Free art piece #21
This one is called “Serious art”.
The author of this piece is to consider this the launch of a new art movement. No art movement starts out with the ambition not to be revolutionary. However, “serious art” — the movement we are hereby launching — acknowledges it is not of the scale of cubism or impressionism and makes peace with it. In this humble acceptance and beginning lies the first feature of this art piece. Eventually, “serious art” might reach the impact and scale of a movement such as “arte povera”. Unlike the latter however, it doesn’t start off with the premise of a necessary revolution.
“Serious art” takes root in Henri Bergson’s analysis of humour in a book called “Le rire”. According to Bergson, what is funny is the thing that breaks a mechanism we are used to. Bergson draws a similarity between the natural and the mechanical and places the comical squarely on the side of the former. Serious art is pure mechanism. There is nothing unpredictable in it. It is extremely precise and offers no room for surprise. It can be even be conceived of as an insult to nature.
Arthur Ganson’s work would have been a good illustration had it not been comical in essence.
The one Arthur Ganson art piece that does qualify as a “serious art” piece is “machine with concrete however”. San Francisco’s exploratorium, where the piece now resides, describes it as follows “A motor is connected to a block of concrete via a simple system of gears. The final gear, embedded in concrete, is set up to make one revolution once every 13.7 billion years, yet the machine whirs uninterrupted.” It highlights a deep “serious art” principle: The near-elimination of essence — because essence posits the risk of wider interpretation and the possibility of a naturalistic and unpredictable approach that would undermine the mechanistic core of the piece.
Serious art explores the idea of seriousness itself and whether it can exist in nature or / and in the world. It is important to note that if laughing, humour and comedy, as Henri Bergson explains, are society’s self-correcting — and, by extension, self-improving — process through which an individual’s excesses and shortcomings are made obvious, then serious art is an art that does not improve. It is adamant on being unchanging.
