Art as Provocation

Getting Noticed

In my post, Blogging for Profit, I lamented on the clamour for publicity in the desire for money and profit. I emphasized the nefarious ways websites and magazines generate reader clicks and subscriptions.

There are also legitimate ways to get noticed. If the quality of the product is excellent, and the service is required, a business should succeed. The same is true in art.

Paying to Survive

The business of art requires profits. Professional artists need to sell their work to earn a living. Art galleries need to earn a commission on sales to keep operating. Museums and public galleries need customers to pay for their infrastructure. Publicity is required to induce patrons and customers to view art and make purchases.

How do artists become known? Let’s look at some famous artists.

Provocation in Art

One way to become famous is to be provocative. Over the centuries artists achieved prominence by provoking society to see art and culture in new ways.

Classical painting previously painted the ruling and upper classes, mythic gods and religious narratives. Gustave Courbet and Eduoard Manet painted ordinary people (even prostitutes) as legitimate subject matter, shocking public sensibilities.

The Impressionist and the Expressionist painters broke convention by painting in unrealistic colours and distorting perspective. This shocked and upset many art patrons and public sensibilities.

Picasso broke the picture into cubes, and the Fauves used garish colours in their compositions. Picasso created disturbing, ugly paintings to convey the horrors of warfare.

Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Philip Guston disrupted the conventions of what constitutes art.

These paintings provoked the viewer into uncomfortable emotions and outrage. They upset cultural sensibilities. They created art which did not evoke skill, inspiration, or beauty.

Getting Attention

Thus urge to provoke and upset continues today. Some artists are at the forefront of social change, confronting racism, women’s rights, injustice, and any and every social norm.

As we become more inured to what is shocking, each generation of artists finds more outrageous ways to provoke. We have human portraits sculpted from frozen blood, huge sharks preserved in glass tanks of formaldehyde, canned human excrement, or a banana taped to a gallery wall.

Do we have to go to further extremes to get publicity? Hopefully we can look elsewhere for the answer.

Finding Provocation

As artists and creators how can we be provocative? Being provocative means pushing ourselves to be more expressive, more introspective, more sensitive to our discourse while keeping true to ourselves and our values.

The essence of art making is to create a reaction in ourselves and the viewer that goes way beyond ‘meh’.

Learning to Provoke

In art school our art projects stimulated creativity and pushed us to find our visual voice. The studio creations showed how unique each student could be. Critiques and evaluations provided valuable feedback on what was effective and what was deficient.

Art school helped me to be provocative and expressive. An example is a portrait of Marcel Duchamp I painted (below). My objective was to provoke the provoker by mocking his urinal sculpture (note the little turds and urinal).

I realize this was just an art school joke about my belief that a urinal is not art.

Art should be more than a contrived ‘Look at me!” or “See how clever I am”.

Taboos

Provocation can also be accidental. For example nudity is a topic with the potential to be misinterpreted. For some audiences it is a taboo and can be mistaken for pornography.

I enjoy drawing the human figure. I want to show its grace and beauty. Is my drawing provocative and titillating to the viewer for purient reasons?

Am I using nudity for shock? Certainly with society’s sensitivity to equality and gender issues, a male artist drawing a female may be considered inappropriate and his art no longer legitimate. Should I only draw male nudes? Or unattractive nudes? I don’t know the answer.

Other taboo subjects that can be provocative include portraying religious and political beliefs or deeply held social conventions. Using Nazi symbols, mocking God, or Buddha, showing sexual acts, or vivid scenes of carnage are all provocative and socially taboo. An artist who invokes these topics should expect or welcome controversy and ostracism.

As an activist, Banksy uses art as a way to raise awareness and protest against current issues such as climate change, military conflicts, and poverty.

Diggit Magazine

Authentic Provocation

The word ‘provoke’ is itself provoking. Other words may better describe what our incentive should be. We want to ‘instill’ or ‘inspire’ or ‘evoke’ or ‘reveal’ or ‘awaken’ something in the viewer. When we have created something special or meaningful, we want to offer it to an audience.

We want our creation to be authentic to who we are, what we see, what we feel, what we believe, what really moves us. If publicity has any value we want the publicity to further our reputation. We want our name aligned with the art we create.

In my last year of art school each graduate created a body of work for public viewing. The artists’ statements offer insight into the motivations, intentions and framework behind the shows. This is what provokes the artist.

Here is part of my artist statement for my graduate show: “Public Place, Private Space”

“My cityscape paintings portray settings which create ambivalent and contradictory feelings, such as inspiration and intimidation, freedom and confinement. Does the city offer beauty or brutality, utility or complexity, ease or anxiety? These paintings look at the confusions and contradictions created within people and places by modern technology.”

Ron Kuwahara

The paintings below convey the effect of cityscapes on its citizens.

These painting align with my intentions and helps me to build the reputation that I want. I want to be known as an artist who cares about the well-being of the ordinary citizen.

Summary

Art needs to create a reaction in the viewer, some works are provocative, some are subtle, some are subliminal. When an artist finds that ‘buzz’, the work and the resultant publicity is successful. It assists the artist in building a reputation and a viewership.

When I’m at my best, I’m trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don’t have all the answers.

Kehinde Wiley

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

John Berger