Translator: Betty C Reviewer: Robert Tucker
You ever look at a work of art,
like a giant chalk sculpture on the ground,
or a pile of candy on the floor,
and think to yourself, "So, this is art?
What exactly is the purpose of this,
and, more importantly, why should I care?"
Well, before we start having this conversation,
I just want to talk about exactly what I mean today
when I use the word "art."
I'm specifically addressing the discipline of the fine arts
as opposed to applied arts, performance arts, or the liberal arts.
But, as I hope you'll come to realize
throughout the course of this conversation,
that the fine arts is actually a discipline
that's very interdisciplinary,
and its ideas tend to spill over into many other fields anyway.
So, for the past three years,
I've been volunteering as an art gallery docent
at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
And some of the things I hear most from visitors
is that they have a hard time figuring out exactly
how they should engage with art,
what they can do to understand art better,
and, more importantly, what they should be getting out of the experience.
Well statistically, actually, art museums have been experiencing a decline
in visitor attendance for decades.
Research shows
that this trend is continuing in most major institutions.
There have also been significant declines
in arts- and crafts-related fairs and festivals,
and research shows that over one third of museum attendees
are actually over the age of 60,
and now less than 10% of museum and gallery attendance
is composed of people under the age of 30.
So, I wonder
why does the younger generations,
specifically millennials,
seem to have such disengagement with the fine arts?
Is it because we feel like
art institutions traditionally are stuffy and old?
Or do people tend to think
that art inherently is elitist and exclusive?
And then I ask: Is this still the case?
And can this generation of people
redefine the public's relationship with the art world?
Because let's face it,
today an art piece can be anything
from a public performance to a community event
to a social media posting.
We need to stop looking at art as just something somebody else creates
that we later just go look at.
The art world, we need to realize,
is something that we're all actively participating in,
contributing to, and reshaping over time.
So, how do we contribute? What can we do?
Let's go back to what I mentioned earlier
about how some visitors feel
that they have a hard time engaging with art.
A lot of this is due to the fact
that art, many people feel, specifically contemporary art,
is kind of not always straightforward messages,
kind of hard to understand.
Artist statements don't always make a lot of sense,
and, basically, even artworks that have wall labels,
a lot of people feel it's filled with confusing jargon.
And so these can, of course, be major barriers
for people to understand art.
Some artworks, they require context and backstory,
and those are important to put into words,
but not every single artwork is easily translated into written language:
art in itself is a language that we use when written and spoken words fail us.
If an idea can be perfectly summed up into written and spoken words,
then I could argue: what exactly do we need the art for?
That's why it's crucial for you, as the audience, as the viewer,
to actively engage with the artwork.
Your experiences, the emotions you feel, and the ideas you have,
are just as much a part of the artwork as the artwork itself.
Let's take a look at some examples.
The works by artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres
are often known to be quite mundane and minimalist in nature.
I've heard people on numerous occasions say,
"How exactly is this art?
And these are just mundane objects.
Anybody can buy this at a hardware store and be able to place it on the ground."
I've even heard people get angry
that such absurdity, such absurdly mundane objects,
are even in an art gallery.
Well, lets take a look at one example.
This is a work he created in 1991,
and it's a pile of individually wrapped, multicolored candy on the ground.
Now, unlike traditional artworks where you're not supposed to touch it,
with this, visitors are encouraged to take a piece with them
as they walk through the exhibition,
and leave with it, as they leave the exhibition.
So this makes the artwork change in shape and size over time,
and then, periodically, the pile is supposed to be replenished
so this process can start all over again.
This is interesting because it makes the artwork change in size and shape
depending on visitors' interactions with it.
But that's not even the most interesting part.
If we look at the subtitle of this work,
it's called "Portrait of Ross in L.A."
Ross was Gonzalez-Torres's long time partner,
who unfortunately passed away due to AIDS complication in 1991,
the year this work was created.
So we can look at the continual stripping away of the candy pile,
the loss of weight in this candy pile,
as a metaphor for Ross's weight loss and continual suffering
leading up to his death.
