Kitsch and Art

So I was talking to one of my professors the other day, showing him a piece I was going to use as the basis for my final and he asked me if all I was doing was some kind of trickery. To understand the question I suppose I should explain the piece. A metal cylinder, floating horizontally in space, suspended on one end by a black ribbon tied to the ceiling. It is cool because the ribbon is tied to the end, and not in the middle, as you might expect, so the cylinder seems to defy gravity and hovers in space until you realize that a system of counterbalances based on the math of the Archimedes' lever has been employed.

It is kind of like the Matrix. The world we experience does not create an exact image of reality; instead it is a virtual reality generated from sense data filtered through our experience, knowledge, emotion, theories, associations and so on. This is not to say that nothing is real, just that we can never experience reality directly. Still, Our natural instinct to make sense of our perceptions - the desire for order - can be so strong that the obvious can be obscured and the mundane made mysterious, magnifying conjecture into astounding fact. The metal rod seems to float.

(I should add that the work is shown here, as it was to my professor, as "in progress." And that the final work will include and installation of such pieces in a sort of dialog with one another)

This is fertile ground for artist. But one in which we must proceed with caution. It is kitsch to deceive the effects of sensory experience, and still another thing altogether to marry those effects of illusion with the content of the artist’s ideas. Kitsch and art aren’t supposed to go together, at least that is what the famous critic Clement Greenburg insisted in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Greenburg championed the idea of removing kitsch from art because he saw cultural movement like socialism co-opting art, and so he sought to save us, but his paper served mostly to alienate the public from avant-garde art by trying to rid art of anything that smacked of popular culture, artifice or commercialism.

Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" of 1964 tried to reunify kitsch and art by tying kitsch to camp, and suggests the spirit in which we view camp involves seeing the world in terms of its "degree of artifice, of stylization." With its love of exaggeration, of "a seriousness that fails," it often seeks out things that are "old-fashioned, out-of-date, or démodé.” The camp "sensibility" offered a mode of appreciating both kitsch an avant-garde art because of its excessiveness, its role-playing, its overt decoration. Individuals with camp sensibilities could ultimately become sophisticated in the ways of understanding of kitsch and peer through Greenberg's elite group of artists and viewers.

Sontag’s work sounds like and apology to me, one that tries to meet Greenburg half way, and presupposes a critical highbrow point of view in which to exploit kitsch, one must stand at some remove to it. This kind of thinking has kept art divided for some time. I get so tired of hearing people talk about what is high art, what is low, what is fine art, what is craft. What is smart art and what is mere decoration. At some point art is art, and if we are ever to escape the effects of the Enlightenment on art, one that continually seeks to categorize it and refine it, artist are going to have to accept a kind of art that is capable of ravishing the eye, even as it exposes the means by which the ravishment occurs.

(FYI my other cool "eye candy" bit of art involves magnets)