On the Subject of Music:

My Own Attempt at the Question: “What is Art?”

… & “Does Art Have a Function?”

I would address the second question first, maybe from this angle: “What is the function of art?” Art has many functions. “What is the function of language?” Art is another, even more basic form of language. I would argue, we create pictures in step with same rate we create words; we start out with scribbles, which turn into lines, that ultimately create images that someone other than ourselves can understand (and those images can stretch out over millennia long after the artist who has made those images is gone). The real question might be how would we function without visual art? It would be a very dysfunctional and chaotic world, indeed. I often think this point is taken for granted; the visual arts is often regarded as something valued, but superfluous, like the icing on a cake, or the font we use to type out a report. But art easily preceded written language (for example, the English “A” is an inverted pictograph of a cow’s head, many street signs and other important notifications are integrated with symbols, and many cultures did not have a written language for most of their existence). In short, art equals language; a more basic and primal language.

This leads into the first question: “What IS Art?” A written or verbal language stands on its own, and when it is fed back into art, it takes on a different meaning in the human consciousness. We tend not to see words and numbers in our dreams, we may hear language, and we’ll see the red color and octagonal shape of the “Stop Sign”, but we won’t actually see the word “S-T-O-P” on that sign (that’s stored in a separate part of our brains). Overall, a world devoid of art might be a functional world (doubtful), but it would be a dull overly literal place that did not allow for any deviation from one line of thought. It also brings up the question before people started creating pictures, one had to understand what a picture is; There was the story of an explorer who took a native who lived in a dense jungle to a mountain top, his entire world had been seen from the perspective of living within the dense forest amongst trees, when he saw people far below, he thought they must be ants because he had never seen anything like it from such a perspective. There is another story about a photorealistic painting of a horse [this anecdote comes from the BBC special “How Art Made the World: The Day Pictures Were Born”] -There is the painting “Whistlejacket” by George Stubbs, which hangs in the National Museum in London. The story goes that a Turkish man in the 19th century was shown the picture, the man was dumbstruck because he had never seen a picture before. He was a devout Muslim and Islam (at its strictest) forbids images of living creatures. The man refused to believe you could recreate an animal in two dimensions, saying he couldn’t recognize it was a horse, because he couldn’t move around it.

Aside from anecdotes, Art is uniquely human. It is has stasis and movement at the same time, and it evolves. What about art created by an elephant or an Ape? I might define that as ‘monkey-art’ or ‘elephant-art’, but it does become art when interpreted by the human eye (note: artist Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’; placing everyday objects into a different setting, or into a different configuration).

So, in a clumsy attempt to answer the first question (and to state in a similar way to the above paragraph): I believe that art is the re-creation and or re-presentation of an object or the manipulation of a place, or the reconfiguration of language or sounds, and/or even actions and routines in a new way through the human filter of experience to make us re-examine these things we take in though our senses, and register them in a new way. Take for example, the “simple” representation of Van Gogh’s “Vase with Twelve Sunflowers” (1888). The sunflowers make a strong anthropomorphic (human-like) image that almost dances with emotion, vitality, and death all at once.

But this is not to say art has to be representational, far from it. One of my favorite artists is the non-objectional abstract field-painter Mark Rothko; artists like Rothko are masters of manipulating the mind’s tendency to make patterns out of the unpatterned and random things seen with our senses. And images and other ways of communicating ideas pick up where words begin to fail describing complex ideas. And the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee often catch my interest. One doesn’t have to have a solid or “intellectual” reason to like a piece of art; I’m sure it’s been said many times before - “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.” is not only good advice on how to look at art, but to remember that labels can get in the way of things. In one of my favorite quotes about music, Duke Ellington says, “There are two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.”

“Art for art’s sake” (not just for the maker, but also for the viewer) is also important, especially now. We so often look without seeing. In an age where we are bombarded with visual information every waking minute of the day. One function of both making and seeing art, is to practice the skill of true observation; to look at a photograph or a painting to stop and actually see, effective art slows down the world that is racing around us down to one moment in time; it engages us and places us into a slightly different dimension from our accepted reality… if only for a brief moment, we forget ourselves.

At the same time, with the visual arts that still image creates within us a mental movement; the mind travels through memories when looking at a familiar old photograph (the clothes, the objects, the people might now cease to exist, but the image still remains). Furthermore, true art stimulates the mind to travel into other regions of our psyche when interpreting something visual that we have not seen before. An effective piece of visual art compels one to see the same static image differently when viewed after a first time, and even repeated viewings; becoming motion in stasis.

As a discipline, art does not just teach us to observe, but also challenges our imagination, it challenges us to ask what it is to be human; and while other disciplines draw on memories and experiences, art helps us to create new ones.

-David A. Roberts IV