I Don't Get It
How many times have you looked at a piece of artwork or an artist's installation and said, "Huh?" As an art world insider who's supposed to know better, I do it on a regular basis. Usually my initial confusion is dispelled after spotting a few referential clues, but every once in a while, the lights never come on. My personal bête noire is any artist who bases his or her work on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. (And if you want to know about Lacan, you'll have to look it up for yourself--I probably wouldn't explain it correctly. Freud and Jung, no problem.) Anyway, it happens to all of us and there are those who contest that artists owe it to the public to make their work accessible/understandable or present it in some kind of dialogue-enabling context. There are also those who feel that it's up to the presenting institution to provide explanatory interpretation. And then there are those who say that the artist and the institution are responsible for nothing more than creating and presenting art according to their own aesthetic and ideological policies. If you don't get it, too bad. It's an interesting problem and I think every stance has merit, depending on the circumstances. In terms of accessibility, there are well-known examples of inscrutable art and some broad categories of incomprehensibility, including:
What makes this art? This is one of the hardest questions to answer when you're faced with a classroom of undergraduates wanting to know why a big rectangle of blue paint with one red dot is hanging in one of the most respected art museums in the world. Minimalism gets them every time. The problem is that minimalist canvases can seem somewhat facile in the midst of an energetic or evocative grouping of pop or ab-ex works. The best example of the power of minimalism was Ellsworth Kelley's paintings exhibited en masse in New York earlier this year; the purity and strength of reductivist concepts appeal most when you're surrounded by them. Otherwise, it's time to trot out the jargon of individual choice and make the point that almost every school of art-making for generations has, at one time or another, been in the "what makes this art" category. And the fact that a painting can arouse such challenges--even to the point of rage--is itself a heartening indication of its capacity for engagement. The time to worry is when people just glance and turn away, which brings us to the next category.
Art with hidden or obscure references: Sometimes you simply must have
additional knowledge provided outside the mere presence of the work. When
I first saw Mary Kelly's Corpus series at CEPA Gallery, I was uncertain
of why certain images and words were linked and was aided by explanatory
text which pointed out Kelly's debt to the mother-infant relationship
theory of (quelle horreur!) Jacques Lacan as well as some Foucaultian
analysis of human sexuality thrown in for good measure. The works were
initially appealing though somewhat text-laden, but the experience was
greatly enriched by this background information. I don't think there's
anything wrong with that. For some reason, it's often considered a no-no
to provide too much reading in a gallery or museum, but this choice should
be left to the viewer. Often it's fun to just look at the works and then
take the hand-out with you and read it afterwards. And a good exercise
for the memory.
Interactive Art: This is a tragic paradox. Some art, designed specifically to engage the viewer, has the opposite effect. Audience members see that they have to do something--it's often not clearly explained what that is--and walk away rather than embarrass themselves trying to figure it out and possibly doing the wrong thing or maybe even breaking something. This is often the case with computer installations, peep-show type constructions, or anything that has buttons or knobs you need to manipulate. I think the main problem here is that, for very good reasons, you're not supposed to touch art. So as a trade-off for having drilled that lesson so well into the heads of our audiences, museums and galleries need to be especially loud and clear when there's something you can touch. Getting back to our first question of whether it is the artist's job to keep his or her audience in mind, I think most of us would say no, except that artists should at least try to get their work in front of an audience. One or two people may end up having a cathartic experience with a piece of art that 100 others wouldn't look at twice. Without delving too deeply into the thorny issue of public art, it's wonderful that some artists specialize in making artworks that can appeal to thousands daily--what's not to like about an Oldenburg/Van Bruggen giant teddy bear?--but the success of these projects depends more on the concept behind the object than wanting to please the public. The real job of artists and institutions is convincing audiences that figuring it all out is half the fun.
Artvoice, 1997