ART AS ORIENTATION
ART THEORY
Many student artists assume that art is mostly concerned with making pictures of the world. But visual art is a method orienting within the human experience.
Art has served many functions throughout human history. It has commemorated the dead, represented gods, legitimized rulers, transmitted myths, preserved memory, instructed communities with civic values, marked sacred places, celebrated beauty, protested injustice, explored perception, and given form to experiences for which ordinary language is inadequate.
Within traditional theory in the West, Art is an orientation between two poles:
Art is created between two poles: the mathematical and the experiencial. In the Islamic artwork below/left, the circle and square provide the foundation for increasingly complex geometric forms. These shapes carry religious and philosophical meaning as well as mathematical order. In Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion at right, the suffering of Christ brings a human boundary experience to the fore. Both poles are present in every work of art; what varies is their relative emphasis and the way they work together.
Compare this painting by Piera della Francesco to the painting above. The formal geometric shapes and the exact proportions of the figures shows a more mathematical formulation in this painting than in Grunwaldt’s Crucifixion.
This painting by my friend Elizabeth Whrightman, demonstrates an equal fusion of the mathematical and experiential. The composition, framed within rectangles, includes beautiful visual rhythms.
Without giving an exhaustive definition of the symbols she uses, her painting is a boundary experience. Elizabeth sees the sublime within the ordinary and offers the people who see her work, the same experience.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
Cultural context is the world in which the artist works, its social codes and fundamental beliefs.
Consider the three landscapes below. Their differences depend on the style of the individual artist, but more significantly, on the cultural context in which they were painted.
Traditional Chinese landscape painting belongs to an ancient tradition that confirms a cosmic order. No linear perspective is used because perspective depends on a specific time. Here, no individual point of view is expressed. This world reflects Taoist, Confucianism, and Buddhist beliefs. It shows a universal order in which man has an integral part.
Edward Hopper’s landscape expresses an American sense of space that uses linear perspective, which is to say, the specific point of view of a single individual. It expresses space as vast and impersonal. A house sits alone in a landscape sharply divided by light where man-made structures are distinct from nature.
This is a landscape painted by a student of mine who was sent from China to the San Francisco Bay area to go to school. She looked at ancient Chinese landscapes as well as landscapes by Hopper for inspiration. She was influenced by Hopper’s style, but painted a landscape reflecting her own sense of isolation and confusion. She was deeply depressed. All the painted signs give instruction, but none give meaningful direction.
Her depression, that came from being lost in a world she did not understand, is a boundary experience as well as a deeply personal expression in a specific time. In a sense, it is a self-portrait. Unlike sacred landscapes in Chinese art, this is land no one cares about.
A radical change in theory: Postmodern Art
The art pictured below deliberately reject the belief that art carries meaning beyond an isolated human experience. Postmodern art does not reveal meaning so much as demonstrate how easily institutions and money can manufacture it. By denying any shared or transcendent reality, Postmodernism reduces meaning to an arbitrary construction—and therefore, to no meaning.
Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) consists of a banana fastened to a wall with duct tape. Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Blue) (1994–2000) is made from mirror-polished stainless steel with a transparent blue coating. Although both works imitate ordinary, disposable objects, they have been exhibited and sold as objects of extraordinary cultural and financial value.
These works express a central cynicism within Postmodern art: the conviction that enduring beauty, spiritual meaning, and mythological truths are either illusions or outdated beliefs.
Traditional art theory rejects the premise that meaning is merely constructed, unstable, or arbitrary. Though each person expresses a unique point of view, human experience is shaped by archetypal structures that give order to life and reveal what people across different times and cultures have in common. Art gives these shared patterns a particular form, allowing the universal to be recognized through the experience of the individual. Science can describe and measure the physical world, but only the creative arts can tell the human story.
These are five categories I use when teaching students how to evaluate a work of art:
The mandala to the left shows different layers of meaning in a work of art. The categories are not separate from each other but represent a fusion of elements within a single work. The degree to which all these elements are integrated is part of how one evaluates a work of art.
