A BIG STEAMING BOWL OF ART

In Lily Tomlin's one woman show Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe aliens come to Earth searching for .. well .. signs of intelligence. Judy the bag lady argues to the aliens that humanity's ability to create art designates us as having true intelligence. "What is this art?" they ask her. She reaches into her shopping cart and pulls out a can of Campbell's tomato soup "This is soup" she says. Then she pulls out a copy of Andy Warhol's print of a can of Campbell's tomato soup and says "This is art" She pushes her two hands back and forth "Soup, art, soup, art .."

Collette and I recently sojourned through the streets of Toronto in search of art; it was Nuit Blanche, which I posted about earlier. This "festival of art" was one of those events that stretched the definition thereof. We are not talking just paintings and sculpture here. We are talking huge "installations" some of which invited interactivity. One of these installations was a lighted drop ceiling draped over an existing alley way

So what they ended up with was ... a really bright alley way. The artists had staged garbage around but our nephew Jeff told us he wandered into this work of art and didn't realize that it was art till he came out the other side and saw the sign.

Was it art? I suppose some sort of aesthetic was involved, things had been staged but from a purely visual sense, it really did little for me. I found myself on my usual high ground and stood up there with my camcorder, taking in the scence. I liked the reactions it envoked, I liked watching people walk through it and discuss the experience ... is shared experience art? Is it art when a bunch of people gather, take in the experience and say "This is art"?

Several years ago the Ontario College of Art exhibited the work of one of their graduates. A young woman had purchased a 40 pound cube of chocolate and a 40 pound cube of lard, took a bite out of each, and placed them in a gallery space. Was it art? The young woman contended that the pieces themselves were not art but the fact that she literally "put herself into them" made it art. So, the chocolate and lard was not the art, the teeth marks were not the art, but the biting was the art, or was it the woman's need to make art .. made it art.

Another Nuit Blanche "installation" was called Sketching Beauty, also hosted by the Ontario College of Art.

This was a project where anybody who wandered in was given drawing materials then all the artwork was assembled both inside and outside of the college; art created out of art. So you had all these individual works of art, all created entirely independently, to the taste of the individual artist then assembled by seperate artists in a seperate space ... was the art created by all those folks sketching? By the assemblers? Or by the people who came up with the concept in the first place. Was the art the final product, or the act of creation itself.

I once saw a piece of "video art" where a guy stood in front of the camera and bounced a tennis ball off the palm of his hand ... for an hour. One long unbroken, unedited shot. Where is the art in this project? The skill of the guy to bounce a tennis ball for that long, the fact he thought to record it, the fact that it was presented in a gallery ...

One of my favorite Nuit Blanche installations was the Cocoon Garden erected in this tiny little public square behind a market off of Queen St West.

The artist created their cocoons by wrapping sheets of plastic around chicken wire forms. They hung lights inside, some flickering, some static. So the cocoons themselves were art, pieces of sculpture fairly easily related to. The cocoons were mostly hung in the trees but there was also one mostly hidden under a park bench.

The cocoons were obviously carefully placed in the trees, I'm sure that it was not random. So there was art in that, grouping and placing all those individual cocoons so that they became one piece. Inside every cocoon were little boom boxes, and at certain intervals, they would activate and play snippets of jingles and radio commercials. I will straight up admit I didn't really get the message here ... what was the point of the commercials coming out of the cocoons? I liked the way the jingles were cut together but I wasn't able to grasp the big picture (now that is an unintentional pun when discussing art ... "the big picture") But I wondered about it .. and perhaps that is the art.

Out on College Street an artist had created this enormous installation called Waterfall, created entirely out of recycled plastic water bottles.

There was an obvious environmental message here, using man made materials to approximate a natural situation. For me, the message, so obvious, did not make it art. The enigmatic message of the cocoons seems more artful to me; perhaps that is my own ego saying "If I can't figure it out, it must be really really creative" But then, I couldn't figure out the message of the partially eaten lard and honestly, that didn't seem artful to me at all. There was something there, in the cocoons; the rest of the installation had a kind of integrity so I just made the assumption that the inclusion of the sound bites had integrity as well.

I have seen lots of things called "art" that I didn't understand and just thought it was bullshit. I have also seen art I "didn't get" but felt there was something there. I think that word "integrity" has something to do with it, another word would be conviction. I don't have to get it, I just need to feel that there is something to get ... how that comes about I don't know if I can totally explain.

I can pull out two examples from the film world: Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The Oliver Stone movie is certainly "arty" Different frame rates, back projections, colour schemes, flashback, flash forwards, radical camera angles and camera movement, off kilter art direction .... and I just think it's a piece of crap. Why? Because it was just arty for the sake of art. Like many Oliver Stone movies he had a point to make .. in fact, he had about 500 points to make and he wanted to shoe horn them all into this movie. There are so many techniques used here I really sense a lack of conviction. John Ford or Akira Kurosawa didn't need back projections and cartoons to make their points, they used the beautiful, simple, powerful langague of a perfectly framed shot, a good actor and an understated score. All of Stone's furious activity was not art; it was more like camoflauge, disguising the fact that he really had very little to talk about at all.

The Life Aquatic is one of those movies that I really like but find it difficult to reccomend to people; it's weird. On the surface it is a parady of Jaques Cousteau but there is more going on here; what that is I am not exactly sure. There is family stuff, relationship stuff, stuff about knowing your role, stuff about the importance of art over science, a lot of stuff about the artifice ... I don't get all of it. But I accept that something is there. Why? Because there is an integrity to the movie, the creators had a plan and they followed it even if it left behind.

In the Leonard Cohen song Take this Waltz he has a line that says "take this with the clamp on its jaws" I have no idea what the hell that means but I know it means something. Largely because it's from Leonard Cohen and I can't think of better example of artistic integrity.

Nuit Blanche had an installation at Dundas Square that, at first blush, did very little for me at all.

The artist was up in this watchtower with a big search light that he would focus on people in the square below. The installation had the title of Fifteen Seconds, a reference to Any Warhol's concept that in our modern age, everyone would have their fifteen seconds of fame (interesting how many Warhol references there are in this post) I scoffed at this at first, but as I think about it now, I am wondering about the concept of art being what people make of it. Was the guy in the tower art or were the people upon whom he shone his light?

You can watch Natural Born Killers and think it is the greatest piece of cinematic art ever, you could listen to that Leonard Cohen song and think it is dreck. Art is interpretive. Art has no existance without us, the audience. We experience the art, we access it with our minds, our hearts, our emotions, we make some kind of value judgement, we in that moment just for ourselves, decide whether or not it is art.

At the end of Lily Tomlin's play, Judy the bag lady comes back out on stage. She takes out the can of soup, she take out the Warhol print, looks at them for a moment, then puts them back in her cart. Then she looks straight out at the audience. She puts her hand to her breast "Soup" she says, then points out to the audience "Art"