Ignore the painting: Your creative expression isn’t about what you create or about the critique
An article on the most rewarding part of the creative journey. And a peak at one of my other tattoos.
You enter MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, by descending into the Berriedale peninsula cliffs carved out for its purpose. Entering MONA is a descent to the lowest of the three museum levels. The windowless, engulfing mountain stages the largest privately funded museum collection in the Southern Hemisphere. MONA overspills itself into nude winter solstice swims, music and art festivals such as the Winter Feast and Dark Mofo, where it injects itself into the long dark winter evenings of Hobart and surrounds, summoning the hibernating Tasmanians out of their devil caves and into the red lights it erupts in around the city. These provocative scenes have far extended their desire beyond the state, with attendees travelling worldwide to be part of group nudity or festivals that end with burning your fears written and spiked on the Ogoh Ogoh.
Everything MONA is known for pushing the boundaries. If you haven’t found something to be a little offended by, you probably haven’t looked hard enough. The unusual art collection is known to evoke a unique relationship with each visitor. Amongst the Cloaca Professional, a machine by Wim Delvoye that replicates the human digestive system, which needs feeding and will, in turn, excrement daily, and Cunts… and other conversations by Greg Taylor and Friends, an extensive collection of sculpted vulvas, are the more traditionally expected, pieces such as The Sarcophagus of Iret-Heru-Ru, Egypt, circa 600 BC. One of my favourite exhibits walks you around an inscribed cement rectangle as a deep musical hum follows you. You find an entry point on the opposite side inviting you to circle another inner rectangle and another. When you enter the centre rectangle, you look around at the walls, which leads you to look up as you notice movement on the ceiling. Suddenly, you are face to face with yourself upside down, staring back in a mirror. I wasn’t what I expected here. You experience the piece unavoidably in your required dance with it.
We don’t go to see the boring. This is why, whilst MONA leaves most a little shocked and exposed, they would return. Despite MONA obviously exhibiting pieces that are not for everyone, I experience moments of guilt there, as I do when attending any museum, guilt for not wanting to stop and appreciate every piece. I have this self-imposed pressure to appreciate every piece in the displayed collection. In contemplating this inner dilemma and how odd it is, particularly at MONA, where I know the collection will never entirely appeal, designedly so I would say, I have also found a cure.
Museums draw us for different reasons. Yet, as normal as it is for each of us to have differing interests, walking by a piece of art in MONA or any museum doesn’t feel right. So I pause, as briefly as I can, to avoid seeming rude, and force myself to find something to appreciate. The good of this is that art is rarely skin deep–though some pieces at MONA literally are—and pausing reveals hidden treasures in art.
As I last wandered through MONA, I caught myself mid-forced-pause and realised how strange this pressure was as we don’t create art for the audience. Not many care if you don’t enjoy country music, watch old black-and-white horror movies, or don’t want to read romance novels. We understand and accept without hesitation different preferences in these forms of art. Yet, I cannot help but feel an underlying pressure that we should appreciate every piece when visiting an art collection. Could this pressure come from imposing an ego upon art? Only art doesn’t have an ego. That doesn’t stop some from acting a little egotistic in the appreciation of art, but that doesn’t create what isn’t there. Yet, when presented with art cloaked in egotism as a passive audience, we often accept the cloaked egotism as part of the art piece.
Art (and we‘re talking about the kind that doesn’t harm) does a lot of good in the world, such as when used to raise awareness for causes, as a study of history, or when we use it to practice cognitive and fine motor development to name a few. In 2017, the Cloaca Professional was screened for bowel cancer to raise awareness for how easy it is to home-test yourself. However, art’s understated and most significant benefit is giving us a channel to express and explore ourselves. Expression is the oldest form of the journey within. It is listening to our wisdom and exploring all that it is to be human, an expression that is exposed in the value of art. Art matters because we matter. Art allows us to matter in that moment of creation. Your art doesn’t need to matter to anyone else, but if you want it to, and it does, how you had hoped it to, you have struck gold. If you want it to and it is misinterpreted, it can be soul-shattering in how misunderstood you will feel. Making our art public opens our art up and, in turn, ourselves to those who will get involved. When people get involved in art, many do so as if they have ownership or opinion rights when they only have appreciation rights. We do have to accept this part of the journey should we publicise our expressions.
People who are gifted the opportunity to experience another’s art can feel like they get a say in it or a say in the artist’s life, as Daniel Johns experiences. Johns has opened up about his rise to fame at fifteen in the band Silverchair. The intensity of the threat by the public left him requiring twenty-four-hour protection and has led to him leading the life of a recluse to avoid many who still feel they have a right to criticise him and will do so loudly in public should they see him. In the podcast Who is Daniel Johns, he says that he won’t ever perform live again which many voiced their opinion on as if they have a right to expect it. We don’t have a right to expect this of any artist. As art consumers, we can easily overstep the mark, forgetting art is between the artist and their canvas. If we get to enjoy it, that is a privilege, not one we have any right to dictate. Art is influential; when it changes something in us, it becomes part of us. Someone else’s art changing something in us does not give us any rights to their art or them. If we need to express ourselves as a result, we can direct ourselves to create our own art. Art is the vehicle in which we explore and express ourselves. Create and see what comes out. Allow art, amongst all things, to create inspiration. But inspiration isn’t an authority.
Expression and creation are part of us. Remember, when you need to walk by without much attention to an art piece, that art only needs to matter to the artist, and what matters is if it enables the expression they need it to express. Everything else is a bonus. A lot of world-stage-worthy art sits in bedrooms, not desiring a stage. It is no one’s right to demand to see, judge, and experience it. Expression is a crucial ingredient in softening into life. Create for yourself to step along your inner journey. My tenth-grade painting was marked in a system of right and wrong that didn’t include how it helped me express what was going inside for me. How do we start our children in art, focusing on self-expression and turn from that during schooling years to a focus on analysing and critiquing regardless of what it did for the artist? I understand there is a formal, teachable depth to art and that the system is slowly refocusing. But it is hard to see the undeniable, foremost role of art, its channel of expression for the artist, given little value in general critique.
For some, art is creating dinner tonight, which will need eating. Consuming creates the poetic need for another meal to be made tomorrow. It’s a great point to remember to create regularly, with more focus on the regularity of the expressive process. You cannot find room to create again if you keep your arms full of old ideas, and in turn, you deny yourself that expressive outlet. Let go and allow it to be about what it does for you over what comes out. Make it. Eat it. Begin again.
Your creative expression isn’t about what you create or about the critique.
Your creative expression is about the process of creative expression.
It is about the steps on the journey within creation takes you on.
What are your creative outlets, and how do they help you on your inner journey?
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Thanks for this very deeply thought out piece, Ta.
Your analogy of creating art with cooking resonates.....a daily re-creation....it reminds me of the kinds of art that don't last long - sand castles, sculptures and indeed, sand pictures - which only last till the wind or tide eradicate them.
I suspect art is a personal expression of the passion within - once created, even if none sees it, it has done its 'job'. Remember the abundance of plants, flowers, grasses, natural beauties in the world, which flourish, whether or not a human stands ready to admire. Thank you.
Beautiful piece and such a huge reminder about remembering to look inside and discover the riches of our artistic expression form the inside out 💗