin, and the
weather threatens to become nasty. . . .
Three dangers threaten thinking.
The good and thus wholesome
danger is the nighness of the singing
poet.
The evil and thus keenest danger is
thinking itself. It must think
against itself, which it can only
seldom do.
The bad and thus muddled danger
is philosophizing.
Which brings us round to what I have to say, here, in the midst of VALUBL OBJX, my exhibit presented at Made in Astoria.
2
I imagine a through-line connecting my art to the visual expression of our ancient predecessors, who carved and painted on stone, who created recognizable forms in wood and clay, who decorated these forms, and their own bodies. Our ancestors did so with genius, I dare say, and some of their expressive, creative techniques and tools are still viable today. In my aesthetic choices for the VyNIL Cycle of artworks, mostly paintings and drawings to date, I intentionally excluded the explicit, the narrative element, the overtly representational, the contingent reference, symbols and so on. In short I avoided as much as I could, the force and dynamics of language, in an effort to emphasize the potential of the strictly visual. My platform, for enabling a particular kind of viewer experience, is by design, limited to the extensive means provided by painting, as a post-contemporary medium. “For choice,” I might add, at the risk of being cryptic.
Now, it is true, that I had ideas in mind about a subject matter for the VyNIL Cycle. Throughout my creative life, I have been primarily focused on dimensional systems. Without delving deeply into this topic (“dimensional systems”), in my talk, I will share some of the theoretical concerns that impact the VyNIL artworks, such as those on display in VALUBL OBJX. I was curious as to whether or not it was possible to make paintings that reflected the nature of information flow and exchange in the post-contemporary period. What do I mean by post-contemporary? For our purposes, it is not so important. Suffice to say, I am referring to this historical moment, for which contemporary art has proven itself insufficient to the task of expressing our condition within the technology matrix that has in large measure consumed our daily existence and dominates our conventional exchanges. Whether we are talking about economics, politics, culture, or our individual relations with each other, technology is to a great extent the prime mediator of exchange.
What are the characteristics of ubiquitous media and network technology? Its infrastructure is mostly hidden from our view, or camouflaged. Its key feature is speed, and more, speed’s acceleration. Without question the phenomenon is global, and simultaneously local. To understand the technology is to recognize its necessities, such as electricity. The project of technology is rooted in code. Chunks of code activate technology, and the connection between software and hardware is fundamental. No less basic is the human element to which technology attaches (“wetware”), in a triangular configuration. If one wishes to comprehend the drive to AI, artificial intelligence, one must recognize that the motivation behind this new-ish development is the reduction of importance in the human aspect in this configuration, if not its complete elimination. Which is why there is a natural widespread social resistance to the concept of AI, as it is expressing itself in emergent technology. In and through my art, I am conscious of these factors and phenomena, and am working out some of my own reflections and realizations about them.
Art, however, is not just thinking about something, and neither is it simply a mechanism for visualizing the reactions of the mind to what the artist perceives is happening in the world. When I sit at the easel to create art, one of my most important objectives, a prerequisite I think for making great art, is to clear the mind, prior to making a mark on the canvas, panel or paper. Why? Because the act of painting is a physical act. I do not mean to argue that art is only physical — it is decidedly more than that. I would argue that making art requires a specific balance or harmony among body and mind/spirit for the purposes of artistic creation. I conjoin Mind + Spirit this way to acknowledge Hegel. I think there are many human activities that require such harmonious conjunctions of these facets of being (Mind + Spirit). These include work, sport, lovemaking, cooking, building, to name but a few. What do they have in common? They all derive quality due to the level of craft they demonstrate. In excellence, they all arise from the refinement of their conceptual root. In some aspects or scenarios, they conduct emotion, and aspire to beauty. Finally, they manifest as a product of love, itself. I would suggest that Love is ineffable, but to do so would be to gloss over how persistent we are to express Love, to communicate it, not just in deed or action, but through the Word, in poetry, for instance, but also through music, art, and a million other things, including our own bodies. In short, art is complicated, as are we humans.
3
Art is more than what you can say about it, which is true also of Love, and of Life itself. Which is not to say that art is not worth talking about. Quite the opposite. Art inspires discussion, or discourse, if you will, and this is one of its basic, if not simple, functions. Whether this has always been the case, dating back to 40,000BC, we cannot know. It is my own notion that what we think of as art today and for a long time is not really the same as what our ancient forebears were doing. Whether we are talking about what Michelangelo, van Gogh or Pollock did, we are still describing something relative, but different to what the anonymous (to us today) petroglyph or pictograph was doing. What is the difference? I would suggest this is a wonderful point at which a meaningful conversation about human expression and creativity can begin. As a 20th and 21st Century (AD) American artist of Celtic descent who paints in the Western tradition, I am resolutely situated in my current aesthetic circumstances, and fairly comfortably so. In other words, I have a life, more behind me than in front of me, that has been dedicated to pursuit of artistic success, even greatness, a statement I make with as much humility as I can muster, because success and greatness are both relative, that is, subject to change, and incredibly difficult to obtain and maintain. Art, including my own, has a direct correlation to Time, to the times, and the artist’s disposition in his conditions of internal and external reality. “Contemporary” in that sense is always a useful descriptor for the artistic enterprise. For me, the best art materializes both the times and the conditions of reality, within and outside ourselves, precisely as possible, because in this facet of its potentialities, art is an important conveyance for us. When Art does so (precisely conveys our Time, and our situation in it), Time is — to put it poetically — expressing itself through the artist, with us. And then, what is behind Time and the artist (and art, and us), namely the presence of both the Infinite and the finite, is harmonized, visibly, as color and form. Or color in form.
