Ah, the age old question, “What is art?” I could sit here as a pretentious artist and lecture about why a signed urinal sitting in a gallery is art and why the Sistine Chapel is not. I am sure most would argue in favor of Michelangelo’s masterpiece in Rome and regard Marcel Duchamp as being a talent-less hack. It is hard to put into words what art is without explaining its entire history and transformations from the time when cavemen were drawing animals on limestone until Cristo and Jean-Claude constructed The Gates in New York City’s Central Park. All I can say is that from my four years in the fine art department here at the University at Buffalo, I have learned that art teeters on the edge of many fields of study, including science, religion, psychology, and architecture.
Though there are many who subscribe to the crazy artist stereotype, my experience has shown me that artists are often some of the most intelligent people around. Not only do artists know about gestalt theory, color theory, and the rule of thirds, they also know algorithms, computer programming, human anatomy, and engineering. How many of you know how to hang a five-story tree upside down from two transformers? Put aside the concept behind why UB’s own Reinhard Reitzenstein hung a tree in this fashion, and just think about the fact that he had to engineer a way to lift and support the tree between the two electrical towers.
UB is also home to Steve Kurtz and Paul Vanouse, two artists in the Critical Art Ensemble. CAE is a group of artists known for their tactical media and biotechnology projects in which the artists concern themselves with genetics, eugenics, and genetically modified foods. In order to create a social commentary on any of these topics, the artists have to know the basic components of DNA, and have an in-depth knowledge of how reproduction processes affect a person or plant’s chromosomes and the genes they carry.
Is art science or science art? The boundaries are indeed blurred, but one thing is for sure: artists are multifaceted beings with plenty to say. Artists are anthropologists, inventors, programmers, designers, politicians, and theorists; or as Joseph Beuys, a political artist, once put it, “every human being is an artist who - from his state of freedom… - learns to determine the other positions in the total artwork of the future social order.”
Each year Generation’s art issue gives our dedicated art staff a chance to shine by filling the magazine’s pages with art; however, this time around we’ve decided to challenge the writing staff too. Each time we put out an issue, the art staff is asked to illustrate a story or concept. It is difficult to illustrate a topic without putting a personal spin on the image, but is it just as hard to write a story about art without a similar twist? The writers were asked to construct stories around images that may or may not encompass a different concept than the one written. In this issue, the art defines the written word, rather than being a secondary illustration of the writers’ concepts.
