213. IS GOOD CONTEXTUAL WHEN IT COMES TO ART? - Aesthetics and Geography
One of my favourite novels is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. However, it took me three attempts to start reading it before I finally got beyond page 42. The first two times I tapped out early, deciding the book was dull and not my cup of tea.
The band, Arcade Fire, released their new album, Pink Elephant, last week. I listened to it on Sunday, while doing some work. It sounded great. I then watched them perform two songs on Saturday Night Live and they sounded great there too. However, on Thursday I decided to listen to the album in the car on my morning commute to work. A mistake! With my full attention on the songs, what had sounded good as background music at the weekend, or had the power of a strong live performance behind it on TV, sounded boring and repetitive. Not a great companion for tedious motorway driving.
Several years ago, 40,000 feet above the ground, I watched and enjoyed two Adam Sandler movies - Grown Ups 2 and Jack and Jill - on a plane. I found them hysterical and laughed loudly in my seat. However, back on the ground, years later, I caught each movie on television late at night. Sitting on my sofa in my lounge at home, they were terrible.
It has long been asked why it is that something on display in an art gallery feels more powerful, and like it is legitimately art, than something perhaps technically superior, or just more interesting, but which sits in someone’s spare room gathering dust. Is it that the art is in the gallery in the first place because of its intrinsic artistic qualities, or is it the placement in the gallery which bestows it with those properties? This Easter, on a visit to New York, I visited many wonderful art museums, but one display at the Guggenheim left me with that classic sensation of thinking: is this really art? Maro Michalakakos’ installation, Oh! Happy Days (Oh! Les Beaux Jours), essentially fabricates the appearance of pink moss growing up the walls. As I walked past a lump of fabric, reminiscent of the time a pipe leaked in my office at home, unseen behind a bookcase, and strange and upsetting mushrooms grew, only to be discovered and horrify us weeks later, I thought how shocking the real fungus had been, how much more powerful, than this artificial facsimile. What a waste of space in the gallery. Except, it has been nearly a month since seeing it and I find myself thinking of it often. The horror of the fungus growing beyond the puddle from the leaking pipe and consuming everything, the way Stephen King’s character, Jordy Verrill met his lonesome death, consumed by “meteor s**t”, in the movie Creepshow. A whole room becoming eaten by, and alive with, an uncanny fungus, like in Bridget Collins’ excellent short story, The Fruiting Body, which I read last Halloween and didn’t think much of, until I found it haunting me in subsequent months, especially when we found those mushrooms behind the bookcase.
Creepshow, by the way, could be considered to be an intentionally terrible movie, based as it is on the trashy EC Horror comics of the 1950s and shot in the style of its campy inspiration. Yet it remains one of my favourites, imprinted on my impressionable young mind at a too-early age, watching it for the first time in the potent darkness of a midnight movie marathon at a friend’s sleepover. I tried convincing my wife it was good, but she was less than impressed. The problem, to my mind, wasn’t the movie. It was the sunny afternoon I tried to show her the movie. The weather and time of day simply wasn’t right for watching a zombie father insist he get his Father’s Day cake from beyond the grave.
Which is all to say that context matters when we open ourselves to art of any kind. These are just snapshots, examples, but there are many more I can point to where something I thought was good once turned out not to be in a different context, and vice versa. And if the context in which you experience the art can affect whether it is perceived as “good” or “bad” art, then surely this suggests that the goodness or badness is not something inherent in the art itself, but in the combination of the object/phenomenon and our experience of that object/phenomenon. And if that is true - which we appear to have compelling evidence of - then it might also follow that anything might be enjoyable, profound, or lauded as a favourite of its kind, given the right circumstances. The only coherent conclusion being to remember, when saying you don’t like someone else’s favourite art, or you think it is “bad”, that it may just be you haven’t experienced it in the right context yet. And that the stuff you think is the best may only be so because of how you first experienced it, not because the goodness was there objectively to be experienced.
This conclusion doesn’t intend to demean our ideas of what we find good or bad in art. Rather it intends to expand our definition. Recognise that the thing we have written off before might only be written off because it was the wrong time or place to receive it. That everything can be given a second chance, or a third, or even a fourth if you are open to seeing what it is that others seem to appreciate but which you cannot, yet, seem to access.
However, we must also remember that part of the context in which we receive art is the context of our selves. While Heraclitus might be right, and we may not be able to step in the exact same river twice, sometimes there are aspects of our selves which simply may not change sufficiently to access something someone else, different from us, might. And that is OK too. Like a colourblind person who must learn to understand that there are certain aesthetic experiences which will not be open to them, perhaps your personal ear will always be tone-deaf when it comes to a certain kind of music, your eyes unable to look kindly upon a certain kind of artistic expression, your mind unable to feel comfortable engaging with certain kinds of ideas. Just as long as we remember that might be an “us” problem and not a problem with the art itself. And it may even be an “us” problem which, with a little time and effort, if we really want to, we might be able to change.
I used to think I just didn’t like ballet. The stuff had never moved me, despite its great cultural appreciation and years of establishing itself as a worthy art form. But the fact of the matter is that my introduction to ballet (no offence to my sister here) was through my younger sister’s ballet lessons when she was a very young child. Endless amateur recitals of inept children were clearly not the best introduction to the form. And even when dragged along to a professional theatre to witness professional ballerinas dance, the context in which I was dragged - the idea of it as dragging - was as something we were doing for my sister, not for me. I remember being switched off before the first dancer even appeared on stage, closing y eyes and going to sleep, happier watching my dreams than this thing I was being forced to do on a Saturday night against my will. At least my dreams were my own.
Could anyone like ballet given such an introduction?
The last time I was made to watch it that I can remember was my sister’s final recital before she aged out. A performance by her school at the Warwick Arts Centre. I remember complaining so much that I was allowed by my parents to miss the show. Sit in the cafe and read a book instead. The memory of that evening, getting lost in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, was a lasting one. I still have no more favourite place for reading than alone in a coffee shop. And much as I loved the Spielberg movie, it just wasn’t the book.
All these years later, however, I am watching the new Amazon Prime series, Étoile, because I love the previous work of the writers and love New York (where half the show is set), and I am finding myself really enjoying the ballet within the show. Even thinking it might be nice to go and see some one day. Probably one of the same shows, good for beginners, that I was dragged to all those years ago.
Context is everything.
As I wrote this piece, I was listening to Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album, Jagged Little Pill. It’s a classic. But probably feels more of a classic to me than it might for others simply because I remember first listening to it on a cassette tape I’d copied from a friend at school, at night, on my walkman, lying in bed. Nothing but me and the music in a darkened room.
For the next few months I listened to the album like that often: going to bed, drifting off to sleep on the waves of these beautiful songs.
As I listen to it now, wide awake and the sun blaring through my window on a sunny Sunday morning, it retains the power of those darkened teenage nights. An old friend I am revisiting which takes me back to a particular time and place.
I know someone else who hates Alanis Morrissette with a passion. While I was communing with her music in this formative way, he was working retail in a shopping centre. One of her hits from the era - Ironic - used to play every hour in the shop he used to work in, selling clothes. He hates everyone who ever featured on that playlist. Music burned into his brain that marked only the ceaseless time suck of a thankless job. The soundtrack to the depression of dead end employment.
It’s not the songs, it’s not the books, it’s not the shows or the paintings…it’s us. It’s the time of day. It’s the people you are with. It’s the place you are receiving it.
So give something you wrote off a while ago a second chance in a different context. You never know: it might become your new favourite.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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