Thursday, October 15, 2009

Art & Change

Essay 1 Year 2 (Excerpts)
Removing the object from its place in the world is like uprooting a plant: it denies the object’s origins and source of sustenance.... The object lives by drawing on elements outside of itself: matter, thoughts, bodies, etc. Take those away and you have a sterile and secure environment that is not touched by unstable factors, but you also have a setting which reduces the capacity of the object to find its mode of being. Thus, in the end, art loses its audience.1
This quote concerns ‘art and change’ and the exploration and infiltration of the west into the east with regard to personal ownership of ivory bracelets and silver decanters from Indonesia. The bracelets are indigenous to Indonesia and the decanters are a crossover of east and west influences. These objects no longer have their roots planted in original soil. The questions the above quote raises are what meaning do these bracelets and decanters have outside their country of origin? Are they considered art, artefact or merely souvenir? Have they, according to K. Murray, lost their audience?



The history, more than the objects themselves, distinguish them from being mere souvenirs into art objects of high regard from a psychological point of view. It is not the art itself but the emotion evoked that determines its category.

It is therefore important to have a historical awareness of art in the categories by which they are identified and examined in order to retain an audience. In this way art, even though outside of its origins, is kept alive like a plant that has been nurtured. A cutting is propagated and transplanted into foreign soil, with a knowledge and understanding to enable it to survive and spread its roots in a new and sustainable global environment. The soil becomes the stories by which the plant or the audience is kept alive.

1 K Murray. “ Till Death Do Us Part: A Structurationist Approach To Jewellery”. Craft in Society- An Anthology of Perspectives, (ed) Noris Ioannou. Freemantle Art Centre Press. South Fremantle, W.A 1992. 198

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