Amazing lecture, the type I really like: provocative, thoughtful, insightful, and passionate.
Jamie Holman has given us a new and fresh outlook on drawing and art. And debunked some myths.
Many people look at art, especially that art created in the last years, and define it modern (modern is instead already 100 years old – see Duchamp), conceptual (everything is conceptual, and born out of a thought-process – see Kosuth who loved breaking rules already in 1965); without craft or skills (pls, see Hirst and his work on fear and the boundaries between life and death, real and spiritual, good and evil – Anatomy of an Angel, for example); difficult to understand (do we understand everything, anyway? Do we have to understand everything? What about staying in the unknown? see Wermer and her installation of 2015. And if we don’t get it, just let’s stay there and let something come up from within); easy to make (a classical example is Tracey Emin’s My Bed. True: easy to get a bed and chuck it there covered with some stuff. Or is it? Because from coming up with the idea, trying it, testing it, sketching it, talking about it, pondering on it, risking everything for it, having the courage to put yourself out there, and your life, under scrutiny and judgement… not that easy, I would say).
Many people have this nostalgic idea of art as of something that portrays a very fake idea of the past, where the artist has to be struggling so much that he has almost to be dead (no, dead is better). Instead, if I am an artist, a creator, and I am in my studio, and I make something, that something is by definition ART.
No one would ever consider a music conductor or a film director not an artist. Still, not that they do much: they don’t play the music, they haven’t written it; nor they act, or work behind a camera. Same for works of art such as the Sistine Chapel: do we think that Michelangelo did the painting all by himself?
Still, behind all of those works, and more that will follow, you find drawing: the investigative and backbone of all art, not just fine art (!). Anything that resembles an arrangement of lines which determines a form, is a drawing; anything that gives a visual information on something is contained within lines; any image depicted by lines, is a drawing. See following: are they drawings?
Some food for thoughts, then (as per usual, Jamie, and thank you!):
Art is always contemporary
Art is always conceptual
Art is always being experimental
Nothing is new – everything is new
Someone tell me: what is the difference between these photos:
… and this one here:
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