Underbridge

As in his previous atmospheric photography series, Krall plays upon the notion of survival and urban decay by displaying a type of hyper-real imaging focused on the tranquility and silence amidst a barren urban interior. The viewer is invited to study the landscape in light of the camera's role as witness and creator of truth. Compared to his classmates, Krall has gained relatively little attention; this may change with his latest work. If you stare at his photographs long enough, you may imagine a world without humans.

Zach Krall is currently enrolled as a Junior Photography major at Concordia University Wisconsin. The remainder of his art instruction takes place at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. (Eric Zimmermann)

Finger Painting

-Mommy mommy mommy! April kept up her yelling all the way down the hall, pounding past rooms on her pudgy four year old legs, determined to reach the living room as quickly as possible. There her mother would be, ready to come and see her greatest creation.
-Ever since her father had shown her the picture book of art, April had been constantly thinking of the colors, so bright, covering the pages. Both her mother and father had been pleased to see her obvious interest in the book, so they had taken her to a museum. She had padded past the sculptures and artifacts till they found the room with paintings. Then April had toddled up to one picture after another, craning her neck all the way back or asking Daddy to hold her closer to see all the pictures. She had asked them every question possible, “What is that? Why did the painter do this? Is this a picture of his daughter? Is this a mommy too? Why is this one so old?” And they had been able to answer all the questions; they always could. Each picture had a different story and she had listened with rapt attention to every one.
-April entered the living room and dove to latch onto her mommy’s leg. Her rosy dimpled face lifted up trying to express the complete devotion and love her heart held. Ever since waking up April had turned all her attention onto the task of showing her mommy and daddy how much she loved them. It had taken all morning! And it had been very hard work. She wanted it to be a surprise, so she had done everything all by herself. She had found a cup in a lower cabinet, pushed a chair over to the tall sink and filled her cup with water. When her sticky tape had not let go of her finger she had not gone running for help but sat there persistently trying to pull it off till she had won back her hand. And oh how proud she was of her job! When Daddy got home he would say it was a masterpiece just like he had about the big paintings in the museum.
-Grabbing hold of her mommy’s hand April walked purposefully back to her room, bubbling with anticipation, but not answering her mommy’s questions it had to be a big surprise. She threw open her door with a dramatic shove and stood aside to let mommy look at her greatest work. There certainly was a look of absolute surprise on her mommy’s face and before it went away April was enthusiastically explaining the story of her pictures.
-April had picked her favorite memory when she had gone on a picnic with mommy and daddy. Mommy had picked flowers for her, and daddy had lifted her up high to see a bird’s nest. Every detail, the shining sun, the dancing butterflies, even the crickets jumping away while she ran through the grass, had been included.
-See here you are, those are the flowers you picked! And this is the baby birds living in their egg homes, just like Daddy said! And here…Mommy? April’s excited chatter had faltered at the look of horror which had replaced surprise on her mommy’s face. Her mother’s eyes were not looking at the picture April had colored so carefully; she was looking at all the art supplies strewn on the floor and then at the water color paint, crayons, and colored paper glued to the walls.
-Don’t you like my mastewpiece mommy? It had never occurred to April that maybe Mommy wouldn’t like it. After all, April had made it for her parents using every color and it was better than any of the pictures hanging in the museum.
-Mother opened her mouth and closed it a few times before forcing out a few calm words. April, please go get the soap from under the kitchen sink, I’m going to go get a bucket of water. I need to clean this off before it is too late; I hope it isn’t too late already.
-In absolute confusion April did as she was told. Hadn’t Daddy said that art work was priceless? That even sometimes people didn’t like it when it was made but as it grew older people began to like it? This was art! She had made it especially for Mommy and Daddy and if Mommy cleaned it up, how would Daddy see it?
-April returned to her room with dragging feet, not sure what her mommy was going to do but with a growing fear that all her hard work was about to be wiped away. Mommy was kneeling in front of one of the walls but her dazed eyes didn’t seem able to take in the entire chaotic art project. Mommy picked up the soap and prepared to scrub the wall closest to her when April mustered up a quivering voice “mommy, those are the flowers you gave me.”
-Tears were starting in April’s eyes and she gazed at her Mommy, she had been so sure that Mommy would be more excited about her work than the pictures in the museum. There Mommy hadn’t even let April touch the paintings and she would have been mad if April had splattered water all over those pictures but here she was, about to ruin art.
-A look of sudden understanding crossed her mother’s face and she put the soap down. With a single motion she gathered April into her lap and asking the same questions April had asked in the museum, “What is that? Why did you do this? Is this Mommy right there?” With beams of joy April launched herself into the explanation of her picture once again, grateful that her mother liked her art. (Hannah Payton)

