Activity Is Twofold Having to Do With Life and With Art

Why exercise you brand fine art? That's the simple question Greater Skilful posed to seven artists. Their answers are surprising, and very diverse. They mention making art for fun and adventure; building bridges between themselves and the rest of humanity; reuniting and recording fragments of thought, feeling, and memory; and saying things that they tin can't limited in any other mode.

All their answers are deeply personal. Elsewhere on Greater Good, nosotros explore the possible cognitive and emotional benefits of the arts, and yet these artists evoke a more key benefit: They are just doing what they feel they're built-in to practise.

Gina Gibney: Giving ability to others

Gina Gibney'southward choreography has been widely presented in the United states of america and Abroad. © Andrzej Olejniczak/Gina Gibney

Gina Gibney is the creative director of the New York-based Gina Gibney Trip the light fantastic Company, which was founded in 1991 to serve a dual mission: to create and perform gimmicky choreography that draws upon the strength and insights of women and men, and to enrich and reshape lives through programs that give voice to communities in need, especially survivors of domestic abuse and individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

Ad X

I make art for a few reasons. In life, we feel and then much fragmentation of thought and feeling. For me, creating art brings things back together.

In my own work, that is true throughout the process. At the beginning, developing the basic raw materials for the piece of work is deeply reflective and informative. Later, bringing those materials together into a form—distilling and shaping movement, creating a context, working to something that feels cohesive and consummate. That'south incredibly powerful for me—something that really keeps me going.

Interestingly, the body of my work is similar a catalog of the events and thoughts of my life. For me, making piece of work is most like keeping a journal. Giving that to someone else—as a kind of gift through live performance—is the well-nigh meaningful aspect of my work.

Trip the light fantastic is a powerful art form for the very reason that it doesn't demand to explain or comment on itself. Ane of the most amazing performances I have ever seen in my life was of a woman—a domestic violence survivor—dancing in a tiny conference room in a domestic violence shelter for other survivors. She was not a professional dancer. She was a woman who had faced unbelievable challenges and who was living with a great bargain of sadness.  She created and performed an astonishing solo—simply to have described her performance as "sad" would have been to diminish what we experienced.

That'due south the power of dance. You can feel something and empathize with it on a very deep level, and you don't have to put words to it.

Judy Dater: I like expressing emotions

A portrait past Judy Dater

Judy Dater has been making photographs for more than than 40 years, and is considered one of America's foremost photographers. The recipient of a Guggenheim and many other awards, her books include Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait, Women and Other Visions, Body and Soul and Cycles.

I like expressing emotions—to accept others feel what it is I'thou feeling when I'm photographing people.

Empathy is essential to portraiture. I've done landscapes, and I think they can be very poetic and emotional, but it's unlike from the directness of photographing a person. I think photographing people is, for me, the best fashion to evidence somebody something about themselves—either the person I photo or the person looking—that mayhap they didn't already know. Maybe it'southward presumptuous, but that's the want. I experience like I'yard attention to people when I'grand photographing them, and I think I understand people better because I've been looking at them intensely for forty-some years.

Pete Docter: It's fun making things

Pete Docter has been involved in some of Pixar Studio'southward most popular and seminal animated features, including Toy Story, A Issues'southward Life, Cars, and Wall-Eastward, only he is best known equally the director of the Academy-Honor-winning Monsters, Inc. Docter is currently directing Up, fix for release in May of 2009.

I brand fine art primarily considering I enjoy the procedure. Information technology's fun making things.

And I'thousand sure there is also that universal desire to connect with other people in some way, to tell them well-nigh myself or my experiences. What I actually await for in a project is something that resonates with life as I run into it, and speaks to our experiences every bit humans. That probably sounds pretty highfalutin' coming from someone who makes cartoons, simply I think all the directors at Pixar feel the same way. Nosotros want to entertain people, not only in the vacuous, escapist sense (though to exist sure, there'due south a lot of that in our movies besides), but in a way that resonates with the audition as being truthful nigh life—some deeper emotional feel that they recognize in their own existence. On the surface, our films are almost toys, monsters, fish, or robots; at a foundational level they're nigh very universal things: our own struggles with mortality, loss, and defining who nosotros are in the world.

As filmmakers, we're pretty much cavemen sitting effectually the bivouac telling stories, only nosotros utilise millions of dollars of engineering to practise it. By telling stories, nosotros connect with each other. We talk about ourselves, our feelings, and what it is to be human being.

Or nosotros merely make cartoons. Either style we try to accept a good time, and nosotros hope the audience does too.

Harrell Fletcher: Anything anyone calls art is art

An image from "The Trouble of Possible Redemption 2003," staged at the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. The video is an accommodation of James Joyce's novel Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center in Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards. © Harell Fletcher

Harrell Fletcher teaches in the art department at Portland State University. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, and in numerous other museums and galleries around the world. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Love You lot More, a participatory website with Miranda July, which they turned into a book, published in 2007. Fletcher is the recipient of the 2005 Alpert Award in Visual Arts.

The question of why I make art needs to be broken down a bit before I can answer.

