reviews, features & interviews
The "Application" of art: an OpEd piece
By roberta
September 29, 2006 · 3 Comments
[Ed. note: This post is in response to my Weekly article on "heat" in the local gallery scene, posted here. In my piece I called the paintings by Mark Gilbert at Klein Art Gallery "applied." Here's the full sentence in which the word appeared:
The works are large and graphic, and while essentially “applied” art (their goal is therapeutic for the patients and illustrative for the viewer), they make me think about why painting is better at communicating transgressive material than photography.]
Post by Dan Schimmel
Dear Roberta, I have been struggling to write a short piece for artblog about Saving Faces because I think it is a unique exhibit that challenges contemporary ideas about art and viewership and at the same time does much to comment on our society and ourselves (and the ever encroaching realities of the world surrounding us). Your September 27 PW article and the longer version posted on artblog seems to have supplied me the launching pad I needed.
Installation shot of Saving Faces at Klein Art Gallery.
Your article(s) referenced four Philadelphia exhibits under the banner, “Heat, and Why It Matters.” I thought this was an honest and probing approach to considering art exhibits against the backdrop of real life experience. But I do take issue with your characterization of the paintings on exhibit at the Klein Gallery.
In your Flickr photos of the exhibit you questioned the paintings of Saving Faces by asking, “but is it art?” I wondered if indeed you were asking the question from a position of doubt or rhetoric. Not that an institution qualifies art, but I can’t resist mentioning that Saving Faces came to Philadelphia via London’s National Portrait Gallery which is currently promoting a large David Hockney exhibit and has in its collection the likes of great painters like Velazquez, Chardin and a whole bunch more of those old and crusty masters of realism.
Saving Faces is an exhibit that covers a lot of ground and has many applications so when you described the paintings in the exhibit as “applied” art (your quotations) I considered the fact that you might be referring to the broad scope of the exhibit with respect to contemporary experience. But I don’t want to be naïve and as both a painter and gallery director, I recognize that “applied” art is art that is marginalized by contemporary standards. As is the word “illustrative,” which you also used to describe the Saving Faces paintings. Again, if rhetorical effect was your intention, I must thank you for this opportunity to take the bait.
Poster describing the Saving Faces project. Click to see it bigger.
I have found that this exhibit does more to reconnect what today’s art world tends to segregate or reduce, and in fact, I find the paintings in this exhibit effect a ‘reconstructive’ experience, not unlike the surgical procedures being documented. Saving Faces delivers an open opportunity to ponder meaning with our mind fully linked to the humanity of our senses. What better application for paint than to address the reality and vulnerability of the human condition. Paint does this quite well, as you astutely pointed out in your PW article. The individuals that posed for the Saving Faces paintings all did so willingly, and look straight at the viewer with unmistakable nobility and courage; which hardly makes for what you described as a “voyeuristic” experience. I view these as face-to-face reckognition that requires the courage and empathy of the viewer to recognize that they are looking at what is most human and therefore shared, vulnerability–and the ability to share it, as these sitters did.
The paintings of Saving Faces were commissioned by Dr. Ian Hutchinson for the purpose of documenting surgical procedures and their potential for patient therapy. But this should not distract the viewer from the broader narrative taking place in this art exhibit. In fact, it is fascinating to consider that these paintings would not have been painted at all if not for the surgeon who commissioned them. One aspect of this exhibit worth considering is its link to the whole of art history of “commissioned” paintings. Again I call attention to Velazquez and those great portraits of the Spanish nobility (inbred with their own deformities). I laugh to myself when I think that Philip IV and his blood line would be the very people today to be the first in line to put themselves under the cutting edge of the most advanced practices of plastic surgery.
Another “application” of the Saving Faces exhibit is that it stirs our emotions and intellect by conjuring up a visceral proximity to the unsettling reality of deformity and disfigurement while opening our experience up to the realm of metaphor; a luxury we as viewers favor over the facts of most of the rest of the world where such conditions are all too real and threatening.
