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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Art History - Do You Need It?

  
 
CameronStewart
20:06 / 28.06.02
(Bear with me, this isn't really a comics discussion.)

I had an interesting discussion with a cartoonist friend of mine last night. He is resolutely contemporary in his thinking - he studies almost exclusively the work of modern cartoonists (or comic artists, whatever you want to call them) and has very little knowledge or interest in the work of the Old Masters - Eisner, Kurtzman, Krigstein, Toth, et al., presumably because it looks "old fashioned" and does nothing to stimulate him on an immediate, superficial level. I, however, find enormous value in studying the work of past artists and understanding how their work informs that of the present.

Can great art in any medium be created without a knowledge of its ancestry? If you're a musician, is it to your advantage to understand Beethoven and Bach as much as The Beatles? Does it benefit a modern writer to have read Shakespeare and Dickens? Are filmmakers who study Kurosawa and Hitchcock more likely to create great films than ones who study Tarantino and Spielberg? Is it possible to create great art when you only look at your contemporaries and learn what is, for the most part, essentially second-hand knowledge?
 
 
nikon driver
22:48 / 30.06.02
yes.don't know.probably.i hope so.yes.
 
 
CameronStewart
00:07 / 01.07.02
That was helpful. Anyone else?
 
 
RiffRaff
02:02 / 01.07.02
Well... it certainly can't hurt. I would say it's more of an an advantage in some art forms than others. For example, it would be more important for a movie director to be familiar with classic films than with a simpler art form, such as painting. (Simpler - not less meaningful or less valid, just less complicated.)
 
 
Mystery Gypt
07:02 / 01.07.02
it's rare that someone is such an impeccable combination of completely original thinker and master of a craft that they can automatically create something both new and well done without putting in a lot of work to the backstory in order to do so. and in general, the rareness of that combination of talents has an inverse relationship to the number of people who falsely consider themselves to have it.

film in particular is such a difficult and technical art, that you simply can't produce a great work in that medium without studying what previous masters have done before. even someone like elias merhige, who made the completely unique Begotten, has a comprehensive knowledge of and appreciation for the history of film.

i guess you'd have to look at a large sample of modern masters of any form and find out if they've studied what went before, but i'd reckon that the majority of artists who's work is really incredible and gets at truth will have studied what came before. now, it doesn't necessarily work backwards -- ie, just because you've studied every great work of art doesn't mean your're certainly going to be able to produce one yourself. but if you have a talent and a discipline, a knowledge of the form will be the third point to your, uh, golden triangle.

at root is this: if you devote your life to an artform, presumably you love it. you love everything about it, and have a driving desire to be involved in it, to produce it, and to know about it. if you're really called to something, i don't think you can avoid this. if you are somehow not interested in the history of what you are GIVING YOUR LIFE TO, you may need to consider exactly why you do it and what you hope to achieve in it.

in the example of your friend, hell, if more comic artists derived inspiration from Krazy Kat, we'd have a lot more exciting, new looking shit to play with.
 
 
RiffRaff
07:37 / 01.07.02
Particularly Krazy Kat. Sheer genius.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:37 / 01.07.02
Leaving aside for the moment the sheer numpty-heidedness of the statement that painting is "simpler" than film...

I think Gypt makes a very good point. I mentioned in the "Poetrial" thread in the creation that people who wrote poetry but did not read it rarely produced anything of worth. Part of this is about lacking familiarity with scansions, metres, uses of language and common ways fo fucking it up completely that only experience can give you, said experience coming far faster when you are not having to deal with defensive feelings about your own work. Part of it is that if you do not care enough about a medium to consume it with reasonable voracity, you are unlikely to produce anything of worth in it.

Another aspect of this concerns cross-pollination, IMHO, in any fiven artform, the more successfully different forms are integrated into the basis for a work (rather than the work itself), the larger the pallete the artist has to work with. There's an Evan Dorkin cartoon in which a young comic artist is seen crying "this Bob Kane guy is too *hard*. Ah! Rob Liefeld!", and that certainly sems to have been the experience of a lot of artists around at the moment. Again, if you do not have the abilitry to understand and interpret a large number of previous and current examples of the artform without appearing derivative, you probably shouldn't be in it.

A good example might be the American professional travelling portrait painters of the mid 19th century, who wwere exhibited at the Met a few years back. Highly autodidactic, having learned their trade largely in the doing of it and associating only perhaps with their contemporaries in the business, they produced nothing of more than curiosity value.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:41 / 01.07.02
Well, sort of - that type of 'naive' painting has a fairly large following these days, as does outsider art. You may not think that this sort of following - you know, the market for portraits of outsize prize porkers and so on - is quite the same as the market for old masters, but nonetheless it does exist... perhaps it's a form of kitsch appreciation but then I suspect that some comics appreciation is appreciation of kitschy elements.
 
 
Locust No longer
19:16 / 01.07.02
I think great art can come from anyone anytime no matter what their knowledge is of older "great art." I think it's a somewhat nebulous subject- "great art." Some people think Norman Rockwell produced "great art" some don't. Neither are right or wrong. I believe I'm off the subject, however. I think some of my art has come from people who have little appreciation for older art. I, myself, do find that the study of earlier art is helpful for my understanding of art today, but there is something to be said for someone who hears one distorted guitar or feed back drone or splash of paint on a McDonalds poster and creates something new or beautiful or challenging. Again, whether it's great is something hard to pin down.
 
 
RiffRaff
00:37 / 02.07.02
Leaving aside for the moment the sheer numpty-heidedness of the statement that painting is "simpler" than film...

Feel free to back that up. A painting only has to show a single view of a single scene. A film has to show the entirety of many scenes, plus orchestrate the actors and dialogue, and tell a coherent story besides. A painting is purely visual. A film is not.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
07:05 / 02.07.02
as a writer, i strive to be fairly widely read, rather than an expert on the history of fiction. the only shakespeare i've read was tedious to the point of tears, and i didn't see it as good writing. i'm not sure how relevant the likes of dickens etc is to what i write - although i do enjoy reading books on social history. i want to read good writing/fiction which of course crosses all genres, but i have more interest in 'historical' horror stories, i.e. bram stoker's 'dracula', than historical fiction in general. i think it's important to have at least an overview of the style one is writing/painting/playing, so as not to be rehashing old ideas and, perhaps, to have an understanding of where one is coming from. that said, some of the 'art brut' i saw in lausanne, created by mentally ill patients with no previous artistic training, was amazing.
 
 
lentil
08:06 / 02.07.02
Leaving aside for the moment the sheer numpty-heidedness of the statement that painting is "simpler" than film...

Feel free to back that up.
A painting only has to show a single view of a single scene. A film has to show the entirety of many scenes, plus orchestrate the actors and dialogue, and tell a coherent story besides. A painting is purely visual. A film is not.

The charitable response would be to assume that you are confusing complexity of production with the inherent complexity of the medium. However your comments about the depiction of scenes doesn’t really allow this.

One of the many innovations in the visual arts developed during the twentieth century was this thing called abstraction, in which no scene is depicted at all, indeed the marks made are intended to bear no resemblance to any physically extant object. Lots of popular artists have used it. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

Painting was for hundreds of years the primary mode of image production, its methods as bound up with technological advance as film is today. Its longevity provides it with an enormous vocabulary which permits certain images, styles, even brushstrokes to assume a significance far beyond their visual effect. All of the tasks you assign to cinema were once the province of painting. An artist painting, for example, an epic Biblical scene such as the crossing of the Red Sea, would not only have to make use of multiple viewpoints in order to construct a convincing pictorial space of necessary grandeur, but also orchestrate the depicted figures (and thus life models, or “actors”) so that their composition was visually attractive and communicated the narrative (that is, to orchestrate a visual “dialogue” and tell a coherent story). And all of this without access to a wondrous device that automatically records the likeness of whatever it is pointed at.
 
 
Mystery Gypt
08:40 / 02.07.02
the only shakespeare i've read was tedious to the point of tears, and i didn't see it as good writing

oh good christ.
 
 
Graeme McMillan
14:47 / 02.07.02
Great art can come from someone who has no knowledge of art history, because art doesn't come from history, it comes from the artist. Does a knowledge of what's come before add something to a work? Perhaps; it depends on what the work's about. If nothing else, it can't really hurt, unless the artist is too hung up on his influences.

I think.
 
 
Logos
21:15 / 02.07.02
I think it was Tchaikovski who said, "By all means, go out and break the rules, but first, it's helpful to know what the rules are."

You can make amazining art without a systematic appreciation of what's gone before, but it's awfully handy to have a good handle about everything else that's out there. I mean, the rest of us haven't just been standing about with our hands in our pockets, waiting for you to show us the way.

Then again, maybe we have. So, knock em off.
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
01:13 / 03.07.02
Art, by my way of thinking, is about the communication of an idea. By that measure, one probably needs a rudimentary grasp of the tools of communication (the syntax, a little of the vocabulary) if one wishes to lessen the ever-present imperfect fit between transmission and interpretation. You can do a lot w/very little, though. I don't think that a comprehensive knowledge of those who came before or the styles in which they dabbled is necessary. It helps to take an occasional look at the playing field, but the tools (rudimentary as they may be) and the idea are, to me, 90% of the game.
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
00:36 / 08.07.02
Whoops. Guess I killed the thread. Let me try to revive it.

I also meant to add that I'm intrigued by the idea of art created in a vacuum, so to speak. Approaching the tools of a given artform as if you've never seen them before in your life and have no idea what they're capable of doing can produce some fascinating results, as I've found in the music that I've performed w/equally (formally) untalented musicians. Of course, being out of your mind on psychotropic substances can significantly aid the process of treating an artistic tool like a mysterious artifact that you just dug up out of your back yard.
 
 
lentil
09:00 / 08.07.02
Yes, but it can also seriously alter your perception of what you're doing with said instrument, perhaps leading you to be a little more charitable than you might otherwise be. i remember immensely enjoying an extensive acid-fuelled percussion jam with a couple of friends which I was later informed by a musician friend (who was not on acid and had in fact just woken up) conatined absolutely nothing resembling a coherent rhythm, nor indeed anything likely to bring pleasure to anyone other than the particpants.
But then I've always been crap at music. And as a counterpoint to what I've just said, I have a sketchbook which was filled on LSD that still provides inspiration; in fact one of the drawings from that book has become probably the most successful motif in my work.


Sorry, threadrotting like a bastard.... in general I agree with the position Haus and Mystery Gypt have taken, that good art is necessarily produced by artists with a love of their chosen medium, and that this love leads to a desire to consume and understand the history of that medium. I'd like to add that this in no way assumes a slavish devotion to a canon - an artist looking at past works with an engaged mind and eye will create their own art history based on what acheives the aims they see as important and what they feel will be useful to their own practise. In their studies they are likely to become familar with many more works of art and schools of thought than they are ever likely to acknowledge in their own output; I don't see this as a waste of time, because a wider theoretical and practical knowledge base is surely desirable.

Deric, I agree with you about art being the communication of an idea, but I think your definition of tools could be a little wider. I would argue that every innovation in modes of production, whether technological or intellectual, is a new tool. You may, when making a chair, choose to forego the use of power tools in order to mimic the techniques of master craftsmen from previous ages. Well and good. But, if you carry on hacking away with your handsaw and chisel because you're not aware of the existence of Black & Decker's Handyman range, then you're just being inefficient. Does that make any sense?
Regarding the possibility of being swanped by influences - I agree that this is a danger. haven't thought this one through fully, but... I think that once you leave the "raw" state of creativity where you treat "an artistic tool like a mysterious artifact that you just dug up out of your back yard" and receive an external influence, it is almost a duty to absorb as many other influences as possible. All or nothing. Once you've got one, it needs to be contextualised by other influences otherwise it will start to stamp itself all over your work.
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
19:30 / 08.07.02
I probably clouded the intent of my first post above by using the word 'tool' to describe a mode of communication when it could easily have been taken to mean tangible artistic tools. What I meant was tools that facilitate the communication of intent w/in a given discipline. And I was trying to say that an artist doesn't necessarily need a comprehensive knowledge of every school w/in his or her discipline in order to be successful in communicating the intent of the piece... I'm probably still not successfully communicating my intent in this tangent, so I probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

I can see all sides of this issue, at any rate, and I think it's a good thing to keep an open mind in one's approach to creating art. An awareness of one's forebears can definitely help, but I think that completely forgetting from time to time about that which has come before is equally worthwhile.
 
 
lentil
07:53 / 09.07.02
"What I meant was tools that facilitate the communication of intent w/in a given discipline"

Actually that's what I meant too. Maybe we're in greater agreement than I'd thought. I guess my Black & Decker analogy was too physical - abstraction, linear perspective and Christianity (sticky example I know as it's also a context) are all tools too.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
13:28 / 09.07.02
I just recently graduated from art school with a degree in photography. One thing that I have observed from the overwhelming majority of my peers in the photography program was that they usually had no interest in art besides photography, which invariably led to them creating painfully dull and formulaic images. I think it is very important to have a knowledge of the history of the medium that you are working in, but also a knowledge and passion for other artforms and media, to see the connections between different forms of art.

I would hope that Cameron's friend may at least make up for his lack of interest in the illustrators of the past with an interest in other art...

As for the notion that art ideally should come from the person, with or without a knowledge of other art - sure, the individual personality of an artist or craftsperson is a big part of why art resonates with other people, but you've got to remember that no one, not even the most reclusive outsider artist, is existing in a vacuum. There is a big difference between being willfully ignorant and simply lacking exposure to cultures.
 
  
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