Introduction: Art, an Encounter

So, the arts. We are going to encounter, them, eh? What does that mean? How about this:

Notice the reference to an audience? How about us?

Encountering O’Keefe

Here’s our first encounter: Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1936 painting, Summer Days.

Click this image!

Seriously, stop! Before you go on to the next section of our e-text, spend some time with O’Keefe’s painting. Observe. Reflect. Let the work take you where you feel led to go. Consider some core questions about your impressions:

• How do you personally respond?
• What do you notice about the work?
• How does the work compare to your expectations?
• What is the painting doing?

OK, what do you think? You may or may not like the painting. That is not our primary concern. How about this question: are you comfortable with it?

I feel fairly confident that people from many contemporary cultures would feel that, yes, this is what art is supposed to be. It combines apparently realistic images of a cattle skull and flowers with an arid landscape. The skull and flowers are arranged a bit oddly, but if we stop and think, it all makes sense. Images of life arise from earth and lead toward a reminder of mortality. The images seem truly rendered and the themes seem comprehensible.

But is it beautiful? We do expect art to be beautiful, don’t we? And, of course, beauty is a personal matter. Still, those elegant, curved contour lines in the skull, the resonance of its earth tones with the landscape, the bright red and yellow and the patches of sky blue … many an eye will find these elements winsome.

Wait. Have you noticed the assumptions on which our discussion has been based? Art should be beautiful, composing its visual elements in tasteful designs. It should realistically depict visual subjects. Flowers, landscapes and skulls are traditional, appropriate subjects. Visual subjects should lead viewers to reflect on edifying themes. Many a viewer of paintings in an art museum would assume these value-judgments about what art should do.

And notice that these value-judgments are all based on expectations. Our comfort zones arise from works that line up with our expectations. Yes. I understand this piece because it does what I expect it to do.

What we may forget to reflect on is the relative nature of our expectations. We expect what our context, the whole of our life experience leads us to expect.

O’Keefe’s context of origin was rooted in the heady freedom of Modernism and in the desert terrain of New Mexico. Her imagination flourished under the formal freedom found in early 20th Century New York. In the 1930s, she began to paint in Taos, New Mexico, finding inspiration in its arid contours and in the skulls which she collected and worked into her compositions. In her work, O’Keefe fused the modernist fascination with abstract form with a grounding in firm representation of recognizable objects.

This may be why O’Keefe’s work feels more comfortable for many people than are the more baffling modernist experiments of Matisse, Picasso, Rothko, or Pollock. For many of us, our first question on viewing a painting or sculpture is instinctive: What is it? With O’Keefe, we may encounter forms and colors which don’t wholly make sense, but we can generally see visual subjects and, besides, those forms and colors are awfully lovely, aren’t they?

Now let’s ask a further question about our expectations. In what venue will we find a Georgia O’Keefe? Well, in an art museum or gallery, right? Or perhaps in an art book or online gallery. That’s what art is, after all. It’s a composition that, if successful, will hang on a museum wall. People will gather before it and pause, taking it all in.

Art, furthermore, is very, very old, as we will soon see. Yet art museums have only been around for a few hundred years. The Louvre, the first real art museum, opened in Paris in 1682. The British Museum (London, 1753), the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, 1764) and the Uffizi (Florence, 1765) followed in the next century.

Now think about churches. Religious icons. Temples and images serving other religions. Think about art and design in advertising. Political campaign images. Arts has many, many functions reflecting contexts as widely varied as human history. In our encounters with art, we will need to examine our assumptions and at least consider expending our comfort zones.

The Art of Narrative

The word art can be narrowly applied to the so-called plastic arts that present visual images. But the arts is a much wider field including music, dance, drama, photography, cinema, and more.

We will explore literary samplings of Poetry and Narrative (storytelling). Let’s begin with some short excerpts from Ernest Heminway’s 1924 collection of short stories, In Our Time.

Let’s think about Context. These are clearly war stories. How do they compare with your expectations about war stories? The text is pretty easy to understand. But don’t they seem awfully short? And there is something uneasy about that tone. Those sentences seem clipped, constrained. We don’t find either the heroics or the suffering which we usually expect from war stories. How shall we take these narrative bits?

The original publication of in our time was published in Paris in 1924, merely six years after the end of World War I had ended the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians. It contained only 18 short vignettes, snapshots of Hemingway’s combat experiences driving ambulances on the front lines. As we will see in our 7th Module, this time frame subverted the world views of cultures and people around the world. This was a war that killed the very idea of heroic military glory.

We will spend more time with Hemingway’s stories as our course nears its end. For now, though, we can notice some areas in which they challenge our expectations of storytelling:

Vital Questions

Our first encounters with art, O’Keefe and Hemingway, have confronted us with a recognition of the extent to which our responses are influenced by the expectations that we have derived from our contexts’ frames of reference. As we recognize this contextual orientation, we immediately begin to sense a wide array of other contexts, especially those of origin that shape artists’ work. In every encounter with art, we enter a dialogue between the perspective embodied in the work and our own expectations, values, and point of view.

Context, then, will always be a primary, vital question to consider in approaching art. A crucial aspect of Context is Function? What is the artist trying to do in the work, and how is that shaped by context? Hemingway’s war story, for example, has a far different function from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s glorifying ode to British cavalry heroics in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854).

But what, in fact are we approaching? Looking at the O’Keefe, we confront visual subjects and themes. Reading Hemingway, we behold vignettes of combat storytelling. These are the Content presented in the works.

But how are they presented? Art composes its contents from Formal Elements—line, form, color, narration, tone, etc.—arranged in designs that achieve the artist’s intended effect. The question of form is the question of how art conveys and designs its materials.

Context. Content. Form. As we tackle works of art, we will return again and again to these vital questions. They will guide us in opening ourselves to rich encounters with the arts.

References

Heminway, E. (1924). in our time.  Paris, FR: Three Mountain Press. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61085

O’Keefe, G. (1936). Summer Days [Painting].  New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.36520221