As you must have read, many of the subjects in the Saving Faces were from some of the more impoverished parts of the world. Stepping outside the realm of politics facts suggest that such adverse conditions faced by many regions and peoples of the world, whether mass threat of birth defect or disfigurement caused by work related conditions or war, are directly linked to our own nation’s enduring policies aimed at keeping our populous safe and secure in relative luxury.
Newspaper illustration of contemporary facial deformity.
The Klein Gallery occupies a very novel and ideal location in a public building, the lobby, a true nexus for art and community! The larger narrative of Saving Faces is illustrated well in remarks left by visitors in the gallery comment book. Below are some vital signs.
Unlike photographs or images viewed through a screen, the skin of each Saving Faces painting has the texture and translucency of flesh. I still recall unwrapping each painting (packing tape and bubble wrap) and the fascinating sensation of peeling bandages from a person’s face, very much like a post-operative nurse or a surgeon.
Saving Faces is not an easy exhibit to look at. There is a certain shock value to some of the images, but when the shock wears off there is plenty of substance that opens the viewer to a depth of experience and understanding that I can only characterize as being full and deeply human. Not one that solicits compassion by calculated association to human misfortune, like a half page ad I saw in another public arena, the New York Times (shown above).
The paintings in Saving Faces are deeply personal and empowering in nature. Not because of the stories of the individuals portrayed, but the access these paintings give us to our own story and how we exist in context to a larger world and the disfigured realities we do our best to avoid in our uniquely American way.
Page from Klein Art Gallery comments book showing comments pro and con the exhibit.
I read the gallery comment book every day and talk to the guard, Kim (who has provided great witness to people’s reactions over the past weeks) and have come to interpret the responses (especially the objections) in ways that continue to expand my understanding of the exhibit’s relevance.
The other day Kim told me a young child broke down in tears when she saw the paintings. Her mother’s reaction was to immediately register a complaint at the reception desk and then rush past the gallery space and the paintings without any attempt to explain the images and alleviate the child’s fears. “That mother don’t understand mothering,” Kim exclaimed. “These paintings are real life. They deserve to be seen and explained to children”
If this anecdote doesn’t sum up what I have been trying to say, nothing will. What is art’s ‘application’ but to put us in close range of reality so as to be disturbed, even frightened, or elevated; and have within it the potential to let us observe and understand and address ourselves outside our routine experience and sit in the open-ended realm of meanings so we can come to our own conclusions based on a full experience that engages on all our senses. How many art exhibits do this anymore?
Another page from the comment book.
There is so much more I could write about concerning this exhibit, Saving Faces. The title alone is intriguing to contemplate in context to this culture of appearances that has expanded beyond the personal realm of vanity to compromise the very substance of our culture’s social discourse and perspective. And how this relates to the art world, an applied practice that serves us best when it takes measured steps in course to exploring the human condition rather than taking a distancing effect via intellect to apply itself to social critique and theory. Without the ‘human creature’ (as Walker Percy regards it), today’s art never outlasts its trend or becomes a parody of the condition it claims to fight against, ‘corporate’.
I can’t help but wonder if you consider DaVinci’s masterful studies of anatomy that do more than just illustrate muscle and tissue, “applied” art? I will agree with you on one point. That Facing Faces packs plenty of ‘heat’.
–Dan Schimmel is a painter, frequent artblog contributor and Director of the Klein Art Gallery.
Tags: reviews, features & interviews
The word “applied” didn’t seem too horribly perjorative in this particular context, but I have sertainly seen it used that way often enough (along with “illustrative”, “decorative” ad nauseum ad infinitum). I can see why it got under your skin, Dan! It bugs me for about a billion reasons–the biggest being the tacit non/understanding and misuse of these terms as NEGATIVE.
To paraphrase Louis Pasteur:
There’s no such thing as pure art and applied art–only good art and bad art.
–Love, Judith S.
