Understand Modern Art, Understand innovation

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ANALYSIS, Melbourne, Australia — My recent visit to the Guggenheim show at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne was most informative. But not about art.

The Guggenheim was informative about positive social change (innovation) and our society.

Art of recent years allows us to view the world through artists eyes. And great artists often have eyes and insight ahead of their time.

The most enlightening Guggenheim pieces were from the last 40-odd years. The well-curated Guggenheim exhibit of modernist & post-modernist art; informed visitors like me about inspiration & innovation.

Understanding Modern Art - it’s the ideas!

“A great artist expresses ideas in a pure form, ideas that capture the innovation zeitgeist.”

– 2thinknow^TM Global Innovation Review

Sometimes modern art can be confusing, sometimes banal, sometimes exciting, sometimes pointless and in some cases profoundly enlightening.

Modern art can on some occasions capture the innovation zeitgeist.

And sometimes, confusion is necessary to sail against prevailing thought, and capture hidden ideas. Ideas that are so new they are below the threshold of consciousness.

Artists often react to foresee, forestall and comment on ideas which become innovation, or merely change, in the future.

In other words, great artists can serve as a pre-cursor to human issues and innovation. Artists can foresee paradigm-shifts and ideas so new that thinking or logical examination may not bear them out yet.

In some cases artist’s ideas can be timeless. In other cases artist’s ideas can illuminate history, or a period in time. Often artists illuminate powerful ideas.

For this reason great art sometimes can be best appreciated in hindsight. Then the rest of us catch up with ideas and themes that the artist themselves often don’t fully understand on a conscisous level.

Past masters of innovation and culture

Da Vinci’s sketches were built in a workable form as inventions 300 or more years after his death.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel still has the power to inform us on the human condition with insight.

Personally, I still find Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or David’s Oath of the Horatii some of the most powerful intellectually engaging paintings in favour of a Republic and Democracy.

Sometimes the jumble of new is confused with enlightening, but posterity often sorts that out.

Why is now a good time to get into modern art?

Movements like 1960s Pop Art and others are now more accessible with the passing of time, so the great works become easier to assess and can inform us today.

The ideas of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and Rauschenberg are affecting us today. At the same time, other new artists are pre-cursing great shifts in thinking.

To the Guggenheim - 3 great idea artists & works

What follows are the ideas I found in these pieces. You may find others. Even artists cannot agree about the exact meaning of a piece.

The important thing is to find ideas and inspiration.

Lichtenstein: Preparedness (1968)

This work is a pop-art assemblage of dots, not unlike a single comic book panel exploded to mural size. It’s important to see it at actual size, not just a small reproduction.

The picture is an industrialised series of humans and machines, not unlike a stylized version of Communist art. The picture is overwhelming at full size.

There are messages of: media & state being collapsed, propaganda used as a tool of thought-reduction, how man becomes a consumer or a servant to State, how man is a cog in a wheel of production (sometimes willingly).

Rauschenberg: Untitled (1963)

Rauschenberg’s works of the 60s are often a flat surface of overlapping media images. His works often resemble a collage of painting and objects.

There are messages of: how the media bombard us constantly with overlapping messages, media messages so confusing that meaning becomes detached from images. The collage of images become the meaning.

And how our interpretation and opinion of events is the sum of a variety of messages, not an original interpretation in itself.

The big questions: are our ideas/opinions becoming the sum of fragmented media rather than of logic, true feeling or analysis?

Jeff Koons Sandwiches (2000)

Koons is a great example of an artist whose works have to be seen not discussed merely from small reproductions.

There are messages of: the promises of cheap food, synthetic ideas and a plastic society. How marketing messages can be empty and promise a cheap and artificial existence, but also have some element of simpler desires in them for food & life.

Koons deals with the subliminal triggers of the fake and false, which is nevertheless painted as real & enticing. At the same time he sympathises with the desires we have for safe reassuring packaged products.

The Guggenheim - 1 Emerging Great Ideas Artist

Ann Hamilton Untitled (between Taxonomy and Communion) (1996)

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/media/imageGroups/5/display

A tray of teeth of various shapes, sizes & species on a red oxide table.

Often these works are the most targeted by those who attack modern art.

There are messages of: the timelessness of life (ashes to ashes, dust to dust), a sense of mortality, war, death, but also life (eating & food), as well as multiple time epochs (of human and animal life).

Call me crazy, but I also got a sense of the biblical themes of the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark, and at the same time of a sense of doom yet a sense of reassurance it has all been before us.

So What is a Way to Assess Art’s Role?

Art holds a mirror to us, our societies and our ideas.

Much of that mirror is subliminal, Jungian, Freudian, and below the threshold of the conscious.

A lot of artists are bad at explaining the significance of their work but many of the same artists are significant for their ideas. Sometimes as an artist making the art comes before understanding. Some have described it as drawing ideas out like black oil from a well.

Artists are invariably inconsistent and slightly crazy, but that is what you have to be to reject the orthodoxy of the current time (the earth is flat, disease is the work of bad ju-ju, vampires exist).

Arts and science don’t exist in separate universes, but cultivating an intellect to understand the great ideas is necessary to unite art & science.

And to some extent for that to be in the reach of humane, such greatness must be below the threshold of consciousness.

So much art and so many ideas are rationalized after they are conceived,when in reality the ideas and inspiration came before the rationalization.

Innovation and Contemporary Art

Want to get inspiration? Then think in the language of ideas. Art.

Of course, it’s easier said than done for those who think in the concrete.

Footnote:

The NGV international Guggenheim exhibit is particularly worth seeing. There was a Warhol, an Oldenburg and numerous artists of repute and infamy, but that is not the point.

The NGV Guggenheim was a well-curated show that the juxtaposition of artists make it worth seeing, even if you have seen bigger collections of the same artists in New York, Paris or Berlin.

Artist, great artists almost always are ahead of their time. Sometimes the ‘AHA’ moment an artist can achieve is long after they are dead.

Sometimes you can have an ‘AHA’, if you look at art for the ideas.

And that inspiration can be the first step to innovation.

take care,

Christopher

Connect to Christopher Hire.

Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.

Filing. Innovation
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