Then perhaps, the replenishing of the candy pile
is another metaphor for a symbol of hope,
a symbol of memories of Ross
living beyond in the memories of his loved ones beyond his death.
That's my interpretation anyway,
and you are encouraged to come up with yours.
The feelings of loss and grief
are something that we all struggle to put into words.
This was a way that Gonzalez-Torres chose
to express his own feelings of tremendous loss and grief.
His works are great examples
of how contemporary art, instead of being alienating and sterile,
are actually in fact incredibly relatable and thought-provoking.
So, some people also feel that going to art exhibitions,
engaging with art, and participating in art,
is only really useful for somebody who is an artist himself,
or somebody in the creative industries.
What would somebody who is a sciences, humanities, engineering student -
what would somebody in another discipline or profession have to do with art,
and what exactly can they get out of it?
I think about this a lot,
and about a year and a half ago
I started a web series called ARTiculations
where I explore the interdisciplinary nature of the fine arts.
About how art can in fact help us develop interpretation
and critical thinking skills,
how it can relate to other disciplines such as music, linguistics,
or even astronomy and mathematics.
There are endless ways
the fine arts can relate to and explore the ideas of other disciplines.
Here's just one example
of how one artwork can be used to explore the ideas of history, materiality, geology
and be a tool of civic and social engagement
all at the same time.
Artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Cazadilla
are known for exploring materials.
In an ongoing work from the late 1990s,
they created these gigantic, oversized sculptures made of chalk.
They were interested in the practical nature
of how chalk can be used to pass on ideas, such as from teacher to students,
and how chalk can be -
and they were interested in the symbolic nature
of the geological material of chalk itself,
and how it's ephemeral and fragile in nature.
After creating these sculptures,
they decided to place them in public areas all around the world.
The first location they put this in
was in front of government buildings in Lima, Peru.
These government buildings
were known for having protesters there all the time
with messages and demands.
After seeing the chalk placed on the ground,
people realized this was another way for me to visually express my ideas.
So they picked up the pieces of chalk and started writing big words,
physically and metaphorically on the ground.
There were political messages, commentary,
people would write the political parties they supported,
then others would come and cross it out,
and put the parties they supported instead.
There were even expressions of love,
and messages that don't directly have to do with politics.
This really created an atypical setting and disrupted the norms of the space.
Well in the end, the cops had to come,
and apparently arresting people wasn't enough,
they had to arrest the actual sculptures, like the chalk pieces on the ground.
I mean they didn't handcuff the chalk, they put it in a truck and pulled it away.
But it's interesting to see
how a piece of sculpture, a piece of art, can really disrupt a space.
Since then, this project has moved on to many other locations around the world,
such as New York, Paris, and most recently Sydney, Australia,
attracting participation and creativity
from all kinds of people all around the world.
In a recent study
conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts in the US,
they surveyed and asked people:
what are the major barriers for you in attending an art exhibition or project?
And so four of the highest results were: lack of time, the cost,
access - physically not being able to get there -
and feeling like they have no one to go with.
Well, a lot of these problems can, in fact, be solved
if we stop thinking about art as just going to museums to look at art.
There's -
With the speed of online and mobile communication,
the changing nature of contemporary art, there are so many new and different ways,
for all of us to engage with the art world and participate in art projects.
We are literally no longer bound by the boxes of traditional institutions.
An example of this is Art Prize.
Every year since 2009, downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan,
gets turned into a big, public, free art exhibition.
Artists from all over the world - anybody over the age of 18 -
can submit to this exhibition,
and they can be from anywhere in the world.
There's usually over 100 different exhibition locations, all around the city,
hosting thousands of artworks.
Some of these locations are traditional art galleries and museums,
but the majority don't typically host art.
It can be anything from streets to city squares,
parks, shops, and businesses.
This really changes the dynamic
from people having to go to the art into the art coming to the people.
And, in addition, half the prizes every year
are actually determined by a public vote.
Well, speaking of public engagement,
"The Art Assignment" is a PBS digital studios web series
hosted by contemporary art curator Sarah Urist Green.
