'Art is hard' and other trite observations of what 'art' really means

Again, love the open-ended assignments. Of course, there was some sort of rigidity, it was either "what is art?" or "what is literacy?" There are still a million and three ways to go about doing this. I wavered a bit on which of the million I three paths I should go down as I stood in the hallway a few doors down from where I sleep and pondered whether I should film my friends sitting there doing art or reading. If I had done literacy, I would have just filmed people reading or studying, spliced in a few images of the words they were reading and then slapped on some loud, ironic soundtrack. Loud and ironic clearly does not equate to literacy in the in physical manifestation of such, but it's nearly as exciting, evocative, and powerful in expressing ideas and communicating them in a manner that will remain unchanged for eternity. Or something like that.

Instead, I filmed people talking about art. Because I have no idea what art is. As an engineer (read: scientist and charlatan) I think that anything that requires technical skill is art. Science is an art. Writing computer code is an art. Those things are just extremely difficult and are brought about by effort, like painting, scuplting, photography, wicker basketry, etc. But what about nature? Is there not a lot of artistry in nature? The arrangement of leaves on a branch, or fields of wildflowers, or penguins in Antarctica? Obviously there is a lot of art in the world. For our purposes though, it's safe to assume that art refers to something technical (hence man-made) and an inherently aesthetic exercise (excluding all the fun explosions and supercomputing you find in science).

Or at least, that's how my subjects defined it. I left the question as simple as the project would suggest: "what is art?" Some were art majors. If they represented some discipline that is not a physical medium, I followed up with "how is [your discipline] art?" Some were reluctant, others more than willing. Some droned on, others skillfully exuded about their practice. Some offered to show me their art. All gave me some insight into something I pretended not to know about. I even filmed some of my friends watching the State of the Union address while one of them strummed on a guitar. In sake of verisimilitude, I simply asked them on the spot without time to prepare statements.

In total, I shot about 25 minutes of footage, and paring it down to less than 3 minutes proved progressively less difficult. After reviewing the shots, I chose the image of my friend Justin writing on what appears to be the lens of the camera as an introduction. This was a technique I used in an earlier project, wherein the camera is placed behind glass and focused in front of the subject on the surface of the glass. This is a good way of simulating the perspective of a whiteboard. Because it visually emphasizes the words being written and the physical process of writing, it exudes a sense of exposition. After this, I chose a shorter transition before a longer interview. It begins with a medium establishing shot of my friend drawing on her arm and then a tighter close-up for detail. My friend then speaks: "Art is expressing creativity" with a slight pause, followed by a rough cut to her laughing at her sentiment, perhaps at the sense of embarrassment from appearing on video. Otherwise, it functions to lessen the seriousness of the whole piece. In contrast, I placed afterwards Emeka's and Zak's more thoughtful response to the question that otherwise has the same message. Only does my friend Kristin offer a different explanation, that "everything in the world is art" in the sense of material and manufactured consumer goods. For parts of the interview, I voiced her over a few images to add some visual examples. From here, I return to Emeka's interview which emphasizes art as a discipline and means of self improvement, and leaves off with the same rhetorical question the piece attempts to answer.

In juxtaposition to this, I put Russ's overreaching answer, that "art's whatever you want it to be," and follow it with Zak's explanation of how he likes to eat tortilla chips. I was almost not going to leave me saying at the end of the clip, "this is art... clearly," but it only bolsters the self-referencing argument that its inclusion tries to make. On one level, exactly how Zak eats a tortilla chip is "art" and the piece that the audience observes is also art. I appropriately finish the piece with Justin's unironic delivery of the concluding lines and finish it with him playing a few well-toned chords. Just as I ended the piece with music, I finished post-production by adding music to the beginning images, Cursive's Art is Hard, which ironically is all about letting go of who you are to get commercial success.

Again, I'm satisfied greatly with the result, especially its coherence. I still don't know what art is, but could ascertain an answer on various levels after repeated viewings. Unfortuantely, the method of presentation didn't allow me to include all the footage I took, and the inherent message differs from that of the aggregate. For one thing, one of my subjects spoke at length about how art reflects the cultural value we assign it. Others gave functional answers, about how art is a method and a medium. A lot of the the interviewees' messages were also mangled in the editing process, as I made liberal use of documentographic "ellipses," or just plain didn't include part of their messages that didn't fit with the overall meaning. Notably, Russ gave a quip along the lines of "an intellect takes a simple idea and makes it difficult. An artist takes a difficult idea and makes it simple" and expressed how art simply communicates those ideas. If anything, I could use that quote to end this journal entry. I leave it up the reader to read that line again and try to mentally digest it.

...and this is how it turned out. Turn up the volume, the levels are kinda low.