Tips for experiencing art. Use your own language
The debate about the establishment of Kunstsilo in Kristiansand has once again illustrated that art has a major communication problem: Why do so many people get so angry about art? Why is it ridiculed? Why is it positioned as something somehow isolated outside society? Why is it portrayed as something our children could make? Why does art have to argue that it is needed at all? There are no social arenas that cause people to go off the rails as much as art. Why is this the case?
In a way, you could say that this is art's own fault. In earlier times, art was an inextricable part of society.
Art was rooted in social processes and had specific didactic, religious, political or everyday functions.
When people went to mass on Sundays, church art was an inextricable part of the religious ritual that took place; it was not art, but part of the act of worship. When the prince decorated his castle with sculptures, stucco and paintings, it was to consolidate power and display political ideology; the beauty of the objects was his weapon of persuasion. When the farmer in Setesdalen drank mead on the feast day, he drank from the richly decorated rose-painted bowl.
The gap we see today between art and society comes from two things: Firstly, in the 18th century, art was taken out of society by establishing art institutions. The other was the modernist idea that art needed no justification or value other than itself, it existed as art for art's own sake, or as they put it in French l'art pour l'art.
Today, art is therefore something we are taught to understand in art institutions and something we seek out to experience in art museums, concert halls and theaters, rather than part of society's culture. You could therefore say that the artwork's need to be something separate and independent has not only removed art from society, but also from people themselves. As a result, art is perceived by many as inaccessible and even incomprehensible. And there are few things that make us as angry as what we don't understand, cf. the aggression in the Silo debate.
The fact that the art world itself contributes to maintaining and reinforcing the gap between art and people does not help either. Many people find the art language used by curators and professionals abstract and alien, many find art institutions elitist and inaccessible, and many find the work of art internal and uninteresting.
But despite this apparent gap between art and society, we have to believe that art can give us insight. Art is created because someone wants to tell us something, and I myself have great faith in the artist as a type of visionary, someone who sees and comments on the world in a different language: A language that instead of words consists of colors, sounds, materials, smells, moods that translate certain qualities of the world for us. Things that we may sense, recognize and feel, but that we don't have the courage or sensitivity or perhaps even the need to express artistically. We use words, while visual artists teach us to see the world, literature teaches us to read the world,
and music teaches us to hear the world.
But what do we do if art doesn't make sense? If we go to an art museum, konsertsalen or theater and don't understand or feel anything? I'm sure we've all experienced this, that something feels so abstract or so distant that it simply doesn't make sense. However, I want you to try to understand - and in conclusion, here is a suggestion for a simple method that you can use to approach art, be it theater, music, dance, or visual art. I want you to think of the art experience as a translation process, where you translate the wordless art into your own language:
1. Describe what you experience in your own words, talk to yourself about what you see and sense. Important! Use words from your own everyday language.
2. Use the same words to interpret how what you see and sense makes sense in your life. Important! Not what others might feel or think.
After all, we can only understand the world from our own point of view - we experience the world through our own body and our own consciousness, and everything we sense is filtered through our sensory apparatus. That's why it's our own perception that we need to use as a starting point. And to talk to ourselves best, we need to use our own language and our own words. Many people feel angry and powerless because they believe that understanding art is more complicated than it actually is, that there is an external formula. But the seeds of the art experience are there, ready to be activated with your own language and your own words.
Frida Forsgren