Whenever anyone says "Art is this" or "Art is that" they're
probably just talking through their hat. Nobody knows what
Art is. Nobody even knows if it exists. Nevertheless, I'm
going to lead off with a phrase that became my mantra all
through art school and a couple or three years afterward,
"Art is process, not product."
This might sound puzzling or even wrong. "The Raft of the
Medusa," "Starry Night," "Melancholy and Mystery of a
Street" ... these are all paintings, right? And paintings
are most definitely products, the end result of the
activity, the process if you will, of painting. And if
these paintings aren't Art, then what is?
Well sure. Art is indeed Product, not Process, if you see it
from the viewpoint of the seller of it, the buyer of it, the
art historian, the audience or consumer of it, as distinct
from one who makes it.
But if you make the stuff, like I used to do, you start to
see things differently. You begin to see art more as a
dialogue, or many dialogues ... between yourself and your
contemporaries, and the old masters (to whom you are not fit
to hold a candle), and your teachers, and the books you've
read, and your intractable medium, and your own lived
experience. And somehow you have to distill those endless,
conflicting dialogues into something meaningful that is
uniquely your own.
"A raid on the inarticulate/With shabby equipment always
deteriorating," to quote Mr. Eliot. And the thing you make
is always a failure, though some things are worse than
others, and then it's on to the next one, which you hope
will maybe be slightly less of a failure, or at least fail
in a different way, from which you may learn something. And
little by little, through long practice, you may achieve
consistently better failures though that is by no means
guaranteed.
And in the process of making these failures, these
paintings, you find that they are also making you, because
you have to make choices about what to paint and how to
paint it. It's like you're lost in a labyrinth, choosing
which passage to take. You find yourself asking, what do I
have to say that is uniquely my thing, the truth that I
alone can tell? And if you're honest with yourself, that
can be a pretty humbling question. So you set it aside.
But if you go on making paintings anyway, in time that thing
might reveal itself through sheer dogged persistence, in
that you chose to paint this thing in this way, not that
other thing in some other way, again and again.
After some years of this, you may choose to give it up. Art
is long, life is short, as they say, and at some point you
may find yourself having to choose between them ... or no
longer able to choose, because life has won. But maybe
that's OK, because art has given you something far more
important than the pile of watercolours now stashed away in
your bottom drawer, or the drawings now scattered to the
winds. It's given you a part of yourself, that will last as
long as you do, whether or not you ever take up the brush
again.
Anyone still reading this can be forgiven for wondering if I
have a point to make. Well yes I do, and I'm sure you will
be pleased that it has to do with AI, because everything has
to be about computers somehow, and I haven't mentioned them
yet. And my point is this: most of the discourse I've seen
around the current generation of robot art machines (DALL-E
and its ilk) has been entirely one-sided, art seen from the
side of the audience, the buyers and sellers, not the
makers.
And while not all of that discourse is wrong, there is a
curious emptiness right in the middle of it. Oh woe! The
machines can make pretty pictures better than humans can!
No one ever need paint again! But from the makers'
perspective the pretty pictures were never the point, and
the robots can't touch that. Your process will never be
their process, even if the resulting product should happen
to be identical, which it won't be. Your process gave you
part of yourself that you never knew was there, that maybe
wasn't even there before. Their process gives you nothing
but an image.
Postscript
----------
Now, it's probably pretty obvious that the "you" I've been
addressing here is me, and I've been talking a lot about
painting because that's the kind of art I made, back when I
was making art. But of course painting is only one of
countless possible media, these days. And while whatever
medium you work in will be fundamental to whatever your
process becomes, I am enough of my time to believe it is
possible to make art with anything.
Is it surprising to learn that after all I've just said, I
think it is possible to make art with AI? It shouldn't be.
After all, Duchamp made art with a urinal. What we're
talking about here is embracing difficulty, asking oneself
the hard questions, engaging seriously with the problems of
artmaking, and making that the core of your practice. And
the hard questions are there no matter what medium you work
in.
Listen for them, they come at first as faint whispers
echoing through the labyrinth. In time they may lead you to
whatever truth is yours to tell.
