Michael Autumn is as much interested in philosophy and psychology as he is in art, and describes some of his art as visual philosophy. He writes an essay about most of his work to explain the raison d'etre and ideas within and behind them. Philosophy and psychology are subjects close to his heart - having read them at university. He has much to say on philosophy, psychology, art, aesthetics, etc. and plans to publish a book about these. Here is a snippet of his views:
Why is so much modern art crap?
We Should Be True To Our Senses
Art History And What Sort of Art Artists Should Be Producing Today
There is plenty of ‘art’ in the world which literally anyone could do. Huge amounts of money are paid for some. What people call art and how much they are prepared to pay for it is entirely up to them. We live in a reasonably free world and we are all entitled to our views. Here I am merely expressing my views.
In 1917 a French ‘artist’ by the name of Marcel Duchamp took a urinal designed by an anonymous person, signed it ‘R. Mutt’, and presented it as a work of his art (entitled ‘Fountain’). He claimed that anything the artist produces is art. The fact is this man wasn’t ignored, dismissed as a nutter, and forgotten. It is claimed that he has had the biggest influence on twentieth century art of any artist.
If we say art doesn’t have to be made, or if it is, then it doesn’t have to be made by the artist him or herself, then anything is art and everything is art. In musical terms this would mean that any sound, including no sound, is music. An outcome of such a loose definition of art (or music) is that anyone can lay claim to anything as art - even if someone else made it! Moreover, they can claim it as their art! So we are all artists and everything is art. For reasons that are beyond me, some people don’t think this is absurd! Some gallery and museum curators seem to think this definition of art is not only acceptable but that this sort of ‘art’ is superior to what may be called commonsense art. Art for them, it seems, must be new: it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it has not being done before or doesn’t look like anything that has gone before. That sounds like a perfect definition for the word ‘new’, but do we want to confuse this with the word ‘art’…?
Some people seem to think that being absurd or shocking is what art is all about. I think the art world is confused and in disarray. When you can walk into an art gallery like Tate Modern, London, and literally not know what is meant to be art and what is just normal reality - like chairs, bins, ladders, scaffolding, fire extinguishers, a room being decorated - then the purpose of going to a gallery in the first place gets lost. It’s a giggle. Is it a game…?
What do I think art is? Art is something totally unnecessary and non-functional, that is made, and made for a specific purpose. The purpose depends on economic, cultural, and historic factors. Is it for a particular patron or is it aimed at a specific market? The culture in which the work is done could affect the subject matter (scared or secular for example), politics (for example war art), norms and styles of art. The period in which the work is done could affect the materials and techniques available, as well as the norms and styles of art. Generally art is to express specific ideas or emotions, and generally, although not necessarily, to provide an aesthetic experience.
The artist is in control to a very large degree. To make art you start with nothing and intentionally produce something - using only raw materials and skill. For example, starting with a blank canvas, or block of Carrera marble, or blank musical score, or blank pages of a book – this for me is a precondition of art. But it is not the whole story. A blank starting point is necessary for complete freedom of expression.
Art is also about what you choose to express, and your control over the medium/s you are working in. There is a skill element: how well you have mastered the medium/s you have worked in (could a craftsperson have done better?); how much time and effort has gone into it (more is generally better than less); how easy would it be for someone else to do (difficult is generally better than easy)? Most people can paint a child-like picture of a horse, but can many people paint horses as wells as the great English artist George Stubbs (1724-1806)?
There is a thin line between art and craftsmanship (or craftspersonship to be politically correct?!). An artist should be a craftsperson. This is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. A craftsperson is not necessarily an artist. A good craftsperson should be able to make, copy, or reproduce something in their medium/s very well, and it is quite simple to determine how well it has been done. On the other hand an artist is a person who comes up with the original idea, the whole reason for doing it in the first place – all the emotions, inspiration, angst, love, aspiration, aesthetics, composition, scale – indeed the artist usually makes all these decisions because he/she should ideally be free to do so, and freely chooses to do so. This is in stark contrast to the craftsperson – where the process is quite mechanical, albeit possibly very skillful.
A great deal of work is called ‘art’ – when I think it is really craftsmanship: there has been no artistic process, the ‘artist’ has merely copied something to the best of their ability – for example painting or drawing a landscape or a bowl of fruit, performing a piano recital, or acting a character in a Shakespearean play. Or if this reproductive activity is to be called ‘art’ then I think we should have a special word for the original, imaginative, inspired art - a much more scarce and interesting human endeavour…
How do I judge art? I have a few criteria. How skillfully has the piece been created? How well have the materials being used and expressed? How beautiful is it - does it have any aesthetic merit? Does it give pleasure? Generally simple is better than complex. How original is it? How interesting are the ideas expressed within, and how eloquently have they been expressed for the medium used in relation to other works in the genre? How well has the finished product or performance been received? Does it evoke the kind of response it was intended to? Finally, does it have anything new to say? That is new in its place in history. For many of these criteria we have to judge art in relation to its history, culture, and geography – the time and place it was created in.
