INTRODUCTION: HOST
Good evening and welcome to our studio discussion. We are delighted to have with us three speakers who are all eminent in their respective fields of art practice. First we have Robert Kline, distinguished writer and theorist, Conrad Getz the celebrated New York critic, and Claire Cansino writer and contemporary art historian.
For our subject tonight we shall be looking at the work of contemporary artist Harry Koontz. His work is process based and often embraces distressing and burning materials to create work. Drawing and painting with his body and hands, found materials, photography, video and light, constitute some of his current media.
TALK
Conrad Getz: (Critic)
I think it was De Kooning who once said that, “there’s no way of looking at a work of art by itself; it’s not self evident – it needs a lot of talking about; it’s part of a whole man’s life”. Here we have in front of us just this one image. Because of this I would propose that we will only ever perceive a faint echo of this artist’s life and work and as such it is only a myth.
What is it then that we ‘see’ in this myth? We come to realise half shapes in play of before us? How do we process the flat playfulness of these aesthetic forms? Does what is left of our ancient cognitive senses alert us to darkness?
If we could fully recognize the forms we ‘see’ might we get back an image of our known? In these half realised shades of a grey world, can we detect reflections of ones own life events that speak? In the background, pale tints of grey, textures of memories long past, sadness, visible but beyond reach and time. The periphery accentuates our view akin to that of looking through a magnifying lens and further darkening existing distortions.
Can we start to think of this work in a different way……? (Interruption)
Claire Cansino (Historian)
Whilst you were talking Conrad, questions were coming to me also about the image and how intangible it seems, its dimension almost beyond access. One cant quite appreciate just where it exists in space/time/distance, and as such we seem not meant by the artist to be able to pin it down further. But if we start to talk about the abstract concepts of something called ‘duration, event and extension’ then we might find another way into the image. We take time – past, present and future so literally to day, but in a very real sense we can never pin down the present. As soon as we speak, that moment that is present is now already the past…..where has it in which to experience the work of art?
With the passage of a duration comes past and future, yet the passage leaves nothing between the past and future. In the image the artist has staged shadow half – images which seem to be circulating, crossing, going behind and merging. Yet where is the moment in time where this might be possible to occur? Past and future mingle, what has happened and what is going to happen come to co-exist. Here I am, standing on the ground, but my feet are not standing in a world where there is a present moment that is the outcome of the past and the promise of the future. What is lost is the concept of a moment in time……the instant ….it is deprived of all temporal extension.
But if we call the work created by the artist, not just an object/image but an event, then the frame changes. For an event can be a stone – a chunk of space and time. An event is an accident – a moment in time when a human being is in contact with a car and run over. The Great Pyramid is an event by virtue of natures materials being used to create a moment in space /time. The factor we perceive with all events is that there is something going on there. What?….at any instant of any hour or minute, chunks, stones, a corn field…… relations are in motion-vibrating, resonating, reverberating…with the question of the event. In such a way a work of art is an event. A thousand noises are voicing an event.
In our world we so readily assume that things have traditional locations. A stone in this sense could be on the ground near my feet. A corn field at0 my waist. The work of art before my eyes, but how is all this helping me appreciating the artwork you might say?
Something called extension and relata define the event, the stone doesn’t have a simple relation, it has a temporal and spatial extension or put another way it is a chunk of space and time. Like so, the artwork is also a chunk of space and time but which is taking part in a series of complex relations, a stream of events or relata.
C.G: (Interruption)
This theory might be all fine and dandy, but is it not simply a myth too, are we not simply wanting aesthetic judgements along with the exercise of our feelings and senses, appreciating what taste is…….
C.C: (Interruption)
That is precisely what I am talking about, all of those but more. I am defining the relational associations between these criteria. Opening them up as Alfred North Whitehead did first and much earlier than we. I continue, bodies and flesh, bones or stone are all to be found as relata , which are always in motion and moving on or happening now. For a stone, an apple in a bowl, a photograph, are all events entering into composition with one another; relata making relational entities. Relata is also event and every event is extended over by other events ….even two events form an almost impenetrable maze.
Robert Kline: (Theorist)
So what exactly are you saying? Something like that our getting to know an artwork such as we have before us is always going to be limited using conventional methods of criticism. …….
C.C: (Historian)
I am saying that we need to open up all our senses in art appreciation. We look at things, ‘see’ things, experience them in the way we have been socially conditioned to do from birth. These are ordinary skills. We need to cultivate exceptional ones. We need to question, examine and look for the ‘unbeseen’ in new ways. Art requires us to intimately engage with it there.
R.K: (Theorist)
Do we not talk about the same when we mention relata and events. I would talk about purity of idea. In the work we are deliberating over I would want to talk about the illusion of shadow and its perception and how the essence of the artists idea is being related outside the concept of the frame. It could be seen to be relating to the personal shadow as well as the collective shadow. Perhaps reflecting those aspects of our common personal character that we might want to suppress. Equally the collective shadow nature of our nation; the things we are not so proud about and tend not to speak become symbolised with darkness and greyness of the intertwining images which cannot be separated by us. We can almost see this being suggested in the work as the spectres change tone and shape.
C.G: (Critic)
Yes, the critic lives by his or her aesthetic judgements which are immediate, intuitive and involuntary, they are subliminal otherwise they would be purely subjective. A precious freedom lies in the involuntariness of aesthetic judging. This freedom allows us to be surprised, extended, confounded and inconsistent. In this way we are free to like anything good in art and to let art stay open.
We look for purity and reflection which shows that anything we can talk about or point at in a work of art excludes itself from the ‘content’ of the work, from its meaning, its gist, its tenor. Anything that doesn’t belong to its content has to belong to its form. Content is indefinable, unparaphraseable, undiscussable.
A work of art inheres in its content. You know that a work of art has content because it has effect. Summarising, content is quality and vice-versa.
R.K: (Theorist)
We all have different ways of approaching the issues that Harry Kontz’s work has thrown up. I prefer to believe that art reflects the truth of society. If society is failing, (e.g. if laws are unjust), art will reflect this failure; if society is progressing, art will reflect that too. With the exception of the culture (movie) industry which produces art that collaborates with the untruth of society and as such denies art any truth content.
The notion of art having truth content reflects not only what society is not, but also what it could be , and should be. When truth content becomes the central concept in aesthetics, we can say that the semblance of beauty, that is, beauty lost or as it might someday be restored in society but natural beauty is ‘suspended history’………………..
