Understanding Modern Art
September 19, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
I had a patient sitting pensively looking at one of my paintings one day, and when I passed by she asked me, “I really like this painting and am trying to figure out what it means.” I started to explain how I designed the pattern and why I chose the colors, then stopped and realized that was not at all what she was driving at. She was asking for a deeper intellectual meaning behind my work. Here is the short of it: there is nothing deeper than what you see.
Perhaps classical art has a narrative behind what you see. Even some modern art has a “meaning”: the Dada movement that poked fun at art and that carried political overtones comes to mind. However, no matter what art is trying to say, ultimately art is intended to appeal more fundamentally to an aesthetic level that does not carry with it any other higher motivations.
When I create my art, I am purely focused on color, shape, pattern, material, and composition. If any meaning comes to it, perhaps when I give it a name I come up with some contrivance that really has no serious meaning but is meant to be more playful. For example, I have this spray painting of drippy white lines on a blue-green background entitled “Nimbus”, and a patient’s husband asked, “Why do you call this Nimbus? It does not look like a cloud but a flat-lined EKG.” Well, that is a nice, positive interpretation compared to my celestially inspired appellation. Nevertheless, I really didn’t care if what I painted resembled a cloud or not. It just sounded cool, and it had some vague resemblance to a cloud in my perception.
I oftentimes hear, “I just don’t get modern art.” What the heck is there to “get”? I don’t like a lot of modern art myself, especially the splashy stuff that looks uncontrolled. I like things a bit more restrained in terms of the color palette and the geometry in most cases. For me, whatever art from whatever epoch, I must relate to it aesthetically. Intellectually is practically irrelevant to me.
I remember I took a summer class on art history in high school and I had to go to the Dallas Museum of Art to stare at this Monet painting of a large green bush sitting in the middle of this lake (no, it was not a waterlilly or a haystack) and I had to write an essay on that painting. Boy, I got pretty creative on that one. Although coming up with interesting intellectual ideas about a painting can be fun, it should be irrelevant to one’s appreciation of the artwork. Historical context (for a history major like me) is a nice adjunct but should not be a prerequisite to enjoying art.
I remember in 9th-grade high school, my English teacher, Dr. Pruitt, talked about how basically everything was art down to the clothes you wear, etc. I almost laughed. Clothes being art? Now, I truly get it. I see art in everything small to big. Perhaps my art is more “graphic art” than traditional painterly efforts. Maybe you can see that in my extensive catalog of logo work. Whatever category you want to append to my art, it is not cerebral but visceral. My favorite artists are Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, and Henri Matisse. I will do a small homage to some of my artistic mentors in coming blogs.