telephone art

It’s true that anyone can be an artist. Of course it can be argued, and I wouldn’t be able to pick a side, that anything with an expression is art. But what about instructed art? Where some person, or some people, are given an idea – with parameters of course – and told to create it. I would say that’s still art. 

Think about it. Take a few moments away from this blog before you continue so really develop a position.

In my opinion, it’s art. The artist receives instructions from their creative mind anyway. The only difference seems to be that instead of the artist’s mind to the artist, it’s the artist’s mind to the artist to whomever decides to act upon the instructions. It’s almost like the game telephone but with art. 

I first received my taste for this type of art from a trip to Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). There was much dedication to the artist Sol LeWitt – an artist who wrote instructions for 2D and 3D art. Mainly they were calculated lines and shape, but ambiguous enough where whoever was recreating the art could personalize it. Oone such piece would be, “5 lines, 6 inches apart, shades of blue, red, green.” There’s a lot of room for such a piece. First, there’s no length or direction to the lines. It could have the span of a vehicle, or of Dostoevsky’s the Idiot. And it never says how the lines are stacked: vertically? horizontally? diagonally? Even with the boundaries the artist has set, there’s still so much creative control. 

 

This comes up because my college, Ithaca College has a very similar display of art going on. I’ve seen a piece where there were 100 red items placed within their separate boxes separated by red tape. A piece where a favorite book, they chose the Catcher in the Rye, was to be recreated larger – I forget the actual dimensions – with different colored markers placed adjacent so during the gallery, people could highlight, underline, cross out, or add little drawings. There was actually one spot where in order to enter the other side, you had to hum a tune before you approached the (because I can’t think of the word I want) worker working the entry way.

And even out of the Handwerker Gallery, there were places all over the campus with instructions. I saw a place with two paddles, paddle A and paddle B, and you have to kill bugs by smacking the two paddles together. Perhaps the most popular was a wishing tree. People wrote wishes on little slips of paper and tied them to leaves. There were so many, it was as if autumn didn’t apply to that tree because the wishes caused the leaves to stay.

If I had a working camera – first world problem – I wouldn’t have flooded this blog, but there would be enough for you, my audience, to get a better idea of what I’ve been going on about. It’s one thing to read about art like this. Without being able to see it, there’s more room to cast doubt. That’s why I wanted you to take those moments to really think about what I was saying. I honestly didn’t even make up my mind that this was art until I started writing this. I accepted it as art because I was told it was. Now I accept it as art because I’ve witnessed it. I didn’t participate in any of them. There was no reason for me to or not to. I’m an artist yes, but, I also like to be part of the audience too.