Thoughts About Art - Tumblr Posts

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. It really helps me see where you’re coming from.

As far as the gallery or museum itself is concerned, it IS a strange and alienating place. It’s weirdly reverent yet antiseptic, has an odd dedication to silence and in grad school, people more pretentious than me would refer to it with such terms as “the temple of art,” where one would demonstrate and exercise “the praxis.” 

I can definitely see where you’re coming from. It’s like a cult of space that expects everyone outside of their sphere to worship their obtuse god. With some artists, it’s worse than others, leading to a level of opacity that’s infuriating to behold.

For me, art of any kind is about communication. It’s about having a conversation with your audience, and playing games with them. It’s part game of pretend, and part mind-game. I can blather endlessly about art, so I’m gonna put the rest of it under a cut.

I got into making installations from a background halfway in theatre and halfway in comic books, video games, weird internet culture, and animation. I wanted to tell stories. The reason I’ve ended up here is because of experiences with art very similar to what you described: a feeling of alienation, or of being in another world.

One particular work was The Coral Reef by Mike Nelson. Every person I have ever met who has seen the work found it deeply horrifying on a visceral level, but I found it to be one of the most exciting things I’d ever experienced. It was like I was exploring the dark dens of alternate reality that you’d only find on conspiracy threads on places on Something Awful.  It felt more raw and more real somehow; the things around me existed in the flesh and my experiences were in direct reaction to them, rather than a two-dimensional abstraction of the thing.

As a medium, it was a very exciting way to communicate an experience or an atmosphere. There were more possibilities that I had felt no one had tried before, or that I hadn’t seen. The novelty of it excites me.

The stories I wanted to tell were about being isolated, alienated, or faced with the kind of uncanny that makes your ears ring, yet at the same time, I wanted people to be curious in spite of discomfort. I wanted to move people from one world to another by walking through a doorway. They’re dark stories, with monsters, and dark empty places, but instead of drawing a frightening or uncomfortable thing and trying to figure out ways to make it inspire that feeling, I decided to go at it from the other direction. Make the right environments, and people will imagine their own horrors.

I want people to create their own versions of those worlds. I don’t want my hand to be the hand of god. By imagining or experiencing something for themselves, people become owners of that thing. It also offers me to indulge my secret desire to be an evil mad scientist by conducting harmless little experiments in psychology and behavior. For me, studio art made a lot of sense. It’s already a strange little alternate dimension. I just shoehorned myself in there and since then, no one’s thrown me out.

That said, I find that the work I make doesn’t represent the vast majority of people who do installation and performance. The work’s a bit more sideshow and spectacle than some people would prefer. 

What it comes down to is that I would like to believe that despite making art to terrify, I am not a terrible person. I want to create an experience that someone will remember and consider later, ask questions about, and yes, possibly be afraid of if that’s their genuine response. The idea of the work not communicating frustrates me. The work somehow being tied eternally to me and my own motivations transcends frustration itself, because I am not the point.

Please, if you’ve time, I’d love to continue discussing this. It’s evident that you are a both a person who thinks about things and a person who enjoys art, so I’d like to know more about some of the qualities of the art that disturbs you or of the work you’ve enjoyed.  

Hey Marissa. Addressing someone online that you've never spoken to by their offline name feels like a tremendous breach of manners, but we'll go with it. I'm an installation artist who builds weird art in contemporary gallery spaces. I also teach at a university situated in the sunny shit-slice of hell that is the American Southwest. I follow you and your art because you seem like a sharp, funny, articulate, and critical person who makes interesting things. [part 1 of 6]

We also have a lot of interests in common, which makes you one of those people I’d love to talk to about art and other interesting things. That said, I’ve been trying to ignore for weeks now how much your post on contemporary art spaces really bothered me. Every time I do, something else reminds me and it comes roaring back. Maybe it’s the bit where you called it alien and inhuman. 

You’re entitled to the experience, and you certainly don’t own anyone an explanation for your opinion, but it felt really frustrating and dismissive. The contemporary art world definitely isn’t immune or protected from criticism; it needs more intelligent discussion and a lot less bad writing. However, I spend more time than seems fair justifying and explaining what I do to the public at large.

I’ve also spent years defending and advocating cartoons, illustration, and pop cultural art to the academic art world. I suppose it feels like a betrayal in a way. It’s an unfair jump to conclusions to think that because someone is smart and has similar interests, that those interests would extend to the kind of art another person is passionate about.

You’re a person who likes art, and I don’t know whether or not I’m overreacting without more discussion and context about what it is that you find exactly so chilling. It felt harsh the first time I read over it. I let it sit for a couple weeks and while it mellowed, it still hurts my feelings in a way I legit cannot figure out, other than the implication that my choice of art mode makes me inhuman. Can we talk about this? I need to know more, and I need clarification. 

Signed, an alien attempting communication via a man-shaped doll made of pink housing insulation. Footnote: the first time I read through the post, I somehow got the idea that you were talking about an installation of a fuzzy pink house MADE of insulation, which would be a superior piece of artwork in a lot of ways.

This is nice. I like this. Thank you for sharing your feelings.

To start: Your feelings are totally fair. While I’m capable of presenting my opinions gently, I like to take exaggerated stances for entertainment. If I say something that hurts someone’s feelings, that’s completely my responsibility. None of that is on you. I think what you’re seeing and feeling makes perfect sense.

So yeah, I wanna assure you that my view of fine art is secretly much more nuanced than I presented in this post. I like going to museums and I can name times when I, too, have been known to defend studio art from the common criticism of “my kid could have done that”.

If that didn’t help, here’s a longer “me me me”-type answer:

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