So, this week has been rather... uneventful perhaps? Apart from many tests we have had and the great success I've been getting on most of my subjects, there's really not a lot of things that have been intresting this week. The one thing that has captured by attention lately has been... art. I know that art may be considered as a shallow thing to speak about, since many people think that art just depends on the person grabbing a pencil and drawing something worthy of being displayed on the National Gallery or something, but it is much more than that. I remember that last year we did an activity with Mrs. Williams on the question "What is art?" (in other words a TOK question). To be truthful, it was really difficult for us to come up with a precise definition to it, because there really isn't only 1 deffinition for it at all. Every single person views art in a different way, just like a person might interpret a song as meaning one thing, while the other person might disagree and say that it could mean another. In other words: there's no fixed meaning to it.
I remember how a few months ago (around the start of July), when Ale and I went on the exchange program to Cheltenham, we were taken to see London and I chose to go to some of the art galleries in there to take advantage of my visit in a good way. We first got to visit the National Gallery, which pretty much has what is thought as "traditional art" (in other words artists such as Van Gogh, Matisse, etc.) However, the second art gallery we visited was the Tate Modern, and quite frankly I can say that this one impressed me more. Even though the quality of the National Gallery's collection was pristine and very detailed and traditional, the Tate Modern's collection contrasted this strongly. For one part, on a side of the building there was literally a room which displayed daily life objects on glass stands with the question we had seen at school: "What is art?"
That display really got me thinking of what could be thought of as art and on what aspect of an artwork was more important: the message or the technique. Some of the artists there might have seemed as if they had no real technque at all, only meaning to their work. However, these past few weeks I've been studying artists that similarly didn't follow the norm of what was considered as art back then and that were risktakers and innovators in the way that they showed their messages. When I tried to immitate a work of art done by Robert Rauschenberg, even though it seemed like a messy mixture of paints and strokes, I found it really challenging to imitate it. That only showed me that even artists that have really simple or messy artwork do have technique, as all of the brush strokes and colours they use are there for a reason: I even think it takes more skill to do a very chaotic looking piece of artwork and managing to retain its meaning.
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| Robert Rauschenberg's Lichen AKA the artwork I tried to imitate, but that I found out that it was more challenging than what it seemed at first sight. |
So now because all of this, I can say that art really depends on the creator of the piece, but it equally depends on the viewer, as the person who made the work has a different way of thinking than any other person in the world. For one person this work (left) might mean how nature is being destroyed, for others it may be a visual resume of the history of humankind, others could describe it as how the painter feels inside and other people could simply dismiss it as a big array of colours and prints with no meaning at all but only with an aesthetic value.
Songs currently on: Life Is Looking Up - Forgive Durden, All The Right Moves - One Republic, New Divide - Linkin Park
* Picture of Robert Rauschenberg taken from link - artwork belongs to Robert Raushchenberg, "Lichen", 1972
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