PART SEVENTHE ART WORLD, HIERARCHIES,
COMPARISONS, JURIED SHOWS & FASHIONS. Betty Soarre: Do you spend much time going to galleries? Robert Yates: I do go to museums and galleries. And I enjoy them, but somehow I don't think they are the place for a living art. Art should be out and about, surrounding us everywhere. This would require a revolution in our social purpose, a fundamental questioning of what it is we, as a people, are doing here for the brief time we have to live. B.S.: You question the idea of juried art shows . . . R.Y.: I don't like the arbitrariness of them. It's like playing spin the bottle. I understand the impulse behind them. It's a way of getting work of a uniform quality or subject matter. It's similar in spirit to picking paintings to match the rugs, drapes and sofa. Personal taste for the curators and jurors. If you want to have a limited exhibition, why not become familiar with the art scene, have some artists in mind and organize your show by invitation only? Otherwise, be democratic and open it to everybody. The best group shows around here in recent years, the NOW show and the GO show, were completely open. B.S.: Do you enter juried shows? R.Y.: I used to enter juried shows and was proud when I was accepted, until I realized that in one show I could be (and was) a prize winner, but with work of similar quality I would be rejected from even participating in another show. It was up to the jurors and their questionable good taste. I got to know certain jurors, so after being rejected a few times by one juror, I wouldn't bother to enter a show if he was to decide if I was in. With another juror I would enter with confidence I would be accepted. But this was a big game and had nothing to do with art. The pretence of standards was so arbitrary, and the pride artists felt at being accepted was so unfounded, I gave it up. You know, the "art world" is still full of crap. B.S.: So you don't believe in juried art shows? R.Y.: Well, no, especially the ones that artists have to pay to enter, whether they get accepted or not. I can understand it when a group of participating artists chip in money to cover the costs of invitations and an opening for a show, but I cannot understand organizers of an exhibition charging artists $5 or $10 per piece to enter, and the artists run the risk of being rejected. I will not enter these shows and I would like to see all working artists boycott them. Unfortunately, they are still quite common. I suppose the money raised goes to pay the jurors. Jurors are always paid, but not artists. Framers get paid, curators get paid, newspaper reviewers get paid — the artists, who you might think were the most necessary people in an art exhibition, are always the last to be paid. Before CAR fees were established, the common feeling, even among artists, was that to have the honour of showing your work in a public art gallery is payment enough. As long as art is considered a frill, most artists will find it hard making a living wage, and we will be creating a second-rate society. B.S.: What did you mean when you said earlier that the art world is full of crap? R.Y.: A lot of effort seems to go into developing theories to determine the "best" and most fashionable artists. Juried shows encourage this dubious activity. It seems like a crap shoot. Pure chance. When I became aware I was going to be an artist for life, the National Gallery was acquiring "Brillo" soap boxes. Presumably that was considered by the experts to be the height of our culture's expression of itself. Maybe it was, I'm not arguing with that, but I was not interested. I didn't particularly like looking at them. I still don't. And the juried shows were composed largely of colour-field paintings which were the fashion then. The making of theories is a different discipline than the making of art. To me the art work is what is important. Piece by piece. What the artist or critics have to say about the work is not very important. The artist is of no importance whatsoever. As a human being, of course the artist is important — like everyone else — but the artist or a theory must not come between the viewer and the art object. For a living culture that is to be part of our eternal present, the viewer must experience art first-hand. Otherwise art has no meaning. If the name of a famous artist or some pre-conceived notion makes a painting or a doodle important, we are simply being hoodwinked, and the collections of the galleries are like bubblegum cards. B.S.: But you have studied art history and are, more than most, aware of the importance of certain artists, the ones our culture has called great. In fact, these artists have made our culture. R.Y.: When we believe that one person's scrawl across a piece of paper is meaningful and another's is not, it is personal taste at work, hoping to whet the appetite of private nostalgia, the memory of things we think we know. It's like me claiming that a lock of my daughter's hair is worth saving as something very special but all those clippings on the barber's floor are meaningless. Now, to me that may be true, but these are individual, very personal things, and they should remain that