What she does, is she goes around the world commissioning artists
to assign projects to the general public.
It can be anything from make a gif, to become a sci-fi character,
to make a rug out of old t-shirts.
Earlier this year at VidCon,
a physical convention for people of the online video community,
The Art Assignment put out a message to their followers saying,
"Hey, bring your [t-shirt] to the convention
and then maybe a bunch of us will make a rug together."
More than a bunch of us showed up,
there were probably thousands of people
that came over the course of three days with their used t-shirts,
and together we made, I would think,
the world's biggest rug on the convention floor.
And this was great,
because it was fun, it was collaborative, we made new friends,
we bonded with each other,
most of us got to learn a new skill;
I mean I didn't know how to make a rug before this and now I do!
while people have been collaboratively making art
probably since the beginning of human history,
a spontaneous, large project of this scale was really made possible
with the existence of digital communication.
Speaking of digital communication,
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist who's probably most well known
for his critiques of the Chinese government.
You probably didn't need me to even explain that,
this picture kind of just says everything,
but he actually has a diverse body of work
that spans from filmmaking, to photography, to public art,
performance art, sculptural installations,
but, I would argue, most importantly, Internet-based and community-based art.
In 2005, he started blogging prolifically
on China's largest blogging platform, Sina Weibo.
Then, in 2009, he started a crowdsourcing project
after seeing what happened in the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes.
So, to this day, government officials still refuse to acknowledge
exactly how many students died,
or even that any died due to shoddily constructed government school buildings.
So, after seeing this lack of acknowledgment and investigation,
Ai Weiwei launched his own investigation with the help of his blog followers,
collecting names of over 5,000 students
who did die that day in the government school buildings.
To this day, he continues to call out the government
on their human rights violations and lack of transparency.
Authorities did not like this,
so they shut down his blog shortly after launching this project.
So, whatever, he turned to Twitter,
and he began prolifically posting tweets there.
As you can see, this was actually two weeks ago when I took a screenshot.
He has over 125,000 tweets,
but even as I was doing this, he was furiously tweeting,
so that number's probably way higher now.
So then, recently, he started another project
where he's making portraits of people out of pieces of Lego.
But then he hit a snag.
The company Lego started to refuse selling to him,
and he's now banned from purchasing further Lego pieces
because they cited this corporate policy,
"Oh, we don't sell to people who use our products for political agendas,"
whatever that means.
So after posting about this problem on Instagram,
his followers began to actually donate their own Lego pieces
to Ai Weiwei directly,
and hashtags like "#legogate" and "#legoforaiweiwei"
began trending on Twitter and other social media platforms.
People have even since set up their own local Lego drives
in support of him.
If you want to help, we actually have a drive here in Toronto!
So, it's interesting
because Ai Weiwei has not only sparked participation
and people speaking out from all kinds of places,
he's redefined the boundaries and traditional definition of communities,
he's expanded it beyond traditional geographic boundaries.
I often think about how, when I was a kid,
I was interested in artmaking, drawing and doodling
for pretty much as long as I can remember.
And then I think,
"Wait, weren't pretty much all of us this way as children?"
Artmaking and artistic expression is such a universal language.
It comes to us before even learning how to read, write or speak.
And so there's no reason to throw away that creative ambition as we get older.
The modernist artist, Joseph Beuys, once said,
"Everyone is an artist."
Now some people took this literally to mean:
everyone can be a commercially successful artist making lots of money
and being represented by major art galleries around the world.
That's not necessarily going to happen.
What he probably did mean is that everyone can be -
everyone should exercise their inherent creative ability,
and that artistic expressions are actually all around us,
and if we just took a moment to pay attention to them,
perhaps we can learn to appreciate them and maybe even become a part of them.
Once upon a time, there may have been an "ivory tower"
where the artistic elites sat,
with no place here on the ground for the rest of us,
That ivory tower has been shattered.
Gradually, people have begun to pick up the fragments,
bending and twisting in their own unique ways,
Which fragment will you pick up?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)