Hello dear readers and subscribers.
Is the content of the artwork more important than the art itself?
It's a question we have asked in a video earlier this year and many people would agree that a good artwork should be able to stand alone and that if we need a wall text or an explanation of theory to justify the work, that it's just an excuse to uplift bad art.
However, today I want to challenge this.
Art can indeed be immediate impact, immediate effect, but art is also, in many cases, context.
There is great power in context, and art can really play with context and do things that one cannot do through mere visual effects with direct impact.
Therefore, in this video, i want to critically challenge this danger of myth that art needs to stand alone because, let's be honest, standing alone um, that would depend from viewer to viewer.
For some, a conceptual artwork like one and three chairs by Joseph Kossuth can be experienced as something aesthetic.
The way it is arranged.
It is compositionally being put in all the right places, whereas others would think it lacks skill and aesthetic principles.
Furthermore, those with an understanding of platonian theory would see the link, of course, between the categories the artist refers to the id, the object and the image, whereas those who are not familiar with platonian theory well, they might wonder what the hell is this about.
So the context is not only dictated by the artwork and the artist, or when it is created.
It also depends on the context that the viewer's frame of reference has to offer, which can drastically shift the ability of an artwork to stand alone or not.
Others would say a rotco is not able to stand alone and that we need the explanation about what these large planes of color mean, even though a rotco painting is direct impact, if nothing else.
But one can actually say this also about a lot of old master paintings.
If we see the still life by Bruegel, we can appreciate it because it's very nicely painted.
But if you learn about the context, that all these flowers we see here that are flourishing are actually flowers that flourish in different times of the year.
So it's a bouquet that could never exist, but that the artist, due to his botanical knowledge and his skill to document and depict that knowledge in a single image, makes of course the artwork a lot more intriguing.
So why would it be a problem for contemporary art to use context or existing knowledge so that people can achieve a deeper understanding and appreciation of an artwork or of a particular topic of life?
Let's discuss a first artwork, and I think this artwork, especially considering the very troubling events lately, is perhaps one of the most relevant and important contemporary artworks of our era.
If we have a look at the artwork as a standalone piece and we have no information or context whatsoever, we see a video of a man with a leaking can walking through a Middle Eastern landscape.
However, this isn't just any walk this person is performing.
He's actually walking with this leaking can on the border between Israel and Palestine, where there has been a tremendous war going on, of course lately, a very complex and troublesome conflict.
So Francis Alice in this artwork draws that contested border between Israel and Palestine, that green line.
That also has a very historical problematic issue, because the green line that was drawn on the map, which was a map in scale with a green marker of three to four millimeters wide, is actually a land of almost 80 meters wide.
So of whom is this land?
What Francis Allais does so strongly here, it's a very poetic act by making this line tangible.
And we also see not only this historically drawn line that he walks that draws back to 1948, but we also see the lingering effects of that line today.
This poetic action making this abstract border momentarily visible is of course very, very poignant.
The paint cuts through contested neighborhoods, military zones, refugee areas and private gardens, even exposing actually how arbitrary the line is on paper and in lived reality, and how it was imminent to be contested and resulted in decades of conflict.
The Green Line was unstable from the start.
A diplomatic solution that was no solution at all.
Especially today in the face of relentless war images.
The famine, the destruction, the hatred.
And without resorting to a polarizing or decrying discourse, Alice captures the problem in this one very poetic act.
Another great example can be found in the work of Luc Teumans.
Luc Teumans, who is arguably the most important figurative painter of his generation, in fact, and the artwork numbers.
We actually see not so figurative paintings.
We see these monumental paintings of numbers isolated on this very trembling dark background.
And if the artwork needs to stand alone, some can actually be impressed by their monumentality and by the typical restlessness in the brushwork of Teumans and also the abundance of color in this seemingly monochromatic painting.
Others will think it is not able to stand alone that there is this elitist theory behind it, because all we see is a number on a painting and therefore it is a bad artwork.
However, the context of these paintings is that they were created in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing and people were dying every single day and every morning, especially here in Belgium.
On the news, the deaths were being communicated, the numbers were being shared and what Teumans does so so ingeniously here with this series, and I think this is a very underrated series.
I don't think Teumans is an underrated painter, but this is a very underrated series in my opinion, one of my favourites of his work.
He depicts these numbers at a human scale because behind those numbers there are actual people and when dealing with these numbers we can deal with those statistics in a very insensitive manner.
It doesn't touches that badly.
It doesn't feel as harsh, even though the reality of the people behind those numbers is very harsh.
Surviving chances are being presented in percentages.
Can you imagine how the lives of people being put into percentages, how dehumanizing that is, and also how these numbers also form a certain countdown?
So there is this very unsettling and threatening undercurrent in this painting, which is very poignant.
Instead of going for a very easy to consume and stand alone approach.
To discuss covet 19, for instance, nicely painted scenes of peoples with masks, kovit 19 masks, or people in isolation that would be very easy to consume and therefore it could stand alone.
Instead, three months goes for a very refined approach that is actually a lot more powerful and that also I visited that show had a much stronger impact, which is then, of course, is a personal thing, because that's a personal experience, but you can see how these artworks do not necessarily stand alone, but when having, for instance, with the year it was made or the title or the location it took place, that we can start to think and actually quite easily for some, can get to what the work is about.
You might also think well Julien, why are you once more showcasing the art by Belgium artists?
It's actually because I wrote a book in the past 18 months about Belgium, contemporary art artbe, and it actually uses the typical top list approach that I use for many of these videos here, but applied to Belgium.
And this has been a project that has perhaps taken the most time of me this year.
So I'm very happy that the book is out and launched before the end of the year.
The book is in Dutch, so if you would like to purchase this book, I can understand why it is difficult.
I will leave a link for those who are a Dutch speaking or perhaps be on the very nice coffee book table.
It also consists of 430 images.
The publisher did a great job in terms of the graphic design.
They're one of the world's best when it comes to graphic design of art books or books as an alternate space for art, or if you simply want to support me, then i would greatly appreciate, of course, any support.
I will link to it in the description below.
Art point be definitely another milestone for me personally and a book that I'm very, very proud of.
I very much hope that you enjoyed this brief discussion with two iconic works of art of our age about the power of context in art.
Feel free to watch our video on creating and explaining your art, which is actually a conversation with the artist RJ Kurion, also the founder of New Crits and Next.
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Bye!