This is the difference between art and poetry or music, Word and sound, as well as thought or idea. Initially, we respond to color and composition, which is to say form, viscerally, which is to say, physically. At that moment, our interpretive complex is activated. We search for the familiar, in form, and our capacity to discern one color from another is associated with emotions, but also with the socially and intellectually conventional. We are used to certain contexts and applications for color. For instance, when Green means Go, and Red means Stop, and Yellow means Caution, and so on. In art, the artist has some leeway with the applied convention, and meanings can be flipped, or otherwise altered, within the scope of art. Seeing, on the cognitive side, becomes in art a type of non-competitive puzzle or exercise. Art can be framed as a sophisticated game, a type of play with its own rewards or penalties, in the domain of the emotional (mind), but this is only half-right. Because art in the end is not about winning; it is about what survives loss and gain, and why one thing survives and another does not. Art then potentially operates both inside and outside the intellectual, touching registers of feeling that normally are distinct from thinking abstractly, about things - like "mortality” - or whatever else. For example, art can come across as either childlike or wise, and sometimes both simultaneously. “To what end?” we should wonder. In this subtle facet of artistry, totality of life can be compressed in a singular persistently instantaneous experience, within the unifying context of time. However, to derive pleasure from art, to recognize its unique beauty, the viewer (and the artist) ought not to need to know anything extra in order to engage with art on its own terms, i.e., color and form. Art, in this respect, has its own particular mechanics. The rest of art, its immateriality, is fine with being held in reserve, as a complement to the visceral effect of art, that moves through vision. The artist and art demonstrate in this combinative exchange the proficiency of the maker to achieve a direct connection with the viewer, at the levels of both the physical and intellectual. We call this technique, but it is more than technical. It is inherently human.
Communication, as such, is an abstraction of this process. We can pronounce that language is a more precise vehicle for human-to-human transmission, but is this true? In a hierarchy of sensuality, we might argue that musicality is the more profound medium for connectivity, but to do so ignores the ambivalence of sound, its circularity. Direction and focus are the qualities to which art bonds our attention. I can close my eyes and experience sound more fully, and that is a clue. Language requires literacy. Art can be experienced fully without thought, absent speech. Again, a clue. Painting has its obvious limitations. A blind person cannot receive art in its totality, withal the tactile aspect of art might convey. Art must be seen to be believed, which distinguishes it from articles of Faith. The subjectivity of art, that over-worn trope, is only relevant in the interpretation of the visual fact of art as object, not in the object itself, which exists as itself, beyond or outside the interpretive complex, and its desire to convert everything to a utilitarian function. Art is a free and radical Thing, opening to immateriality. As such it can be an object of wonder, and much else aside, such as a form of giving. The full range of human response, from despair to awe, can be encapsulated in art, and we know this because it has been done. In truth there are no two artworks that are identical, or each of them and both of them could not be art, by definition. The question of reproduction is therefore irrelevant. What is unique about art and what is common has to do with a much more convoluted exchange between the object and subject, which encompasses both the work of art itself and the viewer. The artist is naturally, inextricably linked to both, and this is an indicator of the artist’s true value. Binaries are insufficient, which is why art is so resistant to recursion. To say that the artist is the medium for art resonates, because on more than one level, the artist must act as a facilitator for not just the art, but for our experience of it. No dealer or curator is an adequate substitute here. Artificial “art” is not art, because it is bereft of its human element, and therefore its capacity for truth, as far as we are capable of ascertaining it (truth) at any given time. [“Scraping” data is not creative. It is more like theft.] This is a critical distinction, especially at such a time when truth and reality do not conform easily. The post-contemporary is just such a time, yet within this tumultuous and precipitous point in human history, when human history itself is questionable, art is possible, and proof of itself. No additional words, like “simulation” or “simulacra” are necessary for art’s verification, now. Which perhaps was always the case, anyway.
- PJM
August 22, 2023
REFERENCES
Walter Benjamin:
Paul Valery: “The Conquest of Ubiquity”
Plato: The Republic (article at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry on “Plato’s Aesthetics;” see Section 2.3 Republic 10: copy-making)
Martin Heidegger:
G. W. F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit
