Boxed In : An Open-Ended Open Thread

I hate being uncertain about things. But every now and then my hard-earned certainty on a subject gets jolted by a seemingly random array of things I read or hear. It's so uncomfortable when that happens, but ...

First I saw a poster the other day: "How am I supposed to think outside the box, when I work in a cubicle?" Ha, ha, I thought...bet your boss is already interviewing your replacement.

Then I had a frustrating but eventually thought-provoking conversation with a collector who was himself rather frustrated with how, despite all their rhetoric, too many artists today seem to be still constrained by one of the delusions of Modernism. The examples he used to illustrate how too many artists were still shackled to working in a way that evidenced they were "in control" were all painters, by the way. The examples he used to illustrate what he felt they should look to see, what they were all missing, were mostly filmmakers. The essence of his frustration was how artists were claiming to be reflecting the current state of humanity (which he feels is chaotic and uncontainable), but doing so through creations relying on wholly self-contained modes or metaphors...creating an oxymoron through their art objects.

Then I read the following on Contemporary Visual Culture, (you might need to read the entire post for context, but this is the part that jolted me):

Perhaps the issue is that at its limits of allegory and illusion painting is a medium marked simply by a set of values that judge quality over content. We speak of someone who “can paint”, by which we mean that someone has the ability to render in its utmost detail. We don’t speak of someone who can “move” or “emote”, but simply of someone who might have the capacity to make it more real than real.

I’m not sure this is an effective framework for understanding the contemporary arts in the present day. By saying this I am not implying the endless endgame of painting, but simply asking a question: “When the frame sets the limits, who really cares what happens inside the frame?”

It occurred to me while talking with the collector that this framework is perhaps a safer starting block for many artists who can see its limitations but haven't quite yet sorted out how to abandon it. I think back to Warhol still leaving some "serious" drips in his early Pop paintings before he decided they weren't necessary.

But then I started getting somewhat confused. What really are the issues here? Will some conceptual or formal twist such as that, as Contemporary Visual Culture's author (Administrator) noted, Eva Hesse had used to "create works in which the work itself becomes its own base, its flatness always already ruptured by a non-pictorial element that it contains" truly convey anything more important about what it means to be human now? Will it set today's artists free?

Rather than the never-ending parade of "make it new" visual language (read: putting A with D, rather than B with C this time) within a frame, are we doomed to an era of experimental, shaped, or otherwise often gimmicky canvases? Will that truly reflect anything new?

The answer is obviously no. The challenge is obviously a conceptual one AND a formal one, but not with the goal of simply "not looking like a frame we'd recognize as such." In fact, I don't really feel the frame is the problem. It's not what goes in the frame that's the problem either. The problem is quite frankly that we've seen far too many images for images alone to get the job done. As Administrator notes: "the problem is that the capacity to rupture our expectations as viewers has become so challenging that simply making a cathartic image isn’t enough."

Which is why I suspect we're turning to film and other time-based media for our examples (I do it here all the time. In trying to explain what I mean about something, I more often than not rely on a film to do so...I see it more and more in how visual artists [painters, sculptors, even photographers] explain their work as well).

But what does that mean? Should everyone put down the paint brush and pick up a camera?

Or looking back to our cubicle worker with the shaky job security; is this simply more evidence that Sloterdijk was right? That having reached an enlightened false consciousness, we're culturally stuck here? Artists and all?

My concern with the examples the collector gave of artists who are working "outside the box" to his mind is that they're doing so either formally or conceptually, but rarely (if ever), to my mind, in tandem. It's this need to go more than two or even three directions at once, to break through into a fourth dimension to capture a deeper sense of what's happening and how it is making us feel, that I think keeps leading folks to use time-based work as our primary analogies.

What does that...what could that...mean for other media though?

This is an open thread.