I Once Hated Contemporary Art

Happy Saturday, folks! 

Over the next year I am publishing a Saturday blog exploring contemporary art from my rural Manitoba artist perspective. I am both an artist and curator living in Woodridge, MB, Treaty 1 Territory. I spend a lot of my personal and professional life making and thinking about the world of contemporary art. Over the next year I hope to make some of these thoughts and practices accessible to a reading audience through this weekly blog.

As an artist and curator, I am passionate about cultural work—whether it is music, writing, performance, visual arts and everything in-between—I love it all. While I value all creative work, my personal favorite is making and sharing contemporary art. As an artist I love the process of bringing something into being, and as a curator I enjoy sharing the work of artists with public audiences. 

I think art in general, and contemporary visual art in particular, is highly relevant to us in a time where we are surrounded by big ideas communicated through visual language. Whether digital or physical, visual language can influence us in ways we are not always conscious of. It is my passion to linger on meaning making, and ask questions. 

I cut my teeth on cultural analysis during my undergraduate degree in liberal arts and then in my professional work in the field of violence prevention. However, it was my degree in fine arts that lifted visual language beyond theoretical analysis and invited me to participate as a maker.

Whether I am making art or experiencing it, regardless of whether I like it or agree with it, I am first of all curious. I want to know why and what?  Why do artists make the decisions we make? And what are the contexts that drive those decisions?

As much as I love contemporary art I also want to confess right away there was a time when I hated it.

Like, right, proper, hated.

Maybe you can relate? Maybe you remember the installation of Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan? Or, put another way, remember when that artist tapped a banana to a wall and called it art, and it sold for $150,000? Wasn’t that absurd?

At one point in my life I not only hated contemporary art, but I thought it was immoral. I was 19 when I first attended the Tate Modern. I remember sitting down in a corridor, feeling nauseous about the so-called “art” I was viewing.  I was offended at the apparent lack of care artist took with their mediums, the veneration of the abject and profane that some displayed, and the loss of any perceivable standard of what is beautiful and meaningful. To my 19-year-old mind, both modern art and contemporary art was a waste of time, space, and money. It simply did not make the cut for what I considered to be worth while and of value.

It has been 20 years since I first set foot in the Tate Modern and felt nauseous. To be fair, sometimes I do still get nauseous when I see some art—but it is for very different reasons! Two decades in and one art degree later, I find all art has something to say when I understand the context and ideas better.

I aim for this writing project to be a place where I can share some of the ideas and contexts around contemporary art–why it is, for example, that an artist might tape a banana to a wall and call it art. Here I invite you to explore the fantastic, sometimes off-putting, often puzzling world of contemporary art with me!