--Medium Enlarged--

“The object of art is to stretch out the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty”
-Ralph Vaughan Williams, 20th century English composer

When we use the term medium in reference to art, we are referring to the physical means through which the artistic idea is expressed—oil paint, pastel, papier-mâché. It is important to realize, however, that these distinctions are not only artificial, but also that they are harmful to art criticism. They obscure the fact that, if a piece is good art, it should transcend its materials, and also they ignore the reality that superficial categories have led to the false hierarchization of the arts. By some critics’ whims, marble is made greater than clay, oil is better than watercolor, and pottery is cast into that abyss known as Crafts. Marble and oils may be more difficult to master, but if there is anything transcendent about Art, then surely it can manifest itself in any material. And if any distinction is to be made according to medium, then let that word refer to the artist who is the true channel between Beauty and the world in which we live. (N. Jordan)

Untitled

God speaks.

That's Him in the crashing waves and in Beethoven's 5th. The cheering crowd and the soaring descant-it's Him you hear. He speaks in the gentle brush of autumn leaves on pavement, through the laughing child. And that's Him in the clamor of congested city streets, in the slurred conversation at a dingy bar. Through the fingers of the guitarist who denies Him, and in the words of the actor who curses His Name, God speaks.

Are you listening? (H. Marie Jordan)

READ.

These are giant letters, taller than a human, tattooed in paint on the bridge-side, in the valley of an urban part of town—an artist has spoken.

Tell me that that is not artwork. READ. It is encouraging the source, the foundation of all beauty and knowledge: Books. Even if it is a command scrawled on the side of a bridge in graffiti? Does it not hold a mirror to life? Does it matter whose life? What is the difference between the mankind who painted the graffiti, and the man-unkind who wrote the book on how to paint like Rembrandt? Tradition? Art is the link to culture. READ. Art creates you even as you create it. This is because it is the soul of human race. Each piece of art represents the varying souls of its creators. Our creations become us, know us, and change us. Through this imitation, art no longer MEANS something, but IS something. Art is past the tangible and ascends into the beyondness that you dare not name. It is instead poured out onto paper or into stone, clay or any other medium that is art: expression driven through the artist. The artist: a clear and deified passageway through which pours all language, dialect, and communication of the universe.

But if art springs from a diminished creature’s soul, mass manufactured to suckle the hive of contemporary souls, it is bad art. Even though it expresses a perversion of a human soul—it lacks the interior of true art. Is its goal knowledge? Or coinage? What is art, ask again? Intellectual intercourse: Human reason consecrated by existence. READ. ART. One reads art by analyzing, attempting to explain what we cannot understand, focusing on the clarity of its definition, but never finding it—for it only exists. (Hannah C.)

The world and everything in it is beautiful.

I love my title: it's exactly the sort of thing that everyone should know, and remember. What I don't like is how people define art. They say that art is something that delights or something that teaches, or something that does this or that; they say what it does, but not what it is. Art is expression, plain and simple. It is people doing things to get what is inside of them, outside. Oh, David, but you must be more specific, you will say. No; that's another thing I don't like about definitions of art and critical approaches—they are the same old joke in a new language: mankind trying to pound the round peg (the mystery and wonder of his existence) into the square hole (his understanding and logic). He always uses a hammer made out of specifics and absolutes. No, I believe that art is expression. But, David, what does that mean?

It means that a simple, pedantic phrase like “I love you” is art. No? Does it move my affections? Does it make me feel good or bad? Does it alter my perspective and mind? What does art do?

It means that the bark of a dog is art. No? Is a sunset not divine art? Mountains rising from the fog? Does man have a monopoly on art?

It means that the commercial jingle I wrote for money is art. No? Did none of my genius, my self, my existence enter into it? Can you say for sure; can I say for sure? Was I not genuine in my desire for money? Is this not greed, primal and selfish worthy to be expressed? Does art only express the noble and good? Is art only itself, and not the context it was sired in?

It means that the soft fantasy fiction, dime-a-dozen, is art. No? Was I not sincere about it? Does it not mean something to me? Does art mean something to everyone, even to all but a few, even to just me? Does this make it art?

