Additional Reading / Chapter Four
An artist’s rocky relationship with conceptual art
On the Rocks
The art teacher brought in a folder filled with magazine clippings for the student to study. The first clipping featured an illustration from the sixties, maybe an early Mark English. Lurid brush strokes in red, clashing with a garish yellow; clear evidence that the image was from a previous ‘decadent’ decade.
In the background a female figure looks out a window, looking distraught. She is painted in a dark grey silhouette, and is standing with her back to a seated man. He is coloured sparingly in a rich brown monochrome. He is drawn relaxed, laid back, and holding a glass tumbler with whisky and ice, the drink balanced on the arm of a 60’s styled chair. A relationship on the rocks perhaps?
The image does its job and wets the art students thirst to read more, but only the illustrated spread is saved, the rest of the article is long gone. The folder was filled with many such lost treasure from a golden era of illustration. Pictures telling stories of scorned lovers, dead beat detectives, reckless race car drivers, or more simple affairs.
A S
tolen Lunch
Next, the teacher brought in a stack of books. Dog eared publications filled with the classics of North American illustration. Rockwell, Leyendecker, and Wyeth most notable among them. Norman Rockwell’s rich characterization of an idealized middle America that never was, J. C. Leyendecker’s nouveau realism idolizing the excesses of the rich. And N.C. Wyeth, defining the fiction of how a pirate would look for generations to come. Illustrated stories of Americana, real and imagined. Both inspiring and daunting for the young art student. He was excited to get started.
But then the teacher said no. You can’t draw pictures that way, not anymore. Photography came along and took it all away. The labours of the masters replaced by a click and a flash. Years of experience and an expansive breadth of talent no match for the ease and uncanny reality of technology. The camera ate the illustrators lunch, nearly every crumb.
And so what were the modern masters of illustration to do? Soon enough, collectively, or individually they came together with an idea. They asked themselves what is photography unable to do? A camera can’t picture something it doesn’t see. It can’t depict an idea, an abstraction that existed only in the mind. And so came conceptual illustration. It wasn’t exactly new, Rene Magritte had played that card in the fine art game. And the Polish poster artists used metaphor because they feared saying anything outright in a communist state. But it was new to North American illustration and presented a different way of looking at things.
Staking a Claim
In the 80’s and 90’s conceptual illustration flourished. In editorial, in commerce, in industry, and in culture. Illustration found a new purpose and reason to exist. Symbol and metaphor propagated in abundance. Miniaturized people were a favourite theme. Generic representations of the common business man. Sometimes carrying, other times pushing, often lifting. Holding massive objects that represented something more. Symbols like a beaker for science, a gear for industry, a piggy bank for commerce. Brad Holland was the master of this new medium, Craig Frazier the intellect, and Rafal Olbinski the auteur. They struck gold and mined it for all it was worth. A second golden era of illustration.
The young art student, now graduated, joined in on the gold rush. He staked a claim and while he didn’t make his fortune, he was fortunate enough to make a good living illustrating conceptually.
Until boom time went bust. With the coming of a new century, technology had a novel trick up its sleeves. It was the internet. In a few short years all the mines were mined out. Magazines, newspapers, print advertising died out or became a shadow of their previous selves. The former student and practitioner, now an art teacher, wondered what was next? He wouldn’t need to worry for long. The industry and art students had already moved onto something new. Creating characters and imagining new worlds that mostly replaced that tired old world of illustration.
Your Move
And it wasn’t only technology that had moved on but conceptual thinking itself had been mined to near extinction. Symbols and metaphors were so overused, finding anything new was like finding a needle in a haystack. A few artist hung on, admirably so. Christoph Niemann put up a heroic fight. Liana Finck is a newcomer so clever she makes old ideas feel new. But looking back the art teacher wondered if it was all a fever dream or a mass hysteria. He could hardly remember why he had expended so much energy to say something indirectly, obtusely, when he could have just said it directly, understandably.
He thinks back to that folder of magazine clippings filled with old illustrations of straightforward storytelling. Of detectives detecting, or lovers loving. No symbols of magnifying glasses or heart shaped mazes to obscure meaning; just to look clever. So often sliding into cliche, or rendered incomprehensible and impersonal, no matter how ingenious. The art teacher needed to make a move or resign the game.
The folder was long gone, lost or purged. So the art teacher tried to go back to the beginning. Walk it off, get out of his mind and back into the world. Draw what he saw and speak plainly about it. But it was hard to shake off an old habit, now a compulsion, to draw a greater meaning. “Why can’t you simply say what you mean?” He asked himself. It took more than a few years for the infection to break.
Nothing Stays Dead
“Draw what you say.” he asked of his students too. Some of them had caught the fever. And in this new dystopian world, he wondered if trusting others to interpret the meaning of what they were drawing was a good thing? The extremes on both sides were out for blood, sniffing around for the faintest slight. A howl in the digital night to summon an undying horde. Safer to stick to a story, clearly articulated, and maybe more meaningful.
This is not to say concept is gone, like mom jeans and vinyl records nothing really stays dead. A few magazines and newspapers have learned to survive, even prosper, in the latest regime. Newer mediums such as motion graphics dip their toe in occasionally. And there are workarounds such as juxtaposition that can say something conceptually without the danger of redundancy.
Of course the story doesn’t end there, stories never really end. Once again technology has another trick up its sleeve, AI, artificial intelligence. The imperfection of a person is now competing with the perfection of technology. Years of experience and an expansive breadth of talent no match for the ease and uncanny reality of technology. First the camera, now AI. Hungry to eat the illustrators lunch once again, perhaps every crumb this time?
But the art teacher wasn’t worried. Maybe an AI could write a new robot law in the style of Asimov … a robot shall not take a job a human would rather do? Something along those lines, the AI could decide. Or people and AI’s could work together, team up for the better good!
Written and illustrated by Mike Kerr ©2023
END OF CHAPTER FOUR / Written and Illustrated by Mike Kerr ©2024
