Facades and Fabrications

Should art challenge its viewer?

Of course!

Should accessibility be the forefront of such challenges?

Not always.

As artist, our initial goal is to communicate. This is easy. Anything objective is able to communicate with its own presence. Even absence can speak (it almost all the time yells). The hard work however is not the work’s will to beget a dialogue, but rather to sustain a dialogue that presents itself intentionally under the artist’s demands. Whether under a Morse key or through the Cinema, a message must always be clarified. Deconstruction is inevitable no matter how many facades a piece of work proposes. In these seams we can detect the honest and call out the bullshit. These facades (which can sometimes be fabrications) are Japanese sliding doors ready to be opened as we seek the space laid out in front of us. Many artists seek to substitute the sliding doors with a bank vault door, bolted and screwed into the surface. There is such a range for this complexity! This brings to question the usage and misuse of accessibility in art. It’s almost like accepting text as visual art. By adding new laterals such as references, parodies, or text the artist not only places more obstacles for the viewer to bear but also a whole new array of different perspectives to peer through (i.e. a photograph of a poem. Not only do we have to dissect the piece as a photograph but now, knowing that the emphasis is on the text, we must anatomize the poem word for word in conjunction with its presented medium.) No longer are we just visual theorist, in combination, we have been given the right, by the artist, to be historians, pop-cultural pathfinders, and literary critics. Again, these are just examples of the perspectives artistic facades can administer to us: the viewer.

As I stated earlier these facades can easily morph into fabrications. This is where it gets tricky, because a fabrication is essentially a trick. This is the area where art has the capability to leap, but with this notion comes the dangerous potential for fabrications to bleed right off the page onto the artists hands. Clear delineation between the art and the artist is imperative while handling such lies. The artist can tell lies but he must never become a liar. Almost crazy right? These lies, these fabrications, must work for a common truth. If the fabrications are too stagnant and too off-handed then we may just have to call “bullshit!” before another inconsequential conversation sprouts.

Ahh… I’m not done with this yet. Join me next week where I “try” to come to a conclusion here.

xoxo George