FOLK ART: Freedom from Expectation | The Pursuit of Delight
Most, as children, have looked down upon a ‘mindless’ doodle we created while not under the influence of the external events at hand. We may have even found fascination in and attraction to that doodle, especially considering its superficially serendipitous arrival on the page before us.
Mindless? Maybe not.
I have a proposition. Suppose for a moment that was not the mindless doodling you may have assumed it to have been. What if, you – in retrospect – decide to take those past occasions seriously as a form of conscious creation?
Why not treat the marks that you looked down on as the initial utterance of a new exploration. Your marks though written off as “mindless,” may in retrospect have been a mindful, nascent demonstration of your description/exposition of delight sparked by a moment of clarity – not a chaotic sidebar to your flagrant inattention.
As I grew up in the visual arts, I would receive comments from the ‘peanut gallery’ of friends and acquaintances, outside of my discipline, not involved in that jury, presentation or other demonstration who would say, “I could never do that.” They would subsequently brush off my immediate retort of “Why not.” Over the intervening years I have struggled to find the bridge past that recurring scene and find a means to take the conversation forward communicating that there is no difference between their abilities and mine. I wanted my companion(s) to see the aesthetic ‘mark making’ emanating from their chosen attire or from their recognition of the alchemy of flavors they described in the meal shared the noon before.
Not able to know why that chasm of perception exists, we can find the bridge to span it by bringing to focus the inspiration engine commingled in the experience of delight that we all share. I propose that those I conversed with misunderstood the available vehicles of aesthetic expression – not lacked the ability to produce artwork themselves. Suppose the ability to experience “delight” is all that is necessary.
What I did not understand in my past efforts to bridge that communication gap with my friends is that I needed to shed light on the art they had already made. My retort should have been, “You have.”
My fellow travels were (are) the ‘folk’ in Folk Art. Analogously, however, removed from nature you believe yourself to be; you notice the absence of the birds singing, you notice the absence of the lilies and their blooms, and you notice the absence of the roses fragrance when they are gone. I finally perceived what I was missing those past conversations. I simply failed to notice the “sights & fragrance” of their work like the roses we all were not stopping to smell. Artistic expression is not something that common expression aspires to attain. That paternalistic mandate is illusion. There is no dialectic between “folk art” and “haute l’art.”
Delightful expression is Art – remembering that expressions of delight and of despair are intertwined[i][ii]. The putative distinction between vernacular expression and high artistic expression assumes unnecessary heroism is required to elevate the former to the latter.
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[i] (Venturi, 1966), … emphasis on the words, “gentle” & “complexity.”
[ii] (Steven Izenour, 1972), … the word, “learning,” is critical here.