The Prompt: Rachel Schragis

Rachel:

I have been struggling with this.

It feels like a harking back,

the part of me that has this on the tip of my tongue is fading.

I am petrified it will disappear.

What is art? This makes me stuck.

Some questions I more want to answer:

what could art be?

what is art for?

why should we make it?

Art is naming your own agenda. What will I make? and when and where and why? Lining up your reasons with the practicals of time and space, getting yourself together to make a thing. From this we grow. I see art-making as having an inexhaustible and mostly untapped educational potential. Learning to make art one is proud of is essentially they same thing as learning to be a person you are proud of- to name what you want to achieve, to reach for it, and to find peace in the distance between the reality and the ideal.

There are two products of art: the object and the learning. We have spent forever trying to name what makes the object great, how much it is worth or how it ought to be discussed and ranked. But that learning, that other product, remains unclassified. When I have access to this other product- that is when I know the artist and/or have meaningful access to their process- I find it to be deeply moving. The lessons, the experience, the thrill, the devastation, the satisfaction, the knowledge, the factoids, the feedback that the artist gets as a result of making their creative product is the most moving bundle of intangible something that I can imagine existing, and yet the viewers are usually given very little access to it.

Maybe this does not matter, maybe these beautiful bundles of learning that art makes within its makers are meant to be hidden. If this is true, the language around art ought to shift: artists do not make art for the benefit of society, rather art makes artists for the benefit of society. So we, as artists, have some obligation to push ourselves to make art that will change us. We should lay out projects for ourselves that we are deeply invested in, and we should do them with our everything: brain, heart, body, gut. However we define it, we ought to make things that will inspire us to be better people.

But what about the audience? I am not satisfied with the learning of art being hidden, or even obscured. I want artists not only to strive to make art that moves them, but to try to let others in to what they have learned as much as possible. I am not interested in indirectness, I believe art is challenging enough for the viewer without the artist trying to hold anything back . Art is desperate. Use ever strategy you have: try every angle. every option. use every material. use language. repeat yourself. write an artists statement, a long one aimed at the dumbest people you can imagine. make it so children will get it. Show how you made it. show pictures. hang up your sketches. Put out your journal and a guest book. make your mother sign your guest book. sit next to your artwork and explain it. ask questions, answer questions. try to understand yourself and make yourself understood.

I am self-conscious writing this, because I worry that those who are reading this and know my artwork will laugh a little. Whose artwork or what approach could possibly fulfill these desires besides the one I took last year, where the space within which I was grappling with my ideas about myself in the world was framed as the artwork itself. Yes, this continues to be how I think about making art. It's my own ideal. I interpret my own imperative, that art be about learning, as a call to make art that directly addresses big social and ecological issues of the world today. I struggle with work with more oblique subject matter, but I am excited about this struggle. I do not think abstract work, work about aesthetics or work with indirect content is meaningless or irrelevant, but I feel unsatisfied with it: Almost all art work I see makes me yearn for a good explanation of why the work is worth the materials it takes to make it. It is denial to think that people don't see what a work of art is made out of, and so art can never entirely transcend being about what it is made out of.

And yet, those of us who look at art often forget this. We see paintings as being about whatever the image on the painting is of. Casted or carved figures are not about metal or plaster or stone or wood. Videos don't have to be about video. I am frustrated by this, but also stuck: does this mean I think every artist has to reinvent the wheel? There has to be some way to use the conventions of art history to our own ends, to play within the options of particular media and for that to be enough.

A few times in my life I have seen artwork that speaks directly to my experience as a human being: emotions, sensations, knowledge, worries, or that is in itself an experience that is so unique or moving that it demands to be processed and integrated in to my life afterwards. Most of the time I enjoy art, though, it is via the knowledge I have been given as a student or art and art history. I have the language and the chronology, the recognition, that allows me to access what a work of art is trying to accomplish. It is accessed through the particular privileges of my own life. As trained artists and fortunate, educated people there is a great temptation to use this knowledge set as the launching point for our artwork, and to some extent it is inevitable. I believe that we have an obligation to be conscious of this trend, and to at the very least be able to name how our work is derived from the social/historical construction of art we have inherited and embraced.

I believe that we should try to make art that allows the audience in, that does not assume the viewer has any codebook of art to help them access it, and that makes some acknowlegement of the unnamed learning-product, in the conventional object-product. Doing this requires an acceptance that the mission is impossible, because no one will ever get as much from your work as you do. Maybe so many hold themselves at an arms length from their own work because they are afraid that if they eliminated this distance, they would have to confront the reality that they cannot be fully understood. better not to try. Making art is selfish- it will never do as much for any other person as it does for you. Any potential for giving to others by making artwork is secondary: it lies in the search to make them understand all that you have gotten from your work. You will never achieve this mission, but I believe we should still really try.