March 29, 2016 - 11:46
" Can something be art if it’s made by someone who doesn’t called herself an artist and who doesn’t even know what art is? " This line appears at the beginning of the BBC video, and similar statements reoccur in different readings. I couldn't help but recall the story about fish an happiness, where one person saw fish swimming and claimed that fish were happy. The second person asked, "You are not fish, so how do you know if they are truly happy?" The first person responded, "You are not me, so how do you know that I don't know? " And that is my question. It is perhaps a trivial one, but the assumed ignorance bothers me. Even if no communication is assessible, can the appreciation and recognition of art be innate?
Reading Introducing Disability Aesthetics and A Training Ground for Untrained artists, I found the two authors to be in conversations in each other:
"Artists do not control--nor should they--the meaning of their works, and intentions are doubtful as a standard of interpretation because they are variable often forgotten, improperly executed, inscrutable to other people, and marred by accidents in aesthetic production. If intention has uncertain value for interpretation, why should it be used to determine whether an action or object is a work of art ?"
"The awareness of an art market that judges your work, subjectively and perhaps unfairly, can only cloud the motivations that lead Creative Growth artists to do the work to do. It leads to greed, disappointment and envy; also to affirmation, encouragement and pride. It leads, in other words, to life."
The connection I saw is the lack of control and vulnerability to public as one embraces reality. Yet it is this reality that distinguishes disabilty aesthetics from regular art, in its purity of expression and lack of pretensions, in its resilience to normative standard and its power to question the definition of beauty. Perhaps artists who don't make art for a specific intention gives their artwork its own life and story. After all, the artwork often speaks for itself. And in liberating the artwork by de-emphasizing the artists' own stories, perhaps the artists themselves are liberated from the usual pity glances and prejudice. From the many intertpretations of Judy Scott's art, I sense that the cocoons she made have life emerging out of them, telling her story confinement in institutions as well as many other disabled or nondisabled people's beautiful, meaningful lives.