Maybe I DO want to be an artist after all!

My first semester in Art School, I came to the thrilling realization that I really am going to be an artist.

Now I am in the middle of my second semester, and last week I had the liberating revelation - I don’t want to be an artist!!!

Many other things perhaps: a photographer, a story teller, an artisan, a designer, perhaps - but art, it’s just too pretentious, restrictive, conceptual, removed from reality and worst of all, it seems to trivialize or even reject the main thing that made me want to make art in the first place – beauty!

I felt a lot better once I freed myself from that short-lived aspiration!

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Spring break – 30,000 feet above the earth, spring break, on my way to LA.

I brought along a slim little book by Robert Adams called “Beauty in Photography – Essays in Defense of Traditional Values”. Robert Adams is a landscape photographer, whose works I know fleetingly.  I checked out the book – actually ordered it from a different library, because the relationship of beauty to art is one of the nuts I have been trying to crack since I started art school.

Robert Adams, I kiss your feet!!! 

I CAN ASPIRE TO BEING AN ARTIST AGAIN! Never have I found in one place so many of the feelings, beliefs and inspirations that made me want to become a photographer and an artist in the first place.

This skinny little book has only been taken out once before – 4 years ago, and yet every other page is folded over to mark a significant passage. For me, several cocktail napkins are scribbled with quotes. Here are a few:

“Successful art rediscovers beauty for us” (p.27)

And he quotes the reviled Steigliz as saying “ Beauty is the universal seen”   AMEN!

On art and social conscience: “Art has social utility. It is designed to give us courage. Society is endangered to the extent that any of us looses faith in meaning, in consequence. Art that can convincingly speak through form for significance bears upon the problem of nihilism and is socially constructive. Restated photography as art does address evil, but does so broadly as it works to convince us of life’s value… the darkness that art combats is the ultimate one, the conclusion that life is without worth and finally better off ended …which is to say that art addresses an inner struggle whereas journalism more often reports on the outward consequences of it.” (p. 70)

Hines, the reformer “wanted to show, he said, both what was bad so we would oppose it, and what was good so we would value it…We feel tremendous gratitude for these paradoxical views (talking of some of Hine's, Lange’s and Evans’ photographs)  - for the way they continue to help us lifelong. When we are young we want art that is filled with bitter facts, because we believe that evil can be overcome if we face it; when we grow older we begin to doubt this optimistic belief, we want art that does not simply reinforce the pain of  our disillusionment. In pictures like those of Hine (and I would add Salgado, Natchway etc) the requirements of young and old are both met; the photographs urge reform, but seem to suggest that the need for it is not the most important thing to be said of life.” P 74

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Robert Adams had a lot to say about art and the search for the original – another theme I have been chewing on since I have been in school.  It seems to me, that here in Art School, and in much of what I see of established contemporary artists, the search for originality can be undermining to art itself.

In response to the question “what’s new?” we can answer with conviction that photography is new, not because it was invented recently and not primarily because of photography’s changing technology…but because photography is by its’ nature forced toward that old job of art – of discovering and revealing meaning within the confusing detail of life. (p. 83)

He quotes from Man Ray: “There is no progress in art any more than there is in making love” p. 88

The artist commits himself to art precisely because he believes that he has seen what others have not…

…New pictures are the only way to avoid exile from himself

….Art has to be reborn (p. 82)