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Artist Statement I believe that the power of art rests in its audience. This belief shapes how I make and view art. In my mind, the artist is a person with a message as a motivation and art as a means. In reality however, many artists seem to prefer their art to their audience. It is often the habit of artists to lose themselves in the production of art and forget about its definitive purpose. To forsake communication for the art object itself is both self-indulgent and self-defeating. I have made it my goal to create artwork that remembers the audience and thrives on their engagement. Art today is struggling with its audience. Traditional notions of art seem unsuited to today's viewers. Of course, this struggle is hardly a new one. Surveys of art history are quick to show that art is constantly battling the outmoded ways of previous movements. Art must renew itself in order to adapt to its changing audience, but to do so they must consider more than just the past. The answer to the current struggle is not simply dismissing the ways of artistic ancestors. Instead, artists today must consider both the way in which art is traditionally presented and the way that viewers now see. Traditionally, art does not mingle in the real world. Its place is behind museum doors. Presented against white walls, it inhabits rooms otherwise empty. In this quiet void, the distance between art and viewer is not only figurative. The audience stands several feet away at the edge of a force field sometimes imagined, but often real. With solemn reverence and hushed tones, the viewer searches for the artist's message often with little guidance from the artwork itself. An appropriate amount of time passes and the process is repeated with the next artwork in line. With good reason, an untrained audience member might walk away confused. The art that I have described is specialized and pure, interested in the language of art and not in the world. In order to maintain this rarefied status, art must resist life. Unfortunately, to resist life is to resist the viewer. To successfully reach an audience, the visual experience that art presents must heed the nature of visual experience in the world. The codes and etiquette that accompany a traditional art experience now serve only to hinder art's reception. Daily, the image as it is seen in the world grows further from the image as it is seen in the gallery. With the help of computers, the nature of the image is going through radical reconstruction. While artwork remains aloof and rare, electronic images multiply infinitely outside the gallery. Given the frequency of this sort of visual assault, the traditional presentation of art seems at a disadvantage in the fight for an audience. Concessions must be made to the new modes of communication in which audiences are versed. Unfortunately, these new modes of communication do not bridge the gap between viewer and viewed. The distance created by the gallery setting is matched by the Internet. Cyberspace is touted as interactive, yet it is only virtually so. Internet users are no more connected or engaged than art viewers standing silently in the gallery. Gallery space is far removed from life, but unfortunately, cyberspace is no place at all. While the world of art is sparse and enigmatic, its electronic counterpart is overflowing. Commercial images accost viewers with messages that are hardly cryptic. On the contrary, their abundance and user-friendliness makes them generalized and indiscriminate. On one hand, the gallery space seems specific to the point of futility. The reverse is the case with the Internet that addresses everyone, anyone and consequently, no one. With this universal accessibility comes the non-hierarchical structure that characterizes the electronic world. Entering into the jumble of unorganized stimulation that dominates cyberspace, viewers are confronted with the visual equivalent of white noise. The result of this is that viewers see things differently. Primed by the pace of a world where time costs money, viewers are less and less interested and even capable of pondering an image at length. The image is consistently less and less valuable as a source of information. Of course, visual information will probably always be an important mode of communication, but its abundance and efficiency in life are hard to match in art. In order to compete with images in the world, art must update its presentation or enter a different realm altogether. I find myself unsatisfied with the traditional relationship between art and viewer, but hopeful that art may not be sacrificed completely to electronic media. This comes from my viewpoint in history. I have the interesting position of being on both sides of the current electronic revolution. My generation clearly remembers a time when computers were closer to typewriters than TVs. This is not what distinguishes us though. Unlike generations before and after, we grew up along side the Internet. We have adapted easily as youth allows us to, yet we know life well with out the letter e as a prefix. What I seek for my art is an unmediated experience: one outside the limitations of both the gallery and e-technology. It is my hope that my work will bypass the outmoded codes and obstacles of a traditional gallery experience. At the same time, I do not intend to merely update art presentation by borrowing from the new types of computer based media discussed above. The renovation of the art experience must begin with the viewer. I offer my audience an experience that is neither coded nor virtual. It is my belief that the authentic, real time experience is all too often eclipsed by a mediated one. I hope to reinstate direct experience by presenting artwork that allows the viewer to share in the creative process. Free from the intervention of the gallery and the vagueness of cyberspace, viewers may come upon art as if in a chance encounter or haphazard discovery. In this way, the creative experience does not idle in the hands of the artist, but reawakens in the audience. Furniture is the vehicle I have chosen to engage my viewers. Furniture and functional objects in general are less by someone than for someone. By definition, they present themselves for use. Without an audience or user, they hardly seem worthwhile. In this way, furniture not only engages viewers, but also depends on them. By focusing on objects that exist outside of the gallery and virtual space, I hope to initiate an authentic experience for my viewers. Furniture presents itself as especially effective because of its place within a physical, everyday type of interaction. Simultaneously, it breaks with the traditional patterns of art viewing and requires the audience to interact on a physical level. Furniture resides literally outside of the constraints of the gallery. Without the doorway of the gallery as a preface, my work may stand