Kickoff of all, what is art? The definition for art that I accept come upward with, which seems to piece of work best for me, is that anything anyone calls art is fine art. This comes from my belief that there is nothing intrinsic about art. We cannot do a chemical assay to determine if something is fine art or not. Instead, I experience like calling something "art" is actually just a subjective fashion of indicating value—which could be aesthetic, cultural, budgetary, and so on.

If we expect at other kinds of artistic activity we tin can see how various forms can all be and exist valid at the aforementioned time. I've made what I remember of as fine art since I was a child, initially drawings, then photographs, paintings, videos, and and then on. By the time I got to graduate schoolhouse, I was not and then interested in making more than stuff, and instead started to motility into another management, which these days is sometimes called "Social Practise."

This is sort of a confusing term since it is so new and undefined. In a broad mode, I think of it as the opposite of Studio Do—making objects in isolation, to be shown and hopefully sold in a gallery context. Virtually of the fine art world operates with this Studio Practice approach. In Social Practice, there is more of an emphasis on ideas and deportment than on objects; information technology can take place outside of art contexts, and there is often a collaborative or participatory aspect to the work.

So dorsum to the question why I make art. In my example, the projects that I do let me to meet people I wouldn't usually meet, travel to places I wouldn't normally go to, learn about subjects that I didn't know I would be interested in, and sometimes even assist people out in pocket-size means that make me experience good. I similar to say that what I'm after is to take an interesting life, and doing the work that I practice as an artist helps me reach that.

Kwame Dawes: An environment of empathy

© Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Kwame Dawes, Ph.D., is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of 13 books of poetry, most recently Gomer'due south Song, and a novel, She'southward Gone, which won the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Accolade for Best Commencement Novel.

I write in what is probably a vain effort to somehow control the world in which I alive, recreating it in a style that satisfies my sense of what the world should expect like and exist similar.

I'm trying to capture in language the things that I run across and experience, as a way of recording their beauty and power and terror, so that I can render to those things and relive them. In that way, I try to take some sense of control in a chaotic world.

I want to somehow communicate my sense of the earth—that style of understanding, engaging, experiencing the earth—to somebody else. I want them to be transported into the world that I have created with language.

And then the ultimate aim of my writing is to create an environment of empathy, something that would allow the miracle of empathy to take place, where human beings tin can seem to ascent out of themselves and extend themselves into others and live inside others. That has a tremendous power for the human beingness. And I know this, considering that is what other people'due south writing does to me when I read it.

James Sturm: The reasons are unimportant

James Sturm is a cartoonist and co-founder of the Centre for Drawing Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. He is the author of the best-selling and award-winning graphic novel The Golem'south Mighty Swing, called equally the Best Graphic Novel of 2000 by Time magazine. In 2007, his trilogy of historical graphic novels was collected in a volume entitled James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems.

I like the question "Why Do You lot Make Art?" considering it assumes what I do is fine art. A flattering assumption. The question also takes me back to my freshman year of college, where such questions like "What is nature?" and "Is reality a moving ridge or a circle?" were earnestly debated (normally belatedly at night and after smoking too much weed).

Twenty-5 years after I'd like to think I am a little more than clear-headed regarding this question. Perhaps the only insight I've gained is the knowledge that I accept no idea and, secondly, the reasons are unimportant. Depending on my mood, on whatsoever given day, I could attribute making art to a high-minded impulse to connect with others or to understand the world or a narcissistic coping machinery or a desire to be famous or therapy or as my religious discipline or to provide a sense of control or a desire to surrender control, etc., etc., etc.

Whatever the reason, an inner compulsion exists and I continue to award this internal imperative. If I didn't, I would feel really horrible. I would be a broken man. And then whether attempting to brand art is noble or selfish, the fact remains that I will do it all the same. Anything by this statement is speculation. I would be afraid that past proclaiming why I make art would be generating my own propaganda.

KRS-One: Hip hop is beyond time, beyond space

Lawrence Krisna Parker, better known past his stage name KRS-One, is widely considered past critics and other MCs to be one of hip hop's about influential figures. At the 2008 Black Entertainment Television Awards, KRS-Ane was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Accolade for his rapping and activism.

I was born this fashion, born to make art, to make hip hop. And I think I'yard only i of the people who had the backbone to stay with my born identity. Hip hop keeps me true to myself, keeps me human.

Hip hop is the opposite of engineering. Hip hop is what the human body does: Breaking, DJing, graffiti writing. The human torso breakdances, you can't take that away. DJing is not technology; it's human intelligence over applied science: cutting, mixing, scratching. Information technology's physical. The manipulation of technology is what humans exercise, that's art.

Or accept graffiti writing. Put a writing utensil in any kid's hand at age 2 or three. They will not write on a paper similar they'll later be socialized to do, they volition write on the walls. They're simply playing. That'due south human. Graffiti reminds you of your humanity, when you scrawl your self-expression on the wall. Hip hop helps the states to come across the things in the world in new ways.

That's why hip hop has kept me young. It doesn't allow you to grow up too fast. Hip hop is beyond time, across space. That's why I brand hip hop.

clintonforcive.blogspot.com

Source: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_we_make_art

Share this post