This was the title of a lecture we attended today run by The Celtic Learners Network, a private initiative set up by a small group to complement what's provided by the local authority's adult education classes and the national museum service. We'd just got back from a few days in London, visiting visual art exhibitions and theatre performances, so the timing was perfect. Mair Jones, a young art historian took us back to where contemporary art began; at the invention of photography.
Artists looked for different subject matter-the challenge was to create something that a photograph couldn't. We journeyed superficially through Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and made a pit stop in 1910 with Marcel Duchamp, who she dubbed 'The Godfather of Conceptual Art'. He placed 'found objects' in galleries to shock the establishment and challenge their perception of what is art. His 'Fountain'(a urinal) being one of his found pieces, possibly pulled off the wall of the gallery's toilet wall or one waiting to be found in a builder's yard. The craft of making was less important than the idea behind it, which presumably was his need to pee while waiting for visitors to his launch.
Then the Surrealists took the question forward, reversing our expectations and incorporating their dreams and fantasies. Art becomes more of a puzzle. Merit Oppenheim's tea cup, saucer and spoon created in animal fur-made for a rabbit to drink from, perhaps? Frida Kahlo, my favourite painter took up the challenge and expressed what it was like to be her- a Mexican woman, who'd had a series of mishaps in her life-a terrible accident, several miscarriages and not least, a passionate painful marriage to Diego Rivera.
The baton was passed to Jackson Pollock, an Abstract Expressionist, with a love of swirling and dancing while throwing paint at a canvas. So although those paintings look random . .. He passed the question onto the Pop Artists, who used everyday images from the media, who passed it on to the Fluxus Movement, performance artists who used their own bodies and invited others to take part in the action. Yoko Ono invited John Lennon into her gallery to walk up a ladder and read a tiny message on the ceiling, that said,'Yes'. The rest is art history. Joseph Beuys felt strongly about the Vietnam war and locked himself and a Coyote dog in a room in New York for three days. Nobody asked the dog and there were no disclaimers.
They threw the question over to Arte Povera, who used their own blood, sweat and tears, displayed in plastic to express their political ideology. The question transformed itself into, 'Does art have to be permanent?' Artists built installations that could be site specific or be recreated easily somewhere else. They consist of multi-art forms and use technology. So called ephemeral pieces were usually filmed, kind of defeating the objective. But who wants to destroy their own creation, especially when so much thought has gone into it? So to Tracy Emin's 'Unmade bed', whose title I used in a play about an art teacher in the 1960s working in Rhondda. Not that far from Tracy's concept and expression of a weekend in her wretched life in 1998. She was already an established artist, part of Blair's Brit Art movement nurtured by Charles Saatchi, and that helped her work gain credibility- and a market. It wasn't work you could put on your wall at home though, was it? Although it did make us look at our own unmade beds differently - could you make money from your own life detritus?
Onwards and upwards. The question marched through the dangerous mountainous and white water terrain of issues: globalisation, national identity, gender, technology, the environment, shock and awe. Are any subjects taboo for the question,'But is it art?' In 1997 Saatchi lent his collection to the Royal Academy in an exhibition entitled, 'Sensation'. Marcus Harvey's piece, 'Myra Hindley'; a huge painting of her police mug-shot created from tiny hand prints of children, seemed to set the limit in the public eye of how far an artist could go in being creative and earn a living. Or some pimp curator or art dealer to make a profit.
So in thinking about the art shows we'd seen in London this week: David Hockney, Grayson Perry, David Shrigley, Jeremy Deller, Adrian Wisniewski, Chihuly, et al in Cork St, community artists mapping the changes on Hackney life of the forthcoming Olympics, and performances: Lorca's' House of Bernarda Alba', set in Iran, and Sofi Oksannen's' Purge', set in Soviet occupied Estonia in the 1950s. All can be described as Art. What's the criteria then, the yardstick to use in critiquing contemporary art to know if what you're seeing is excellent, good, bad, or just the Emperor's new clothes? Can we rely on the judgement of the curator or media reviewer to be our enlightened guide?
Grayson Perry in his quirky exhibition at the British Museum, 'The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman', tells us at the beginning not to look for meaning there. Yet it is art full of meaning and self expression. And ideas. I felt changed by the experience. This is his summing up.
'Craftsmanship is often equated with precision. I feel it is more important to have a long and sympathetic relationship with materials. A relaxed humble, ever curious love of stuff is central to my idea of being an artist. An important quality of great art of the past was the pure skill in the artist's use of materials. In celebrating craftsmanship, I also salute artists, well most of them.'
