A while ago at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts, my girlfriend and I overheard a group of people discussing a piece of abstract art that was part of the current exhibit. They wondered aloud what the random combination of colors meant. One said she thought it had to do with death, another said life, and still another said love. They gave their various reasons and argued their points, until finally they decided they all hated it anyway and left.
It seems that so many people hate abstract art because they can’t immediately draw meaning from it. They can’t look at three shades of blue splashed, seemingly whimsically, onto a canvas and say, it’s a statement on death, or the process of death, or the difference between death and the process of death. And life. What they might sarcastically say is, it’s a statement on the color blue. But, indeed, that may be true. In fact, the latter take could be more likely than the former, a realization that actually gets at the real reason people should be skeptical of abstract art; it’s usually a destabilization or critique of another theory of art, something to do with form, line, contrast, color, etc. So, basically, it’s elitist. You have to know something about the specific theory that particular piece of abstract art is responding to, and that’s the problem. Abstract art gets its name because it comments on abstract ideas, not concrete subjects. What we have to do, then, is not confuse how we view abstract art with how we view other forms of art.
Our first inclination when confronted by a piece of art—any kind of art, be it visual art, literature, or music—is to assume it means something. When we can’t come up with its meaning, we think either we are stupid or the art is stupid. It’s probably neither, we’re just trying too hard. Art doesn’t always have a meaning, in the traditional sense; that is, its primary goal is not usually to bury themes and motifs for the viewer, reader or listener to dig up. Literature courses and art critics have got us thinking that way, but the beginnings of works of art are much nobler.
Of course, different pieces of art do different things. But good art—yes, I’m about to make a distinction between good art and bad art—does not generalize. And that’s perhaps one of the only distinctions you can make between good art and bad art, but it’s true. Good art does not generalize; it does not say life is good, or the human heart is unknowable. Critics say that. Granted, a writer may print “life is good” in his story, but if you see those words on the page, you can bet it’s not the point of the story. Here’s one way to put it: the writer doesn’t want to simply tell you that life is good, he wants to show you just HOW life is good.
For example, a writer may talk a lot about death, and it may seem like he wants the reader to take from his story the idea that death is inevitable. But that’s not really what he’s trying to say. A writer doesn’t set out to write a story about death’s inevitability, because good writers do not generalize like that. Instead, he sets out to write a story about something specific and concrete, like a piece of birthday cake. It’s a piece of a child’s birthday cake her mother has left in the fridge long after the child passed away. Then one day the mother throws away the piece of cake. The writer’s job is to show the reader what has changed in the mother; why, this day, she has thrown away the piece of cake. But when a reader picking up the story sees that death is involved, he may get stuck thinking the story is trying to say something about death, because death is one of those abstract “big ideas” that literature professors always want to focus their discussions on. The reader, if he is naïve, may even put the story down because he likes happy stories, stories with good endings, not depressing stories about death. And at that point something has failed in our overall understanding of art and its aims, because that story was not about death, or the child who died. It was about the mother. And if it was about any abstract idea, it wasn’t death, or life; it was love.
- Robbie Hargett is a graduate in English. He can be reached at ghargett1@utk.edu
