Many people now believe that spatters of paint are the epitome of
creativity, and they are willing to buy it, be it production line
artwork, sold on the street by hawkers claiming it comes from starving
student artists, or an expensive piece bought out of a gallery or from
the artist who actually is starving.
Somehow I have had painters and creativity on my mind for the last few weeks, after swearing that I wouldn't go down that route again, a few years ago. It's scary stuff. Let's do this thing and try and lay at least one ghost to rest.
Wassily Kandinsky has been one of my pet peeves, since I first came across the guy's art in the mid Nineties. Kandinsky was a Russian who wanted to paint. He was taken with Monet and spent a lot of time developing his art. After several periods, he arrived at abstract expressionism. In fact he is known as the father of abstract expressionism.
In the Nineties, I worked in an agency. One of the centrepieces of the agency was a large print of a Kandinsky which could occupy an entire wall in a small house. I am not sure what the title of the piece was, but what it entailed was splatters of paint against a dull, brown background, in other words, a large part of what is now known as abstract expressionism.
Kandinsky was not alone in this 'let's-throw-paint-randomly-at-a-canvas-and-see-if-we-can-elicit-an-emotional-response' school of art. If you look around houses all over the place, including my own, there must be thousands, if not tens of thousands of different variants on the splatter.
Many people now believe that spatters of paint are the epitome of creativity, and they are willing to buy it, be it production line artwork, sold on the street by hawkers claiming it comes from starving student artists, or an expensive piece bought out of a gallery or from the artist who actually is starving.
What people don't get to see is that it is a small part of the long journey of the artist. In fact, Wassily Kandinsky painted lots of things, in different ways, as did Picasso and Monet and Manet and Seurat and Van Gogh and Frans Marc, and the lot . Ways of painting, which we see as hallmarks of creativity or signature pieces were just part of a long journey.
As I understand it, the artists were looking for patterns of seeing, making and evolving the patterns and, in the case of Kandinsky and others, ways to break the patterns. In spite of all that effort, the general consensus on great creativity is that it now involves throwing paint at a canvas. That is how art and creativity is judged.
So... the effort of the artist's crafting of a piece can be replaced by a simple exercise of laying down newspapers, putting the canvas on top, flinging paint, followed by the exacting task of cleaning up afterwards. And strangely , it will be more profitable, which is probably why painters spend such a lot of time trying to reinvent the splatter or, in some cases, the thick, gooey glob laid down with a painters knife, or something, as long as it avoids any significant degree of form and structure.
If creativity is an exercise in seeing things anew or in a new light, where do the splatters and blobs of that school of abstract expressionism take us?
The obvious thing is that people who want to state that they have a creative side to their personalities can use a painting in that style to make the statement. They can possibly even find a fun way to relieve the whiteness of their walls and find complementing décor for their lounges, though how the blobs go with the porcelain dogs and shepherdesses beats me.
We also know, if not from their choice of art, then at least from their décor, that they probably can't be bothered to look for the pattern or spend time appreciating it and its evolution.
If people don't look or think about what they are looking at, especially something as intimate as a lounge wall, then there must be some kind of flaw in humanity. That, or the television set is the most important feeder of perception.
There's the scary bit.
At this point I am tempted to take a couple of wanton kicks at Ginsberg, but I am running out of words. And anyway, people don't read him all that much anymore, or hang his poems in their lounges.
Here's the point of the whole thing... a little creativity can be a dangerous thing, if you get my drift.
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