The raw and the cooked

A short film about Gabriel Orozco*

 Apologies in advance to current practising artists - myself included - but I feel I need to set this down.

I am alarmed to find myself bored with contemporary art and I want to understand why. The prospect of traipsing around yet another gallery has started to weigh heavy, when once it was an adventure, pursued with passion. I have started to opt out of openings, to not bother to make trips to shows I once would have considered unmissable. It's true, I am older and a little jaded but I think there's another problem. The art is getting worse.

To borrow a term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, I see a lot of raw rather than cooked art these days. By which I mean art for which the raw ingredients have been gathered but which has sidestepped the more challenging process of cooking (thinking and making) that resolves those ingredients into something new.

Perhaps you'll find pure research (photos, objects, drawings, papers) arranged in vitrines or on the gallery walls, which the viewer is invited to study as if marking the artist's homework.

Or, mundane photos / barely edited smartphone footage of little significance, were it not for some accompanying text that explains an idea or reference that occured to the artist but remains unexpressed in the visuals.

Or illustrative paintings / drawings of people or landscapes that in themselves may connote important themes or narratives, but the painter is content to sit back and let the referents and not their own painterly labour do the work.  

Or imitative abstracts (painted or sculpted) that continue to riff on a revolution in art more than 50 years after the fact. 

Or art made to illustrate a doctoral thesis or tick a scientist's funding criteria or meet a museum's engagement agenda or fulfil a property developer's Section 106 requirement. 

Or art made to look like all the other art - clumsy painting; re-assembled painted pallets; fat bundles of stuff on on spindly legs; recycled kitsch; large draped pieces of fabric; random objects culled from the street around an urban studio. 

Or clunky artisanal ceramics, and other badly executed crafts presented with (if we're lucky) a splash of irony.  

Sometimes I see these things, recognise them for what they are and part with hard cash to hang them on my wall or put them on my shelves. Because I like them and think I could live with them. But that's interior design, not art.

Sometimes things can look like any of the above and still be full of important ideas. There are no rules.

But. 

Good art, cooked art, brings together unsuspected content to create new flavours. "What if?" "Why not?" "Fuck that!" It surprises, provokes, confuses, disrupts, asks questions, opens doors, creates awkwardness, angers, unsettles. It might give pleasure, but in a thoroughly overwhelming and disorienting way - like a relentless tickle or a dose of psilocybin, not a stroke of the head. 

It resolves into something that the artist needs to tell the world, consciously or unconsciously. It alters people's minds, their ways of being. In some small way, every piece of real art changes the world; it doesn't just add to the pile of meaningless stuff already in it. 

I understand many artists are battling almost impossible odds to have the time, physical space, head space and cash to make their work. These circumstances do not help artists to generate quality work, and sometimes I feel it's a miracle any art gets made at all. 

Very few of us can make significant, fascinating, provocative art all the time. But some of us, sadly, aren't even trying. 

 *Gabriel Orozco is one of many artists whose work and process I feel hits this high bar. See also https://gabriellehoad.blogspot.com/2011/04/love-and-hate-and-gabriel-orozco.html