Really enjoyed my conversation with Maroulla Paul for City Solicitor magazine in which we discuss the unanswerable question, “what is art”?
But is it Art?
Maroulla Paul speaks to Dani Humberstone and Tamsin Relly, about what they consider to be art:
We live in a world where so many things, from the gadgets we squeeze our lemons with to interactive images created through technology are considered ‘art’. But what is ‘art’? Maroulla Paul examined the facts and talked to two established artists to see if there is a definition we can all agree on.
In 2010, the highly controversial artist, Ai Weiwei, filled the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern with 100,000,000 sunflower seeds handcrafted in porcelain by over 1600 artisans. These weighed over 150 tons and took over two and a half years to produce. The exhibit, in varying forms of different amounts and weights has, in its lifetime, been shown in nine different countries all over the world. Thought to be the most expensive artwork ever produced, each seed is unique, different from all the others. Yet, on first impression, they all appear identical.
But are they art?
Weiwei sees them not as one piece of art, but as a hundred million pieces with social, political and economic undertones. For him, they represent the Chinese, each one different, but when together, so powerful as a force. ‘Seeds grow’ he says, ‘the crowd will have its way one day.’ To some, the sunflowers seeds were ‘seeds of hope’ ‘contemplative and barbed’ ‘part prophecy and part threat’. To others, they were a huge amount of porcelain seeds, no more, no less.
What some consider great art, others simply don’t get. The debate around ‘what is art’ has been a controversial one that has never truly been answered.
The dictionary definition seems clear, concise and apt:
‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.’
But, sadly, more recent attempts to answer this unanswerable question are linking whether something is art to whether it has a commercial value.
I spoke to two highly respected and established artists, Dani Humberstone and Tamsin Relly, about what they considered art to be.
I met Dani at the Mall Galleries where she was doing a live painting of a giant strawberry during the SWA (Society of Women Artists) Annual Open where she was exhibiting.
Dani is a full member of SWA which only comes about after you have been regularly submitting work and then you have six entries all accepted; this grants you associate membership and full memebership comes when you get another six accepted the following year. No easy feat.
I asked Dani how she came to become an artist, she replied that she couldn’t ever remember not being one. Her mum actually bought her her first easel and paints when she was 18 months old – and thought this was a normal thing for a parent to do.
Dani dabbled with various styles and settled on abstracts before morphing to fruit, both real and surreal, and these now form the backbone of her work. The transition was not a “conscious choice”, she says, ‘it just happened’
She likens it to ‘just wandering around after something. It leads you’.
Dani says her fruit are symbols of people; like fruit, humans are fragile, living things that scar easily.
Asked ‘what is art?’ she says that is ‘very difficult to define but that it has to be based around telling a story and trying to do that in the most truthful way possible. It’s about seeing that nothing is ordinary, that actually everything is extraordinary if you look with different eyes and really see. A rainbow is beautiful, it is true. But it’s not art. Art has to be produced by a human being. Artists respond to the world they live in right now. It is an emotional and intellectual response. For Weiwei, his art is pertinent to his experience of China; for someone living in Kent or Sussex, like myself, with no such dramas the response is very different but equally valid. Authenticity is key’.
Dani believes that although art is not essential to life from a practical perspective in that it cannot house or feed you, nonetheless it is essential in being a person. ‘As soon as we made anything that wasn’t essential, we made art’. She sees art as ‘our way of reflecting back the big subjects; love, sex, politics, war, religion, money, ambition’.
Whilst she agrees that there is a need in most artists for validation; it is not that validation that determines whether it is art citing, Van Gogh who rarely sold a painting in his lifetime.
Tracking down Ms Relly was a much more difficult feat as she seems to be constantly in far flung parts of the globe in pursuit of inspiration and research to further her art.
I first spoke to her whilst she was on the Gerzon Zevi Land Art Road Trip; a month long travelling residency camping through the iconic Land art sites and landscapes of the American South- West including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels.
We resumed our conversation back in London before she disappears off again in October to the Arctic Circle on a residency which combines artists, scientists, architects, educators and others all living together on a sailing vessel and working to expand each others’ perspectives and to create new, collaborative works.
I asked her to describe her work. ‘My practice includes painting, print and drawing and explores the effects of contemporary consumer-based lifestyles on the balance of the Earth’s ecosystem. Drawing from snapshots of day-to-day life, nature and images found in the media I work with the fluid and unpredictable qualities of my materials, to present impressions of urban and natural environments in states of uncertainty or degeneration’.
Tamsin laughed when asked to define art and said ‘Oh boy, that’s probably about as slippery to answer as the meaning of life, but an important question to keep asking.
‘I think art and its definition can take many forms and purposes, depending on context, culture, maker and viewer.
But perhaps in its very reluctance to be pinned down, is where art making gives us that open space to explore the bigger unanswerable questions in life and attempt to make sense of the world – through metaphor and the indefinable.
What interests me is: does a piece of work make me feel something exciting or shift my perception and make me think differently about something? Does it reveal something? It may be simply in the sensory experience of the work or through understanding more about the process or motivations of the artists.
I think art and art making is a conversation – between the artist and the work and then between the work and the viewer. And it is very alive; the process and the viewing; a work can tell you something different each time you experience it’.
Interestingly, like Dani, Tamsin also referenced Ai Weiwei.
‘I am so moved by Ai Weiwei’s work, his personal values are completely aligned with his art making. His work, through its poetry, addresses and reveals important social issues that people are faced with in their every day life – which so much of the world’s politics can too easily overlook or brush beneath the carpet. Art is a discipline and language that can do that: it invites us to look at things through a different lens’.
I asked Tamsin if she felt there was any merit in the theory of art only being defined as such if it had commercial value.
She correctly observed that this was ‘simply in keeping with the trend in many areas of contemporary global culture – where everything, down to the DNA of a tomato seed, is commodified and valued only by its price tag?’
So, are we any wiser?
Is Phillipe Starck’s lemon squeezer as valid a piece of art as Michelangelo’s David? Can we put Emin’s bed in the same category as the Mona Lisa? Is will.i.am’s #pyramidi to be compared with the Golden Death Mask of Tutankhamun?
Art may ultimately not be wholly definable but it exists and if it is man made and it moves us in some way then there is no doubt our lives would be a lot poorer without it.
Both Dani and Tamsin are exhibiting in London.