Last week I had the privilege of visiting the Jean Buffet retrospective at the Barbican. With one or two exceptions, his work was new to me and I was unsure what to expect. What I got was a masterclass in experimentation and materiality. In the space of an hour I understood why the digital experience of viewing art of the past eighteen months has generally just not done it for me!
Dubuffet’s constantly experimented with materials – surfaces, pigments, liquids, collage, earth, plaster, varnish, biro – you name it he tried it. He shape shifted from realism to abstract and back again, but all born from careful observation and then the making of work from his memory of that observation. And the results are there on the topography, grain and pattern of his pictures and, occasionally, sculptures.
But looking at the photographs in the catalogue today, I realise that they do not capture the essence of his work. The photographs flatten, tidy up, tame and mis-represent his work. Nothing quite matches the real thing…
Yes. There is no substitute for experiencing art as it was created and viewing work online has its limitations. However, art online offers similar opportunities to those created by books and magazines in an earlier age, reproductions – even poor ones – enabling millions of people to access the work of artists who would simply have been beyond their radar without it.
There is some hype and fear that experiencing art online might supersede the experiencing of art in the flesh. Don’t you think this is unjustified ? When photography began to take off in the late 19th century, there was talk of painting being a thing of the past and what happened…..painting took off into another golden age, released from the shackles of pictorial representation, there was an explosion of new styles and approaches and methods.
Online art may do this too, stimulating another revolution in creative opportunity that we have only begun to glimpse.
Meantime, the online experience can act as a gateway or a taster, providing a serious – if untextured – glimpse of what people are making and doing around the world , and quickly accessible…………….