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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
January 2006
Beauty: ‘That quality or combination of qualities which delights the senses or mental faculties; esp that combination of shape, colour, and proportion which is pleasing to the eye.’ - New Shorter Oxford Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861271-0
Beauty or aesthetics is a subject very dear to my heart, but I will not go into it here in detail because it would be too much of a digression (I will be publishing a book about this and similar topics). I would just like to make one simple point: without necessarily being able to define it, most of us appear to agree on what is beautiful – be it a landscape, a piece of music, flowers, a caress, etc. We have remarkable agreement in what we consider beautiful in human faces and bodies – even across cultural and ethnic boundaries. That is not to say we don’t have our own individual tastes and favourites, but our general agreement on what we consider beautiful is considerably stronger than our disagreement. The same applies to disgust and pain… I suggest therefore, that beauty has some deep biological and evolutionary basis, and that it has an objective quality - contrary, I think, to popular belief...
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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
January 2006
We Should Be True To Our Senses
I was once on a flight from London to New York (on a personal photo shoot as it happens) and had the good fortune of sitting next to Anita Zabludowicz - a prominent collector of contemporary art. This was a very fortuitous chance encounter for me, and a real privilege. During our conversation I asked Anita what she looked for in contemporary art. Regretfully I cannot remember exactly what her reply was, but essentially she said that it had to be new. Whilst I would agree with this to a certain extent, it was what she didn't say that intrigued me. She didn't say it had to be beautiful, skillfully done, of outstanding quality - or anything along those lines. That is not to say she doesn't think art should be these things - just that she didn't mention them...
Let us consider newness in relation to something else. I think most of us like to try out new food, but we probably wouldn't take the view that all the food we eat in the future must be new. And just because it is new does not mean that we are going to like it. Whether we like a meal or not is actually out of our control: it is a natural and spontaneous reaction between the chemicals in the food, our taste buds, our olfactory (smell) system, and our brain. We cannot decide if we are going to like a meal or not.
Beethoven once said of his music that he could communicate directly with people's hearts - meaning their emotions. He knew human nature well enough to know that we all respond in a predictable way to certain types of music. His music could make us feel sorrow, joy, pride, reflective - whatever he choose - and film score composers today use the same principles all the time (Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone to name a few). We respond automatically to harmony, melody, and rhythm. It is a natural and spontaneous response to sound waves being converted to electrical signals in our ears and the brain's reaction to them. We cannot decide if we are going to like what we hear or not.
This begs the question: why do some modern day contemporary composers create music that they know will probably be displeasing to the vast majority of us? They even have words for it: atonal and discordant music! Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, and Nicholas Cage - to name a few twentieth century composers of this negative, atonal, discordant genre - were striving for newness almost for the sake of newness - forgetting what music is for: to give pleasure, to stir the emotions in us. This is what was said by the eminent contemporary musicologist William Thomson about Schönberg, the father of atonal music:
What was Schönberg's error?
(from the book Schönberg's Error by William Thomson)"Renunciation of even the primal tonal archetypes bequeathed him by his full musical heritage, believing all the while that he was rejecting only the major-minor conventions of his immediate past. He did not understand the full ramifications of his renunciation, a denial that if followed rigorously entailed abandonment of the full range of structuring potentials of pitch. His transformation of music was motivated by the same hubris that in the world's myths spells the tragic downfall of heroes who try to call the shots of destiny.
"Schönberg thought he was fueling music's flight to the next plateau, in its ascent toward a musical heaven. He was in reality only fueling the ambitions of a singularly enormous talent and establishing a brief, strange interlude in an art's checkered history. It is true, as some contemporaries have said, that "he showed us the way." But, some eighty years later, we must recognize that his way fell short of becoming the next Golden Age so anxiously sought during the beginning of the twentieth century. Nor was it the inexorable "way" that music's hop scotching development had pointed toward in the long haul of history. As evolution, it was an ill-conceived , though passionately propagandized, mutation. It was an achieving far more radical than Schönberg dreamed."
I think such discordant music will be very rarely played, quickly forgotten, and will crop up in academic circles only. The same goes for a huge amount of contemporary art...
It is as if pleasure is out-dated, it is time we had a period of displeasure! Isn't this tantamount to saying you have enjoyed food for too long now - now it is time not to enjoy it and eat dirt?! I think artist neglect human senses and emotions at their peril...
Art should be made to be appreciated at a superficial level at least. Deeper dimensions add to its cultural value, but this should be of secondary importance. Most viewers or listeners are unsophisticated and/or they do not have the time or inclination to delve below the surface. Good art communicates directly to everyone at the level of the basic senses and emotions.
Is there too much pressure in the arts to be original - as opposed to simply good...?
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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
January 2006
Art is primarily created by the imagination of the artist. Photographs are created by electro-mechanical devices. Photography is the precise reproduction of a two ( possibly three, or four) dimensional image of reality. I am an artist and a photographer, and I like some my art to look like photographs because I am so impressed by reality. Just like fact is often more interesting than fiction, reality is often more interesting and beautiful that imitation. So on the one hand some of my art I create to look like photographs; and on the other I am happy to share my love of the visual world through simple photographs (albeit invariably with subjective alterations/enhancements).
