A slow hunch

For my post today I wanted to reflect upon a portion of a talk by Steven Johnson, not the whole talk but just one portion.  The whole talk is about where good ideas come from and where creativity and innovation exist.  I would highly recommend watching the video, like most ted talks is it about 18 minutes long. He talks a lot about the english the coffee house and how coffee played such a big role in the enlightenment. Good stuff.  But what I wanted to talk about for a few moments starts at 9 min 30 sec.  Johnson talks about what he calls the "slow hunch".  An idea that is not a eureka moment but it is something that exists underneath or behind other ideas for years.

Link to VIDEO

In the coming months we will have great discussions at Art for Lunch. One will be on tattoos one on higher education, but the one that I think I am getting most excited about is about unforeseen visions.  All of the art faculty and staff are going to be discussing ideas that never came to fruition.  So often I look back on my sketchbooks and come across ideas, or images of ideas that have never come to the workbench but have been peeking in and out of my work for some time.  The exhibition "Bookends or Lapjoint" that Darrell Kincer and myself had at the TUSKA center at UK has really set with me in terms of reflection.  It was so interesting to look back and see so many threads I had not seen before. My first performance works dealt with chairs and then no chairs for 5 years. In graduate school I start making performative chairs and some prints about chairs as containers.  Chairs leave for a few years and then I start making chairs as a form of portraiture and hiding things in chairs from Goodwill.  Chairs leave for a few years and my little girl Olive asked me to draw with her and I start drawing a chair, my wife comments "Why is it when anyone asks you to draw something you draw a chair?"

What Makes it Art?

...apparently, a light switch does not. See full story here. The article also gives an excellent recap of the more famous faux pas mistaking art for trash and so forth. These include:

• the 1926 incident when Edward Steichen bought a bronze version of Constantin Brancusi's Bird In Space. The purchase wasn't the problem. But because it didn't look like a bird (i.e., no head, feathers, beak, and so forth) US customs refused to accept it as a work of art, and instead classified it as "a manufacture of metal ... held dutiable at 40%".

Some art has been made, perhaps 'more', famous through its destruction.

• In 2000 a drawing sent to Sotheby's auction house was put through a shredder instead of up for auction. The creator, Lucian Freud, valued at £100,000, was not re-enacting the famous homage to deKooning enacted by a young Rauschenberg (1953), unfortunately. The loss of the Freud drawing was a case of human error.
• As was the case with Gustav Metzger's trash bag, on view at Tate and entitled Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art. The sculpture/installation was mistakenly thrown away by maintenance staff who viewed it as it was, an overflowing trash bag in need of emptying.
• In 2007 an art storage company in London was ordered to compensate a Swiss collector after an Anish Kapoor sculpture was apparently thrown away, mistaken for trash.

We can classify art as a creation that follows or breaks the rules certainly (i.e., if it doesn't look like a bird, it cannot be a bird so therefore, it must be art). This reminds me of Daniel's installation that had been on display for three years, as part of the "Live.Learn.Believe" outdoor sculpture program funded by GC alum, Richard Spears (class of 1957). The sculpture was located on the corner of Jackson and Mulberry and had the appearance of a teeter-totter but was much more intentional and visually interesting than a traditional playground toy. As Daniel and I were looking at his sculpture one day, an elderly man rode by and stopped to ask us about it. He questioned what it was to which we replied that we wanted to know what he thought it was. The gentleman reasoned that it had to be art because it wasn't like another teeter-totter that he'd seen before. In other words, Daniel's work was unfamiliar to this Georgetown resident. Therefore, he classified it and posited that it was art.

Blurring the boundaries between life and art, while a tenet of modernism, also serves to problematize how we think of modern and contemporary art today. As artists-, art historians-, and curators-in- training, what do you think? Where are the boundaries blurred and where are they distinct? Is Dan Flavin's installation art or just a bunch of light tubes?