If you follow our daily posts you might have noticed the Deseret News article cited in yesterday’s Mixed Media that considers two Salt Lake exhibitions under a common theme: inspiration. Because we save the good stuff for our monthly edition, the dailies and weeklies occasionally scoop us, at least as far as timing is concerned. Content is another matter. So here’s a taste of what Geoff Wichert is working on for the April edition of 15 Bytes.
Namon Bills’ Poems, a collage in homage to Kurt Schwitters
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. They say it in the hope that the one being imitated won’t take offense (let alone sue, like DIA Arts is threatening to do those who put a photo of their Spiral Jetty on the label of a bottle). Good artists borrow; great ones steal. Thus acknowledged is the underlying reality of status. If an artist’s best work is a blatant copy, it can hurt of even destroy a reputation. If a prolific maker of influential images takes an idea from a lesser artist, it may register as a curiosity or vindication, or it may not register at all.
Influence, in other words, is trouble. There’s something damaging about admitting an influence, which arguably undermines ones own originality. Two things can ameliorate the damage to ego and repute: if the influence is from some great figure, with the implication that not just anyone could absorb what the imitator has been able to make his own, and homage. If the imitation is deliberate, a high and rare form of praise that transcends mere words and enters the realm of art, then an admission of primacy assumes its simplest, most harmless form: a mere admission that someone got there first. For that’s the point, after all. All art is a single, organic process. Except for a tiny, virtually non-existent minority of genuinely naive artists (who serve primarily to prove that art making is, indeed, a human instinct), everyone learns from someone and passes what she has learned on to others. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and it is that alone allows us to reach into their empyrean. Does anyone today truly claim to possess the original genius of Giotto, Dante, or Van Eyck? Yet we surpass their technical accomplishments every day, and not just on canvas, but in magazines and TV advertisements that we produce and discard by the millions. We got here by imitation and by theft.
Over the next few months, Salt Lake will be offering all who are interested two of the largest, most ambitious, and finest shows anywhere to be seen. In total, fifty three artists are participating in two huge, challenging shows. At UMFA, The Smithson Effect tracks homages, ironic or otherwise, and ferrets out more subtle and substantial influences of Robert Smithson, architect and engineer of The Spiral Jetty, and formulator in the late 20th century of some of the more influential ideas about art to have reached into the 21st. While The Smithson Effect includes some Utah artists, a large part of its achievement is to bring together artists from around the world who acknowledge the influence of his ideas, in particular as exemplified by his work in the Great Salt Lake. Meanwhile, the Rio Gallery’s Homage offers thirty Utah artists the chance to each celebrate an personal hero: an artist whose influence the invited artist is willing to acknowledge and even to foreground in the work on display.
Categories: Daily Bytes
