Looking for art in all the wrong places

Climbing down the hierarchy searching for the music of art

Unfired plate from Sara Santa Clara, here on Substack

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the difference between engagement with art and engagement with music in the culture surrounding me.

Everyone loves music. People go to gigs, stream albums; listen when cooking their pasta, dance when no-one is watching. But art? Visual art? How many people go to galleries, or buy art to put on their walls?

I look forward to the arrival of my Songlines magazine every month. I love reading what I find there, and listening to new music from all over the world. This month there are articles about an Algerian/French singer, an all-female band from Saudi Arabia, a British-Burundian musician, an American bluesman, a Ghanaian guitarist, a Dutch-Turkish band, and a pioneering Touareg band, to name but a few.

As I was reading this, I thought, what would the equivalent of this be for visual art, is there such a thing? How would it be to open a magazine and see what artists in Turkey, Pakistan, Korea, the Solomon islands are doing?

Then I remembered the hierarchy. The hierarchy that puts gallery art at the top, art-school-trained artists above crafts people, and the necessity of money if you want to bring a piece of art into your home. I saw that my definition of art had fallen for this hierarchy and its implicit definition of what art is, and is not.

We have art, illustration, design, and craft. Neatly stacked, one on top of the other. Throw them up in the air, and I see that of course art is woven through the culture just in the way that music is in people’s everyday lives; if I stop thinking of art as being a two-dimensional thing that I can hang statically on a wall, and instead look at where there’s colour, skill and subtlety in the objects that are part of every day life.

Cushion covers from Rajasthan, bought long ago on the streets of Delhi, that I was told were ‘eye-work’; the women who made them lost their sight doing such close work for a living

The pottery bowl that I’m eating my breakfast out of, the mass-produced cup that I chose because I liked its shape. The trousers that I bought because I liked the deep green colour and texture of fine corduroy; the colour of the sweater I chose to wear with them, the contrasting colour of a scarf. Fashion, pottery, furniture, house paint; cushions, rugs, fabrics. Now my imaginary art Songlines magazine is full of textiles from Nagaland, pots from Somalia, teen fashion on the streets of Tokyo, tattoos in a London shop, makeup for a night out, stylised birds flying around a handmade lampshade.

The carpet I brought back from Kula, Turkey, after doing an architectural preservation project there

I’m tired of the negativity and disappointment that so often hit me when I go into an art gallery looking for aesthetic nourishment and satisfaction. I think for me, now, there’s a kind of uselessness to much of what I see on gallery walls. What is it for, that installation, that articulated concept, that framed static thing? This is what sent me to Indian and Chinese art in the first place - looking for art that was designed to be integrated into everyday life, that was designed to function in the world in some way.

Traditional earthen architecture in the village of Tiébélé, Burkina Faso.

I want to see the art that flows through people’s lives; art that augments the day to day actions of dressing, eating and drinking, that changes the atmosphere of a room, that makes its human user feel better in the world.

An improvisation by slavetothestitch, a retired man who lives in Ireland.

slavetothestitch self-portrait

Maybe I’ll make my own little art Songlines magazine, and call it Lifelines; fill it up with examples of every day aesthetic nourishment as a celebration of colour, texture, form, pattern, material and utility…