What is art

[beeline]

Gawd let's just not go down the what's-graffiti road again, please...

[lightningBugout]

Art is the moment of startling recognition when the hero sees a ghost in the mirror in a horror movie and the moment that follows when she turns around and realizes the ghost can not be seen outside the mirror. Also the thoughts and feelings that follow.

[Alaya]

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.”


William S. Burroughs

[MacCruiskeen]

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.”

William S. Burroughs

Related:

They stood under an electric pylon and looked across the city centre. The wind which stirred the skirts of their coats was shifting mounds of grey cloud eastward along the valley. Travelling patches of sunlight went from ridge to ridge, making a hump of tenements gleam against the dark towers of the City Chambers, silhouetting the cupolas of the Royal infirmary against the tomb-glittering spine of the Necropolis. "Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?"

"Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, "If you want to explain that I'll certainly listen."

"Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or a golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That's all. No, I'm wrong, there's also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given to ourselves."

"I thought we had exported other things -- ships and machinery, for instance."

"Oh, yes, we were once the world's foremost makers of several useful things. When this century began we had the best organized labour force in the United States of Britain. And we had John McLean, the only Scottish schoolteacher to tell his students what was being done to them. He organized the housewives' rent strike, here, on Clydeside, which made the government stop the landlords getting extra money for the duration of World War One. That's more than most prime ministers have managed to do. Lenin thought the British revolution would start in Glasgow. It didn't. During the general strike a red flag flew on the city chambers over there, a crowd derailed a tramcar, the army sent tanks into George Square; but nobody was hurt much. Nobody was killed, except by bad pay, bad housing, bad feeding. McLean was killed by bad housing and feeding, in Barlinnie Jail. So in the thirties, with a quarter of the male workforce unemployed here, the only violent men were Protestant and Catholic gangs who slashed each other with razors. Well, it is easier to fight your neighbours than fight a bad government. And it gave excitement to hopeless lives, before World War Two started. So Glasgow never got into the history books, except as a statistic, and if it vanished tomorrow our output of ships and carpets and lavatory pans would be replaced in months by grateful working men working overtime in England, Germany and Japan. Of course industries still keep nearly half of Scotland living round here. They let us exist. But who, nowadays, is glad just to exist?"

"I am. At the moment," said McAlpin, watching the sunlight move among the rooftops.

"So am I," said Thaw, wondering what had happened to his argument. After a moment McAlpin said, "So you paint to give Glasgow a more imaginative life."

"No. That's my excuse. I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don't."

-- Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, pp. 243-244.

Gray's own design for the book jacket of the first edition (1981).

"If a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively." That's a clever line, and a seductive one. But I think Gray is cleverer, and a better artist, than his protagonist Thaw - a fictionalized version of himself as a student who commits suicide in despair at the age of 23 after failing to complete a huge mural and then (maybe) killing a prostitute.

One of Thaw's big problems is that he can only "live there imaginatively", but his imagination is neurotic and consumes him. In the end, it destroys his ability to live there, or anywhere, really. Art is a substitute, or an attempted substitute, for the life he can't live. But life won't be fobbed off that easily, or not without exacting a heavy price. And it's certainly pretty hubristic to think that nobody inhabits a place imaginatively at all unless an artist has already done their imagining for them.

Still, after reading Gray's book I certainly inhabited that city more imaginatively, both while I was living there and now when I return on visits. Whenever I see the Necropolis or the Art School or the Mitchell Library, I think of passages in Gray's book, or they think me. That's certainly a gain, because the passages in question are rich and strange (and often funny too). But it's also possible to see it as a kind of loss, because someone else's imagination has taken up residence in my own, unshiftably. Shit, I've been colonised! My thoughts and feelings are no longer my own! (But were they ever?)

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (And that's a quote from Walt Whitman, of course. Yet another artist who helped shape, or colonise, people's imaginations.)

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I know this thread has finally started to be about What Art Is, and that's good, but I have to apologise to the whole board (and to Lorelai Gilmore) for the indefensible stance I took earlier in the discussion.

Lorelai tends to use her powers for evil... And she talks way too fast about too much even for those who know her. She may be the heroine of the piece, but it's clear that she will one day be nothing more than a more vocal and demanding version of Emily Gilmore...

Not that Lorelai is not cute and hot and lovely, of course. She most certainly is. In extremis! But she can talk, and does so, to excess.