Rightly or wrongly, I think the generally perceived wisdom is that photography is easy and art is hard or more skillful. Consequently culturally art is generally more valued than photography. Whilst this obviously has a lot to do with the reproducibility of photographs and the often uniqueness of art, I think it is fair to say that even if only one photograph could be produced - for example polaroids - art would generally still be valued more highly than photography. I say generally, because there are exceptions, and society is slowly wakening up to the value of really good photography. (Of course there is a lot of "bad" art with little or no value, and the same applies to photography...)
On the subject of skill and value, I would like to make the point that a lot of so-called "art" could have been done by young children with very basic materials - paper, paint, and a paint brush - whereas even the most basic photograph requires much more complex equipment - a camera, processing (until the digital age dawned), and a printer - several steps (take the picture, process it, print it), and training in the use of the equipment...
Some of my art could be described as photo-idealism, or photo-surrealism, in that they look like photographs. However, the arrangement and presence of certain, sometimes unlikely, items may seem too good to be true. For example the existence of birds, animals, and insects in some pictures - to say nothing of their very convenient placement... Or the apparent transformation of people into objects... In many ways this is what I am striving to achieve, however, I'm concerned about the term "photo" because of its often negative or cheap connotations.
I think it is the responsibility of the artist to do the best they can with their time in history - in terms of knowledge, materials and techniques. This means using any tools and techniques that will help them produce better work or to do it more quickly than otherwise. Cave people used different colour earths and cave walls because they had no other choice. However, throughout history new materials and techniques have evolved, at different times in different parts of the world, and artists have progressively had an increasing range of options to choose from. Much of what was attempted in the past was as faithfully as possible to reproduce reality. Techniques like ray-tracing - using Alberti's "Artist Glass" (dating back as far a the mid fifteenth century); copying using a grid - Alberti's Grid or "Veil" (fifteenth century); and devices like the camera lucida (early to mid nineteenth century) and obscura (from the sixteenth century onwards) were employed by the likes of Caneletto and Vermeer, to name just two - to help them achieve that faithful reproduction objective. There is no doubt in my mind that these two artists and many more besides would have used a camera of the modern variety if they were available in their day...
But it is not the tool that makes the art. A tool is just a tool. A camera is a complex heap of metal, electronics, and glass - and is incapable of selection, composition, timing, editing. Hundreds of people can be given the same camera, but few will make art. Likewise, hundreds of people can have a piano, but very few are composers. And fewer still are good composers. Modern day digital music technology can help the composer by making editing easier and writing down the music, being able to hear bars played by different instruments and to hear a whole orchestra - without leaving his or her study. However, the actual creative process remains unchanged: it is as uncontrollable and mysterious as ever...
I take photographs - like most people. I have a long and great affinity with photography, and some, in view of the equipment I have and the time I spend on it, consider me a fanatic or a perfectionist. Yes, I shoot probably more deliberately and diligently than most people, but that is simply because I really, really, want to capture as accurately as I can, what I can see. Often I take photographs because what I see I just want to capture as well as I can. I don't want to change it at all. I specifically do not want to change it at all. I'm impressed and inspired by what my eyes can see, and that, in and of itself, is what amazes me.
However, I am all too aware of photography's limitations and often I am frustrated by this because I cannot capture what I want to. This is where art comes in...
I use photography for two purposes. One is simple photography - capture something amazing that I can see. The other is to make raw material for my art.
To capture what I can see can be a lengthy process in itself because of technical limitations that I want to overcome. For example the dynamic range of film (digital or celluloid) often cannot capture extremes of light and dark, especially if both are present in the scene. Moreover, certain corrections for perspective, colour, tonal range, and composition might have to be made. All this can be done after the shoot on the computer.
In terms of digital art I can use as much freehand work and as many photographs as necessary. On average I think I spend 200 hours (20 ten-hour days) or more per picture. And I use the most powerful computers and the most sophisticated software.
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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
December 2006
Why is so much modern art crap?
Is it only art journalists, academics, and contemporary art gallery owners, who like what most people would call, and sometimes literally is, crap - aka contemporary "art"? I am, of course, referring to the anyone-could-do-that! variety of contemporary art. I certainly don't wish to dismiss the whole of contemporary art, not least because I am a contemporary artist myself.
(There seems to be a similar trend going in contemporary classical music as well, but I am not qualified to talk about this.)
Maybe I'm weird, getting old, or out of touch - but I simply don't understand this growing trend towards producing less and less accessible and aesthetically pleasing art - especially the sort that seems unfinished, rushed, scruffy, disdainful, and literally anyone could do (who has the physical capacity to do so). This sort of "art" goes against my senses, aesthetics, and comprehension of human nature.
Newness, for the sake of it, is very easy. Take it from me: as an artist, philosopher, psychologist, and someone interested in the history of art - I could come up with new ideas every five minutes. They would be thought-provoking, but they would look like rubbish, would not enhance the viewer's lives in any way - just like so much modern "art". In fact it might even depress them.
I choose not to do the easy. I choose to be faithful to my own sense of aesthetics and value. And, believe me, it is much harder...
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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
December 2006
Art History And What Sort of Art Artists Should Be Producing Today