VISUAL ART

New Show Weighs In On The Definition of Art—Through Art!

How do we define art? Seven artists take on the slippery subject in a new show opening at Upfor Gallery.

By Megan Haverman July 22, 2015

The Great Debate About Art

Image courtesy Upfor Gallery

ABRACADABRA (Perish Like the Word)

Local artist Ben Buswell uses his drawing to point out the magic behind illustrating perspective—but should an artist ever reveal his tricks? Has Buswell created value with the concept, or lost it in the disclosure? Either way, there’s nothing up his sleeve.

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It's presented as art, but it looks like a file on your laptop. Portland’s Zack Dougherty took a literal approach (he has three cheeky works in the show), and converted an image of Harris’s book cover into binary (up close, this is all ones and zeros—666,355 of them, to be precise!). Technically, you can translate them all back into the cover which will give you the concept—but where does that leave the art?

Untitled

Artist Erika Keck marked her debating stance by including a contract—not on display—with her painting, laying out her terms and conditions for its display: if not closely adhered to, Keck will no longer endorse the painting as art, thereby personally determining its definition as an artistic work.

Untitled

Srijohn Chowdhury’s work may appear at first glance to be the most traditional, depicting a Hellenic figure associated with ideals of beauty. But it's made with concrete and an a reused canvas. Plus what would you call it? Statue? Painting? Installation? The piece purposely blurs taxonomic lines to defy Harris’s need to categorize art.

To See You Again

Seattle artist Max Cleary plays with materials, creating, uncreating, and recreating the image of a rock through photograph and sculpture. Cleary photographs the rock (art) destroys the photograph (un-art) to create a sculpture of a rock (art!) to photograph (art?). Among other themes, Clear explores how we perceive when art is finished, if ever.

What is art? No, really. Certain pieces make canon while others fade out, and at nearly every abstract gallery a non-believer has huffed: “My three-year-old could make that.”

Upfor Gallery’s current group show goes some way toward answering—or at least examining—the question. Conceived in collaboration with Envoy Enterprises in New York, Portland shows off the third installment of the Big Apple's four-part series, based on the late Oxford University linguist Roy Harris’ 2010 book The Great Debate About Art.

Harris identified three major stances on the subject: A canonized POV, which declares art is determined by major institutions; An individualist approach that says art is in the eye of the beholder; and the argument that the concept is the art, as opposed to its execution. Upfor’s ten works are each a commentary on the Harris book as seven artists muscle in on the debate.

Gallery owner and director Theo Downes-Le Guin gave us the scoop on five works that grapple with art’s slippery definition—click through the slideshow to see them all.

The Great Debate About Art opens at Upfor Gallery
on Wednesday, July 22 and runs through August 29.

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