Down-to-earth
At the end of October, I went to see Ellen Dissanayake speak. The lecture was open to the public, but Dissanayake had been invited to Portland by the combined Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft applied craft MFA program so there were a lot of artists in the audience. Dissanayake started the talk by saying how pleased she was to be there among “down-to-earth people,” and a ripple went through the crowd as everyone tried to figure out if she was being sarcastic or if she was just plain stupid. In the modern world, artists aren’t exactly known for being practical, logical, or even sane. But Dissayanake meant what she said. Usually, she talks with thinkers—art therapists and anthropologists—so she was excited to be speaking to doers—people who actually make things with their hands.
Gwenn Seemel
Frances
2007
acrylic on canvas
22 x 19 inches
An art therapist friend of mine, here pictured, introduced me to Dissayanake’s work a few years ago and I was immediately taken with her theory that art is about “making special.” Though I don’t think it’s the root definition of art, I do think it goes a long way towards explaining why we create. What’s more, I appreciate what the theory implies: that everyone is an artist because anyone can “make special.”
Dissayanake’s very anti-elitist approach to art helps her sidestep all the most boring arguments in art today. For example, an artist in the audience last month asked her what she thought about beauty as it relates to art and to calling an object or an action art. Dissayanake responded that beauty is too subjective—that something that looks pleasing could be beautiful, but something that looks fierce could also have a kind of beauty. Art isn’t about making something beautiful, it’s about “making special.” And, in this way, Dissayanake neatly avoided the wasps’ nest of decisive opinions and pontificating egos that is a discussion of aesthetics, bringing the topic back to what really matters. Very down-to-earth indeed.
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CATEGORIES: - Philosophy - Reviews -
(4) Comments / Commentaires: Down-to-earth
You sound very elitist Joshua. One person’s garbage is another person’s “sepcial.” I think it is wonderful that someone has the balls to suggest that art is accessible.
“Special” is what I meant…
I see both sides of this discussion. On the one hand, I’d be more apt to consider just about anything made by a so-called layperson art than some of the stuff that “artists” these days are coming up with. On the other, I don’t want to draw too many lines or make too much of classifying art and non-art. That game gets tedious and it’s too subjective to be useful. That’s why I love Dissanayake’s anti-elitist approach. It gets all the aesthetics debates out of the way and allows us to focus on creation.
joshua emrich...
Ellen is greatly mistaken.
--- -- - --- - ---- - - --- ----- -- -PNCA is not at all full of down-to-earth people.
I “studied” there.
It is full of overly idealistic youth with delusions about the real and artworld.
They have NO intrest in “making special”
They want to “make ideas” Half -formed liberal ideas, into art.
The art is mostly garbage. Let’s be honest.
The student show was a great example of hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown into what can more easily be seen on the Net.
And the poor students dont know any better.
luckily, I figured out there game before I put myself in 30 years of absolute debt.