It strike me today looking at some of
Eager Art which are acrylics on canvas, how distant art history makes us feel from what 'true art' is. I don't claim to know what it is, but looking at this particular Toronto 'Artist's' work, I am strike by my lack of association with art.
Let me explain myself a little better before you complain.
It is hard to imagine paintings by the Raphaelites to be honest depiction of daily life. Surely the streets weren't so clean, if only you could smell the air; Surely representation art died when technology allowed reality to be captured on film and duplicated perfectly endlessly, impressionists were the last physical representational artists.
Art ever since then has been 'lost'. It's identity scattered and ill-defined, we squint into the dark hoping to find light, and we look for it so hard that whether it is there or not, we see it. The traditional sense of art has been lost to us since the turn of the 20th century, and ever since then it has been struggling to redefine itself.
Schoeberg, Stravinsky. Bauhaus in Germany looking into the future, while France look to the roots. Today there's a slow but steady movement of contemporary native American, and Cubian artists. Contemporary India is also making a scene of some sort.
I look at EGR's studio... this is how close art has always come to representing the time from wence it came. Urban graffiti creeps onto the canvas, indeed they are 'art' that covers the city whether we acknowledge them or not. Fashion and lifestyle is revealed, in an aesthetic that is unmistsakably here and now. Transfer the same impressions to any other art. I'm not a huge fan of Avant Garde work in the sense that I won't attend every auction that are in town, or try and convince someone that they'd look "nice in your dining hall, adds sophistication". Did you know that many of these work are rented out for Galas and banquets? For an arm and a leg and maybe even half a cow.
I am a fan of them because they force me to try and understand the world that gave birth to it. The world in a certain moment, on a certainly continent; the factors that caused the world to be the way it is in that moment, and the ways it will shape the world that will come after it.
Art never ceased to be a representational form. (Aren't all medium essentially a representational form?) Perhaps we waste too much time working out the semantics of art (and music too, ethnomusicology sometimes I think it's a joke), when we should be spending our efforts to use art to teach, and to learn.
