What is Art?

    As I drive from Napa to UC Davis, I think about the question posed by Wayne Thiebaud, “What is art? “  During his class, I can’t join in the discussion;  I am ignorant and know I can’t define it.  

    It’s everything, it’s nothing.  

Personal thinking about the subject -

    When I am in a market, I lift a turnip from a bin; I turn the purple-tipped bulb and see green triangles sprout from the white surface of the cut stem.  I bring the turnip to my kitchen and suspend it on a glass filled with water:   life continues.   Sprouts become leaves: leaves reach from roots.  When could this become art?  In the viewing of the growth, in the telling of the experience, in the painting of the object, in the videographic record of growth in time?  I have only questions, no answers.

    How do we get there from here?  How do we get here from there?  As I speak on the phone, a pencil in my hand, I draw a line, an oval line, and then another line around that oval.  Rendering, I see an avocado.  This shape is like an Egyptian eye.  I draw.  In the shapes, there is a similitude to an egg.  I draw.  The relationship originates from a line:  draw by hand, perceive by  eye.  Is this art?

    What difference does art make?  When does it happen?  How do we know it when we see it?  Answer and argue. 
Well, it’s a feeling. 
You mean art is feeling. 
Well, not exactly. 
Then what is it? 
Show me. 
I can’t. 
Then tell me. 
I can’t. 
Why not? 
Because the words are inadequate.  I can say art is like and give you examples, but even those examples, are they art and who agrees?
 
    Pandora’s Box,  an art exhibit at Walter’s Gallery in Baltimore, relates the ancient Greek perspective of myth and life in one hundred and thirty prized pieces of sculpture, in clay.  Are these pieces art?  Let’s look at a clay pot made in Boetia, in 700 b.c., named the bell-shaped goddess, which is now studied and revered as art.  But this example, if it were used at that time (in 700 b.c.) as a common functional vessel, was it considered art?  Does the distance of time and our limited knowledge of the culture create a reverence that makes the clay pot now unique from the common?  Was the clay pot a template and indeed not unique, but now judged unique, because scholars can derive definitions about art?   

    If this is a valid argument, what then, about now?   Will the now  art, which is considered not valid by the now  scholars be studied by future scholars and declared as art ?  If so then in that future time those future scholars will define this now art as valid?  Cannot we consider art as we make it in the now a record of our being and thinking?

    I get confused when I go so far out.  I have to come back to the center.  Where is the center?  Is it in the avocado, the Egyptian eye, the egg?  Is it the pencil, the hand that holds it, the eye that perceives?  Is it the cluster of wild grapes suspended from twine hanging outside my front door so the mocking birds can peck at them?  Or is it ones heart opening like a rose observing the mocker’s satiety?

    A eucalyptus leaf is more than green.  A tomato sits on a plate and as time and moisture evaporate, that smooth red skin wrinkles.  In my cupped hand, I rub the tomato's wrinkled skin.  My hands remember a similar tactile experience touching my mother's face.  What is art?

    I don’t know what it is that makes my eyes tear when I think about it. 

    I don’t know where I go when I am in it. 
   
    And I don’t know where I’ve been when I come out of it. 
   
    I don’t know if I make it.  But I know I can’t not try.
    
Personal observations copyright 1996-2006 Victoria Allen, Viktorya Allen