THE MEDIUM
Every medium has a voice. It has particular physical qualities, limitations, associations, and expressive possibilities. Part of learning an art medium is learning what it naturally does well and what it does not. Papier-mâché, for example, would be an inappropriate material for a Civil War monument, while bronze carries qualities of permanence, gravity, and historical significance that make it particularly appropriate for such a task. On the other hand, papier-mâché may be an excellent medium for a Halloween mask, where exaggeration, lightness, humor, and the speed with which it can be used are virtues. Bronze would be considerably less appropriate.
The same principle applies to painting. Watercolor behaves differently from oil paint, tempera, or acrylic. It has its own transparency, fluidity, spontaneity, and limitations. Oil paint permits a different kind of depth, correction, layering, and physical presence. Learning technique, therefore, is not simply learning how to control a material. It is learning to recognize the particular voice of the medium and how that voice can serve the larger purpose of the work.
COMPOSITION
The Theory of Composition concerns the mathematical pole of art creating. Visual elements—line, shape, color, value, texture, space, rhythm, and proportion, —are brought into a mathematical relationship with one another. A painting is not simply a collection of colors and shapes, any more than a piece of music is merely a collection of individual notes. A coherent unity emerges from combining strong rhythms and balanced proportion. The strong rhythms support the expressive power of the work: a figure screaming.
The task of composition is to create the coherence through which separate elements become a single expressive form.
Here the shapes are more numerically precise. Formal shapes (mathematically simple shapes) make the composition. But even in work like the Pieta shown below, mathematical proportions are used to make the work more coherent.
SUBJECT
The subject of a work concerns what the artwork addresses, but subject should not be confused simply with what is depicted. As you may know, this mother and child motif carries other meaning that extends far beyond the objects represented. Subjects in art are underwritten by mythology, religion, history, and personal experience that are embedded within the culture . Subject and function are therefore closely allied. What an artwork represents cannot be entirely separated from a deeper underlying purpose.
Michelangelo, Pietà, c. 1498–1499. Marble.
For this reason, understanding a work of art requires more than identifying its style or technique. A Renaissance altarpiece commissioned by the Church, a royal portrait commissioned by a monarch, and a monument commissioned by a group of merchants all exist within networks of expectations that dictate the final work. Beyond understanding a work’s cultural context, it is wise to ask of any work, “what is this for and who paid for it?”
FUNCTION
Consider this painting for the French Royal Court, of Luis XIV, and another painting commissioned by sober businessmen of Amsterdam. The Dutch were not a monarchy. How different is the way these portraits are painted? Even in the same era, there were strong regional differences in style and in the intentions of those who paid for the work.
One painting represented rule by a king, the other represented the authority of a business class. This was a time when the wealth of the aristocracy was beginning to be eclipsed by the wealth of successful tradesmen. Each group portrayed themselves very differently.
Contrast these two paintings, completed only twenty-four years apart. In Ingres’s portrait, Napoleon appears endowed with divine authority, like Louis XIV before him. The ordered, formal Neoclassical style places the emperor above ordinary citizens. In Delacroix’s Romantic painting, ordinary people become the agents of history, united beneath the figure of Liberty. Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, it carries forward the revolutionary ideals of liberty and resistance to royal power. The paintings serve different functions: one legitimizes imperial authority; the other celebrates the people’s power to challenge it.
The image to the left is Käthe Kollwitz’s etching March of the Weavers, from her cycle A Weavers’ Revolt (1893–97). The subject and function of the work arose from the social and labor conflicts of nineteenth-century Germany. But its meaning, like the meaning in Delecroix’s work, is not limited to that historical setting, just as Delacroix painting was not limited to events of 1830.
The immediate function of the work is to decry the working conditions of the weavers, but its meaning transcends that particular time because it gives form to a human boundary experience: the moment when suffering can no longer be endured and submission becomes resistance. This is an archetypal experience, relevant to human beings in all times, and it is what gives the work its enduring authority.
The value and power of Kollwitz’s work embody precisely the conviction rejected by Postmodern theories: a denial that stable and universal meaning is communicated in visual art.