On reflection, this was a patently ridiculous view to take, and I was allowing myself to be governed by emotion - I was still furious with Lorelai because, earlier that day, she had selfishly forced Rory to take part in the Stars Hollow dance marathon, attended by Jess, which led inevitably to Rory's breakup with Dean (though it had been inevitable for a while anyway).

If Rory hadn't been there, though, and totally exhausted by Lorelai's insitence on winning the danceathon, they might have been able to work through their issues.

Dean was never good enough for Rory anyway, of course, but he made her happy. Now she's gonna go with Jess, the Dickens-reading tearaway, and I (perhaps unfairly) blamed Lorelai for that.

What is it with everybody in Gilmore Girls (even Jess) being a bookish genius, though? It's like in LOST, where every single character's a Special Forces Ninja, even if they've spent their whole life as a box salesman or a physicist at Oxford.

Um, carry on, sorry.

.

@ Mac: Lanark is great. I haven't read the book though. But Lanark is great - and inhabiting it imaginatively is the job of every responsible citizen.

[MacCruiskeen]

@ Mac: Lanark is great. I haven't read the book though.

Tut-tut. That's worse than admitting to not having a TV licence.

But Lanark is great - and inhabiting it imaginatively is the job of every responsible citizen.

Well, man, shape up and do your duty.

Sherioushly, Ahab, it's an amazing book. Not his best, though: 1982 Janine is probably that, despite having one of the world's worst titles. It's also Gray's own favourite - not least, as he says, because the protagonist is "not a bloody artist." In fact he's a sadomasochistic technophilic Tory installer of security systems who almost drinks himself to death in a cheap hotel. The climax, the great puking scene, is nothing if not artfully rendered, though:

[AhabsOtherLeg]

@ Mac: Lanark is great. I haven't read the book though.

Tut-tut. That's worse than admitting to not having a TV licence.

Not got one of them neither, after their failure to broadcast the DEC Appeal during (and after) the Gaza conflict. Had a few threatening letters (one arrived the very day that my license expired, instantly demanding £1000! They can be quite efficient when it suits them!) but there've been no stormtroopers at the door yet, and I'm feeling quite confident they'll just leave me be (bad area - not worth the trouble - write it off as a tax loss or something).

But Lanark is great - and inhabiting it imaginatively is the job of every responsible citizen.

Well, man, shape up and do your duty.

Cheeky git. I thought I already was. Do you just mean read the book? I shall do that. Glasgow was already in books before Lanark, though, but I'm sure you know that. Alexander Trocchi's "Young Adam" briefly calls in there, and I'm betting William Hogg has at least paid a visit in his fiction or poetry. Plus there are the songs. And Taggart. And Still Game.

It's been imaginatively colonized for a long time. But you know that too.

(Sherioushly, Ahab, it's an amazing book. Not his best, though: 1982 Janine is probably that, despite having one of the world's worst titles. It's also his own favourite - not least, as he says, because the protagonist is "not a bloody artist.")

I hate to say this, but Lanark used to be in our high school library, prominently displayed and accessible (and it's a big book, you can't miss it) - and all we ever used to do was look at the line-drawn cover. Not out of artistic appreciation, either. No. Rather, it was because it had a naked lady's boobs on it.

Alasdair Gray would be proud, I'm sure.

Didn't know about his other books. I'm way behind the times on.... nearly everything.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Actually real art is magic that stops the universe collapsing on itself and holds cthulu and his minions in thrall in R'yleh.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Actually real art is magic that stops the universe collapsing on itself and holds cthulu and his minions in thrall in R'yleh.

ART!



NOT ART!

[Alaya]

Art?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Art?

You made me do this:



Sorry, couldn't resist. I do like that first building, though. What is it?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

His work is magic. Like Joe said.







Don;t really mean anything by that, btw. Just echoing the shapes. If he's writing in code, beyond the obvious, it's probably a lot deeper than the first things I saw.

ON EDIT: Oh, it's a Tory spewing. A Scottish Tory? I was probably right then.

Scottish Tories: Double-Plus Ungood.

[Alaya]

Ahab I'm so glad I made you do that, how funny.


http://www.arcspace.com/architects/zumt ... claus.html


That is a photo of something my ex threw together

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I'm really starting to like that building. It looks quite traditionalist, even historical, from the outside (maybe only from a distance) but the interior is pure Star-Trek-Borg-Cube crossed with ancient warrior's funeral pyre.

I thought it was a public chapel at first, but obviously not...



Not much seating, hehe.

[OP ED]

there is no such thing as art.