Let it Rip; Why Art can take it

The specificity of the studio co-exists with street-art. The trained artist co-exists with the self-taught youtuber. It’s an ecosystem of art and creative expressions enriching us all.

 

This is a text about how art is the most delicate and most robust thing, in need of care as well as freedom.

If artistic exploration is understood as a right to practice and experience art as a part of a society that caters for existential needs, it must be surrounded by a double-sided protection. One side is the funding that give an artist the space the practice requires. The other side of that is the guarantee this gives the society to see, access as much as possible, a vast variety of artistic expressions, to experience the presence of art as a democratic right. It is not the job of the artist but of the politicians to safeguard this.

What happens in an artistic process can be as life-challenging as free-diving. It can be messy, immoral, exuberant, clarifying, subtle and partly disguised for the artist herself.

Art is of value for the exploratory risk it undertakes and the multitude of ways it supports us in experiencing our world. The work of an artist can sometimes be chronicled and sometimes not. To force art to be “good” or “clear” is to deprive it of its force. To protect art is also to protect something delicate, that which is outside of language.

But – artistic practice is also full of creative practices, parts of the whole, that can and should be ripped out and practiced everywhere and by everyone. To draw, dance, act and make music in school, are not artistic practices as such. They are creative languages that can be mixed in with knowledge about group dynamics, personal growth, innovation, care and sustainability. This does not lessen the value of art. And it doesn’t lessen the value of natural science. It does the opposite – cultivating an artistic literacy that can last a lifetime, enabling being an audience and a participant in art and creating ownership over a personal creative practice that can last as long. Art exists in specific places. And everywhere.

*

 The specificity of the studio co-exists with street-art. The trained artist co-exists with the self-taught youtuber. It’s an ecosystem of art and creative expressions enriching us all.

Art is not easily killed. But artists need to eat just as much as any other person. When the oxygen slowly decreases for artistic practice as is the case in many countries, the reactions can become a problem in themselves. The defense of art can turn the defender into a reactionary clinging hard to arguments of what art is not.

That art is free – in the sense that art is not here to illustrate someone’s ideology, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask questions about what its narratives represent. Those questions are not about obedience but quality. Are there perspectives we are missing – not because their inclusion would make us look good but because they would make art more diverse and interesting.

The same thing is true for writing and talking about art through artistic research. Some voices claim that artists are researchers in themselves and therefore there could be no added value to a field of research on art. That is much like arguing that a wet person is an expert on the ocean.

To be explorative and to conduct research are different things. Art is robust enough to benefit from those who chooses to hold up part of what art is doing and making for thorough examination. To venture into the artistic practice with a question about what happens there and to use artistic methods to answer it is to grow the artistic field from within. More ideas, conversations, arguments, examples inside and outside of art makes it stronger. Its value is not residing on keeping it obscured and hidden.

Parts of art and how it is experienced will always be beyond our reach, mysterious and alluring. Part of ourselves is unreachable, an island deep inside us we can not travel to but whos´ presence is felt.

We are much more complex than words can catch up with. But what they can do is light up a space so that the shadows become clearer.

We can´t explain art. But in trying, we can say something about our need for it.