I was telling a more learned friend about the altered books I described in this post, The Memory Business: Your Life as Art, and she told me about Tom Phillips' work, A Humument. I was trying to figure out where this trend came from, and slapping forehead with palm, didn't think to look for an artist at the beginning. D'oh.
The Humument is an altered book. Phillips started altering this book in the mid 1960's, and continues to add to and change the work. There are at least 370 pages of this book online in various places, and a variety of published collections. The work is a virtual definition of post-modernism, as he started with a novel called A Human Document, and has created his own story using selected words from the original book, together with collage methods to create a new work. (And also seems to have started something).
What's important to think about is this:
- Important trends often start with artists, who interpret the world and share that interpretation. It's not about pretty pictures, it's about ideas. (Consider the dialogue between science fiction and science, and how that dialogue has affected real world invention)
- Art that was once radical is now familiar. Case in point, Andy Warhol's graphic style. What looked like installation art fifteen years ago is surprisingly similar to the distressed clothing seen today.
- Great artists may be hard to understand, but they are rarely stupid. When you read their own writings and commentary, you see nuanced and layered ideas and symbolism. They observe, deconstruct and reassemble elements and ideas to evoke a response in the viewer.
- The symbols in art speak to us even when we don't fully understand them at a conscious level. (** see footnote)
To do something practical with this insight, you don't need to become an art historian. You need, instead, to pay some attention to what artists think is important to think about. These are not the artists who are painting pictures of fluffy kitties on the weekend, these are the kinds of artists that show at the Venice Biennale. You could involve artists in your creation process -- many of the most creative product development companies do exactly this.
** The footnote:
You may have seen or read the haunting Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie. I found out something new recently that intrigued me -- the meaning of blue roses.
A while back I took a short course in Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. I learned that blue roses is a symbol of impossible love, because blue roses do not occur in nature. Laura, a central character in Menagerie, has the nickname blue roses, given her by Jim, the fellow she has long harboured a crush for, but who is engaged to another woman.
You don't have to know that blue roses is a symbol of impossible love to understand the play, and Williams may only have intuited this himself. But symbols have their meaning even when we don't know we're dealing with a symbol. This is part of their power, and of course why advertising images are selected with such care.
***Postscript
Apparently there now is such a thing as a real blue rose, thanks to Suntory Ltd. and Florigene Ltd. Given the symbolism, you might want to use caution sending these to anyone you care about. Thanks to BW for bringing this to my attention.
