G. Steve Journal

The Gift

One of the reasons, if not the reason, "conceptual art" has never found purchase in my mind is, I think, because of the very presence of the artist as the source of the conceptual puzzle. It seems to me such an obvious conceit and therefore, regardless of scope or complexity, small.

Garrison Kiellor observed, "A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader is obliged to solve." Is it not so for all artistic endeavors?  Does the work register? resonate? provoke or evoke a feeling without our first thinking about it?

Many artists, myself included, sense that there is something more that results from our creative efforts, usually without being able to precisely describe what that "something" may be.

 Lewis Hyde addresses this notion in his book, The Gift: "...along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that "I," the artist, did not make the work."  And, wrote D.H. Lawrence. "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me." I heard this referred to recently as: "....the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearances."

One is almost inclined to believe that trying to pin down this elusive quality of artistic expression may result in the destruction or dissolution of it's power - better not to know.  Perhaps it's akin to the curious physics principle that the very act of quantifying the speed or mass of a subatomic particle actually changes the particle.

Or maybe Louis Armstrong said it best when, asked what's jazz replied: "If you have to ask, you'll never know."

Perception

Reading Jonah Lehrer's book "How We Decide" - not unlike Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller: "Blink" – I'm reminded how much our perceptions of the world are relative.

In one telling experiment, subjects were asked to rate their favorite strawberry jams from among a dozen or so.  Once that had been accomplished, the researchers asked them to then describe what it was that they liked and why one jam was selected over another.  Finally, they were asked once again to rate the jams.  Surprisingly, the results from the first and second trials were very different.

The researchers, and Lehrer, account for this by noting that we use two different parts of the brain for each of these two tasks: in the first one our brains are judging the taste...etc. in a non-analytic way -- gut instinct, one might say.  Actually, the brain is subconsciously processing lots of information in this mode, just not in a way that we are aware of.

In the second trial, when the subjects are asked to defend their choices, the "rational" part of our mental processing steps in and attempts to legitimize the ratings.  However, this causes the jam to be experienced differently, in a more intellectual way, and so the gut instincts  (perhaps we can call them our pre-cognitive impressions)  are second-guessed.

I'm wondering how often this happens when we are contemplating a work of art.  In some cases, it may actually enhance our perception, as when we are informed that the Van Gogh painting before us is the last one he painted before committing suicide.

More often, I'm guessing, our rational mind second-guesses our gut-feeling and the magic is lost.