All Art

Photo credit @Tate Britain

By Erin Deborah Waks

“Art is not a thing, it is a way.” – Elbert Hubbard

I wouldn’t be the first to find Sarah Lucas’s work grotesque. As I walked through her latest exhibition, entitled Happy Gas, I felt the familiar sense of discomfort and displeasure I often experience when looking at art I find – well, discomforting and displeasing.

It’s not that I think such art is inherently worth more or less than the beautiful Romantic paintings that adorn the walls of the National Gallery, or the striking photography I recently relished at the Tate Modern’s A World In Common photography exhibit. It’s merely that I enjoy it less. I don’t like it.

Sometimes I want to think, to feel erudite, to be pushed to consider something in a way I hadn’t even considered you could consider it. I get bored and want to experience new emotions, different ones. When I feel like that, I’ll reach for my trusty Tate Membership Card and see something fresh – highlights as of late include the Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt and a street art walking tour in Shoreditch I took. And, of course, anything by Sarah Lucas or Marina Abramović.

But other times, I want something pleasing to the eye, something evoking a sense of beauty. I’ll pop to the V&A, like I did last month to see the Chanel and Diva exhibitions (side note: both are absolute perfection). Or go shopping. Either works.

Sometimes, though, I want neither.

I don’t want overwhelming elegance, class and aestheticism, and my mind is too tired to learn. A self-professed overthinker with a penchant for intense emotions, it’s at these times I want to remind myself of the peace and serenity that exist in the world. I want a space in which I can be, without the external pressures of who I should be. In these moments, I crave the abstract. I want shapes, colours, lines. I want art to calm me, and I care very little about its historical context, sociopolitical significance or formal composition. Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian’s Forms Of Life hits the spot perfectly, and The Water Lilies by Monet, found at Paris’s Musée de l'Orangerie, albeit a tad further afield, is the ultimate antidote to the stresses of life.

So I have no overall conclusion about what art should be – in fact, I think the only rule I have for art is that there should be no ‘should’. Whether it makes you think, makes you calm, makes you uncomfortable, makes you neutral or is purely pretty to look at, art is art. Art for art’s sake and all that jazz, but also art that means something, art that is political, art that has a purpose. It’s all great. And it is, certainly, all Art.