Judith, you’re right about applied having a negative connotation. I didn’t really mean it as a negative but as a kind of distinction. Dan, I meant to be provocative. And while I disagree with some of what you say I think many folks would disagree with my point of view. To me the Leonardo anatomical drawings –a very good point of comparison–are filtered through the long lens of history and so they are art history. And yet the guy was an inventor too and so they’re working documents that he may have considered scientific and not art at all. They’re quite beautiful no matter what they are.
As for Gilbert’s works he was commissioned to make them–they’re not self-generated. And while there is a history of portrait painting, usually the sitter commissions the works. These feel like they come out of the medical text book tradition of observation, illustration and tutelage. I brought in Lisa Yuskavage as point of comparison because her works, some of which are portraits, are completely self-invented essays on beauty and the contemporary gaze and they originate in her own fascination/obsession/compulsion about the subject. While I thought Gilbert dealt with the subjects with great compassion and empathy I never felt the fascination/obsession/compulsion thing with him. They were very much portraits for hire and a little cool for all that heat. If you know what I mean.
Hi Judith,
I agree that Roberta used the terms in question less pejoratively than the length of my response would suggest. But I took her use of quotation marks and ran with them for the very reasons you go on to identify, because I do believe there are people in the art world who would marginalize that exhibit because of the conditions it grew out of and the medium and technique used to create the imagery in question.
I think it was the GREAT painter, Max Beckmann, who likened great art to the stuff that would hold its own when mortality was staring you down and threatening. He was probably referring to some his experiences in the theater of war, which ultimately led him to a nervous breakdown, opening the spickot to the iincredible flow of paintings he is now known for. Not that art need to be morbid and death-like. What I think he was saying is that it needs to have a certain emotional and existential resonance or reverberation in chambers of our soul to remind us that we are slightly more than fleshy carcasses of comfort control.
I wonder what the response would be to the Saving Faces exhibit if it were hung in a gallery in, say, Baghdad or Beirut.
Hi Roberta,
You bring up good points. And, yes, I know you were being provocative. As am I.
Jenny Saville (http://www.geocities.com/craigsjursen/2002-3.html) is an artist I’d like to throw into the ring when considering the Saving Faces exhibit (and your initial review). And I’d be curious to your response comparing her work (especially the operation table paintings) to Gilbert’s on the merits of what it does, not why or how or for what reasons it was made.
I think Gilbert’s paintings were calculated to be ‘cool’, and I agree with your characteriztion of his approach. Gilbert allows no room for his own emotive expression and attains a far more honest effect. I would argue the objectivity of Gilbert (whether intended or not) does a service to the subject matter. I wouldn’t like those paintings as much if they were ‘hot’. And in an way, I think, therein lies their compassion and empathy.
As for Da Vinci, there’s art history and then there is our informed responses as a result of ‘history’. I agree that at the time of making, those anatomical studies might not have been intended or viewed as ‘art’. But then, much of what informs our view and understanding of art today would fall under that same category if you wanted to apply your argument across the span of culture and history. I do think Gilbert makes artistic choices in the work that go beyond recording and I do think he struggled with issues relevant to ‘art’–how to make a good painting!
I tend to think art can come from anywhere and any circumstance. Some would question whether drawings on skateboards are art. Context is everything and in the end nothing. I think these gazing faces overcome the circumstances of their making. I can think of a lot of trendy forms of expression that will last as long as the newest brand of Nike sneakers last on the store shelf. And then there’s next year’s branding surge.
Not that I don’t appreciate most forms of art and creative activity, no matter how linked to commercial culture it often is these days. I just think our contemporary eye is quick to dismiss things that look conventional and favors fashion and trend, which more often than not, falls short of anything ambitious in intent, other than self-reference and commentary and commerce.
The paintings in Saving Faces, pardon the pun, cut through the surface and clutter of things. There’s nothing really to write about, it’s just paint and faces and flesh. And real persons looking back at you while they allow you to look at them.
What about that great painting by Alice Neel. Speaking of art’s growing relationship with commerical culture; Andy Warhol might even agree with me.
Thanks to both of your for you comments to my comments.
Signing off for now…
Dan