alone, unmediated. Furniture does require a new response from the seasoned art viewer, but is for the same reason problematic because of its possible placement under the heading of craft. Will viewers only react differently to my work because they think of it as craft? Is the relationship between craft and its audience the one that I have been seeking? I do not wish to sidestep the issues I have raised by simply making craft objects. With little knowledge of traditional craftsmanship, I can hardly claim to make crafted chairs. Yet at the same time, my work denies the traditional role of art in both viewing and presentation. The confusion over my work lies in the fact that it is functional and meant to be used. If my work were not functional, all that I have mentioned above would be invalid. By making my work functional, I hope not to represent or depict life, but instead engage myself in it. My chairs are not a demonstration of furniture; they are furniture. I am not trying to distance myself from life by commenting on it or mimicking it. On the contrary, I feel that I am trying to close the gap between art and life. The differences between my work and traditional art are not symptoms of rebellion, but cues to the narrow definition of art. In the debate between art and craft, I have not sided with craft, but called for the expansion of art. I hope for my furniture to be an art that involves itself directly and immediately with life and the audience. My work is part of my own life and that is a quality that I value. My emphasis on art that functions in a real space is probably a result of my admiration for visionary artists. Traditionally untrained in the codes of high art, visionary artists make art as a means to express themselves within the context of their lives. For this reason, I feel that the work of visionary artists maintains an immediacy and honesty to be envied. One of the first visionary artists to be widely recognized was a French postman named Ferdinand Cheval. In the French countryside, Cheval constructed his own fantasy world out of stones and cement. Around 1914, he stopped working on this "Palais Ideal". He was ignorant of academic art practices, architecture and even masonry, yet his years of work produced a structure recognized as "one of the world's most astounding visionary structures"1. His creative drive was unmitigated and inexorably bound to his daily life. Through it he was able to enact his dreams in real time. I make furniture as a way to involve myself directly in life, yet most furniture is mass-produced and therefore distanced from both its user and its maker. By making my own furniture, I have presented myself as a counter to the current trend of industrialization and mass production. Led by profit goals, manufacturers focus on products that are easier and easier to duplicate. Such products must be unspecific in order to reach the widest range of consumers. The target audience for any successful manufacturer is the calculated mean of possible consumers, hardly an individual. The idea of mass production arose with the modern industrial period. Originally, it accompanied a hope for social and economic equality. If everyone could own the same house and clothes then equality could be achieved. Robert Venturi discusses the problems with this Modernist belief in terms of architecture. Writing in 1977, Venturi scolds designers of the machine age for ignoring their clients on the authority of some distant ideal of Mankind. The architects he ridicules "reject the very heterogeneity of our society that makes social sciences relevant to architecture in the first place. As Experts with Ideals, who pay lip service to the social sciences, they build for Man rather than for people..."2. The failures of Modernist idealism have taught us that equality does not rest on sameness. Instead, we may be equal through our differences. The homogeneity that mass-production
entails now enslaves us. In our commercial society, we are given
very few choices. We are lulled into the thought that buying
power equals personal expression. Instead, we are merely expressing
our approval of one marketing tactic or another. The distance
that I disdain in the gallery or the Internet is replicated in
commercial strategies that filter and distort qualities of real
human individuals. I cannot hope to overcome the establishment
of capitalist culture, nor is that my goal. To make something
entirely outside of consumer culture would be to make something
that avoids the desire to possess. It is an understatement to
say that this is an ambitious goal. By asserting our individuality on a local scale, we may reverse the effects of mechanization and subsequent dehumanization. The union of art and life is the key to this process. The modular and interchangeable nature of our world is carried through into our living spaces, yet art that hangs on the passively on the wall does little to humanize this sort of environment. Instead of relegating art and beauty to a small square of the wall, it seems that it could fill a space from construction to decoration. Art should not be a window by which to escape our environment. Instead, it should surround us on equal terms with the everyday objects that fill our lives. I involve myself with the everyday
environment with the hope that the mass produced spaces I have
mentioned might become better suited to their inhabitants. The
commercial-friendly "average man" does not exist. To
make art for him would be false. In order to reconnect humans
to their environment, it is necessary to person-alize spaces.
The self-declared architect, painter, activist, Friedrich Hundertwasser
insists on the rights of tenants to alter their living space
based on the "moral inhabitability of modern 'functional'
architecture". Without restraint on the "individual's
desire to construct"3, mass produced spaces could once again
reflect the humans that inhabit them. Hundertwasser's beliefs
manifest themselves in petitions, public speeches and even public housing
projects. His
buildings are meant to humanize and ameliorate what he considers
sterile and impassive living conditions. The directness with which I approach my viewers is the same quality that I hope for in all aspects of life. The lost authenticity of original experience can be replaced by taking a direct role in one's own environment. The manifest will of the individual is the key to the rehumanization of the modern environment. Rejoining art and life guarantees an unmediated encounter and the sharing of the creative experience. My work is my attempt to follow through on my ideas in real time.
-Jessica Braun
1 Maizel, John. Raw Creation: Outsider
Art and beyond. London: Phaidon, 1996. 2 Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. 3 Hundertwasser, Freidrich. Austria Presents Hundertwasser to the Continents. Exhibition Catalogue. Glarus, Switzerland: Gruener Janura AG, 1983.
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