way. To say that for all of us, collectively, the most casual doodle of a very worthwhile artist, like Picasso, is more important than anybody else's — that's like looking at the world through whoopee glasses. Everything is distorted. It makes no sense. Life becomes a circus side show, a hall of mirrors. Every doodle of Picasso is more important than any doodle by anyone else? Get serious. The things we are asked to believe. In a world like this, no wonder there are forgers. When people want to believe things badly enough, they are set up to believe anything. They are both deceived and inviting further deception. I think most thoughtful people suspect that there is not only a possibility, but a probability, that Rembrandt painted paintings which the experts claim are not by Rembrandt, and there are paintings not by Rembrandt which the experts claim as his. The experts seem to get their kicks out of playing these embarrassingly risque games. It reminds me of those dumb yuppy parties I've heard about, where blindfolded men have to feel the legs of all the women and try to guess which one is his wife. B.S.: But there is good art and bad art. You know this more than most. However democratic you may feel, unfortunately what people do is not equal. There is an aristocracy in the making of art. R.Y.: My advice to viewers of art is, forget the artist and come into a direct and immediate relationship with the work. Art is not about arranging things in hierarchical order. It is about seeing. Seeing is something you do, not something you theorize about. The act of seeing is the only truth. B.S.: But we can see some art is better than others. R.Y.: You can see. You can see for yourself, but not for your neighbour. Are comparisons necessary? The act of seeing must be immediate. It has to go straight in. William Blake said we see through the eye, not with it. We must see with our minds and feel with every cell in our bodies. B.S.: But still, like it or lump it, some art is better than others. R.Y.: I have seen Karen Kain dance many times and she was beautiful. Certain movements — maybe a toe fixed in the same pointing position while the rest of her body changes direction entirely — can cause an aesthetic "flash" of a type you get looking at great paintings or sculptures. An understanding that transcends any talking about it. But I have also seen an anonymous young woman walk. It too appeared effortless. In the case I am thinking of right now, she was wearing blue jeans, plaid shirt, running shoes. Sexless clothing. I watched her walk maybe fifty or sixty feet before she disappeared into a convenience store. She was a perfect object of grace, delightful femininity, a healthy animal full of life with no self-consciousness -- just walking, not for art or show, but just walking to get somewhere. She was a creature whose movement delighted me. I had no desire to possess her, but simply enjoyed her presence like horses I have seen running, or whales breaking the surface of the water right beside a boat I was in. A joy to behold. It is true that the dance was presented as art and I had to go through a ritual of sitting with dressed up people after paying money to get in. The walk just happened. It was as free as the wind. I don't know what I am saying. I'm deliberately juxtaposing these two events, but why should I lessen one experience by comparing it to another? Why should I let one experience blind me to the other? When you compare what it is you are looking at right now with something you have seen formerly and then measure against it, you compromise with what is. This is a waste of time. Why do we compartmentalize things and then judge them? And why do we live life as if it was a series of fragmentary jig-saw puzzle pieces instead of feeling the whole at once? We are habitually encouraged and conditioned to see the world through established images. But art should help us break free of that, not become part of our chains. B.S.: I hardly need to ask, but what do you think of fashions in art ? R.Y.: It doesn't matter to me whether it's art, clothing, architecture or lifestyles, politics or economics. If I'm to be aware of fashions, usually I'd rather read about them than make a trek to a gallery to see them. I'd rather hear about somebody's fart than experience it. I guess if it's worth hearing about, it caused a stink. Fashions are like farts. On the one hand, they cause a certain discomfort, but on the other hand, they provide a certain relief. For some reason far beyond me, they're always good for a laugh. Thank God they don't hang around too long. |
PART ONE
Making Art; For Whom & Why PART TWO The Artist, Childhood Influence, Family & Other Artists. PART THREE Education, Relationship to Nature, Artistic Making, Trail Signs. PART FOUR Further Influences & Education, Signatures & Definition Problems. PART FIVE High Art & Folk Art, Snobbery, Colonialism, Roots, Nationalism, Canada. PART SIX Culture, Tradition, Ancestry, The Importance of Art. PART SEVEN The Art World, Hierarchies, Comparisons, Juried Shows & Fashions. PART EIGHT Perception & Conception, Critics, Words & Seeing. PART NINE Art, Beauty, Meaning, Opinions, Judgement. |