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What's your favorite theme to see explored in art?
I haven't really seen this question asked often (not just here, in general), but what are your favorite themes to see explored in art and media, and why?
Personally, I really like art that explores concepts of "decay as a positive". I find it very intertesting when decay is portrayed as a positive force that prevents stagnation, as a sign of incoming change, rather than the common "decay is a sign of neglect".
I really enjoy when art stares into the mysterious abyss, those places within ourselves that don't conform to any accepted stories, the gray areas, those moments of upheaval that leave you staring through accumulated layers of identity and experience to peer deep into the unknowable. It's relieving in a way to experience such things. It's a communion between creator and consumer that escapes definitions. And it's best for me when that type of art also sort of celebrates the unanswerable instead of attempting to offer ways out of it. A prime example for me persoanlly are the later paintings by Rothko. Huge canvases of floating dark colors, sometimes black, that occupy your field of view and encompass your soul like a window that can't be seen through. I visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas years ago and sitting among the artworks felt like I was experiencing direct contact with some truth that I always tried to hide from, as if being in the presence of The Monolith from 2001 A Space Oddysey. It was spiritually moving.
The art I'm most interested in is speculative fiction and the themes I personally enjoy the most are apocalyptic/ post-apocalyptic, time travel, and romance.
I like to think about things from an ecological perspective and your 'decay as a positive' theme makes me think of detritivores and entropy and even the idea that decay is necessary to create temporal space for new things.
I really like the way photographers tend to portray memory. When exploring this trend they tend to push the boundary between photography and painting.
I really like Gerhard Richter's "blurred photograph" paintings for this very reason. I don't know if exploration of memory is what he was going for, but they just look like memories to me. (Edited: forgot a word.)
'Sense of place' is something I find myself often coming back to. I think how strong the 'geography' of a piece is can be a huge determining factor of how successful it is. Themes are interesting, but I'm starting to think they live and die by how well they are tied to being a product of a time and a place.
There is a psychiatric museum near me that displays the art the residents created during their time at the facility that was turned into the museum.
One of my favorite pieces is a television that a patient/resident would write notes/thoughts/ideas/ramblings on and then slip them into the back of the television. The ‘piece’ is the television with some of the slips of paper pulled out and displayed around he television.
There is also a piece that is hundreds (thousands) of pieces of metal that were pulled from a patient’s stomach and sewn into a mandala on a piece of fabric. Another piece is a massive cage that is filled with bundled empty packs of cigarettes.
There are incredible paintings and ceramic sculptures that are fascinating displays of complex emotions and one piece is fabric embroidered with words & phrases of a schizophrenic.
I love the works because they are compulsive creation. Most artists create because they are compelled and understand that they are performing for the viewer but, these artists were compelled and created because it was one of the few outlets they had to communicate their torment.
So……my favorite theme is art that is created from compulsion without the expectation of a viewer. Yard art, Outsider art and roadside art fall into this category for me too.
I like art that exposes and incorporates its own underlying mechanics as part of the intended expression. For example, glitch art deliberately bares how the system it operates in works.