I believe that there is a simple beauty in our own existence that we choose not to be aware of. I believe that things created by the infinite cannot be defined finitely. I believe that art is expression, and expression is art, and that that which we call and mean by “art” is merely general area of the spectrum of expression. Its boundaries are blurred, and if you look at them closely enough, they are made of countless, diverse dots that represent you and me and the human race, and these dots form the nebulous "What is remembered" and "What is great." Art is great, true, especially what we call and mean by "art;" but it is simply the more interesting portions of a beautiful, eternal dialogue between the universe and itself. (David Reher)

9 0

9 O’clock on a Saturday produces nothing but staggering ideas and thoughts that generally don’t add up to much other than a shaky knee and a room-spinning, dizzy contribution. Dizzy. I sit and try to focus on something solid. Like an Acid trip. The metaphors floatin by. One suctioned to my face. Another one stuck to the wall. A fistful of salt. No hope now. Forcing me down and filling my gullet to the brim. Spewing out. Over everything. In the muck. There, you’ve said it. Shoot ‘em out of the water with your rap-a-tap-tapping. Blow. Sing it like a line. That gray J-ELLO with its cauliflower pieces nebulously floating through: a pot-luck. Not lucky enough to get something other than three beans in soup. My thoughts, your thoughts, a society of drunkards and intellectuals and side street prophets bull-horning their forecasts to the world. Dizzy. I thought about it. Again. A plague. It. It can mean anything. It can mean me or you or us or them or that or those, but it can never mean It. I can’t speak It. It, there it is again. How many times do we follow Hem.? It. Dizzy. It. I try to define—didn’t use the It—but I only conjure It. A slippery demon that possesses those and destroys others.
It. It. It.
You want Art! Ask me something else.
Art.
He died ten years ago while shaving and underneath the plant that my GrandMum now believes is her bed-mate. Art is that which I try to explain but all I get are five I.B.’s and a dirty cup of H-2-O. I can’t explain Art. I can’t defend it or him or them together. It. He was a chef. A good chef too. He would create things that would slide down their throats—an ooh ahh—and It would become something that, under glass and with a flower on top—prosthetic or not—is now considered Art—not his name but the being itself—beautiful and so REAL. What was art? Is. Three letters. A.R.T. Combined they are something impossible. That slippery demon.
(Justin Weber)

What Art Is, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Run-on: A List

“[T]erminologically, there is always a vacillation—I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete …” —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Art is the highest form of communication (… without communication?). Art defies definition, and can be described only in the grossest generalizations or the minutest specifications, which are rendered useless or meaningless by their respective generality or specificity. Art is creation, reaction, understanding, communion, a progressive bringing together or flinging apart, careful observation and mindless manipulation. Art is beautiful, ugly, shocking, thoughtful, cathartic, shifting, alive. It’s something to believe in, appreciate or ridicule, but never to ignore (or perhaps to ignore? Satie’s “Furniture Music” …). Art is in the psyche of the artist, the reaction to the creation, the transcendent universal language of space and time. (Aside: can we – do we – separate the art from the artist? And what is an artist? Nietzsche says: "Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing." He says: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”)

Art is in words and images and sound, hearing and reading and the love of things strange and unconventional and opposite, bound up in limbs and fibers and pulses, the life blood of humanity.
Art is the nameless unknown generated in the person of the individual experience (Apollo); Art is the nameless unknown generated in collective exhilaration (Dionysus): there is no gap between low and high art; there is no low and high art; art is limitless and defiant of categorization. (Roland Barthes: “… such a labor could not be written. I can only circle such a subject.”) The only parameters, the only definitions of structure and space and abstraction are in the minds of artist and audience (can we make this distinction? Perhaps this should read: “in the minds of people”).

There is meaning where meaning can be found. There is meaning where meaning exists: there is meaning in art, and if there is none, well, then, there is meaning in that as well. In absence. There is art in living and seeing and experiencing; there is art in looking at the sky and walking on the grass; there is art in hearing the grinding of this industrialized planet and art in feeling its struggle and feeling our own struggle; there is art in the cast-off middles and grey ash dusting of everyday life discarded or ignored or taken for granted; art is more than visual or aural or tactile; art is more than living; art is more than communicating; art brings together, art isolates; art can never be known; there is no art, there is only creation and destruction and rebuilding anew in another image.

There you have it, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. From the fingertips of a true child of postmodernism. (Richard Payton)

Note from the Editor

This week’s theme is addressing the question, “What is art?” Among the humanities, this is a vital, and frightening, question. In defining art, we waver perilously between a definition too broad and one too narrow. In attempting to define art, we strive to define the infinite with finite medium and logicWith such matters requiring delicate balance, it is not surprising that seeking a definition of art has raised many discussions and, after many millennia, no answer. Bearing all this in mind begs the question of why: why should we bother to add another trifling footnote to the countless pages devoted to art? Truly, if art were defined down to the last dab of paint, the last musical note, or the last syllable, would it still be art? . A teacher of mine once explained that good music was the proper combination of chaos and form—providing something new and surprising, yet with elements that the reader will understand and recognize. So too with defining art.

Ultimately, it is the task of defining art which forces the artists to define their goals because, quite simply, the goal of any artist is art. In answering the question of what, the artist, while never fully reaching an understanding, comes closer to it. There lies the beauty: art is an ideal never obtained, yet always pursued, and, in striving for the lofty concept of art, the artist exceeds all expectations.