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Love and Marriage |
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As with love and marriage, sensibility and concept also go together ‘like a horse and carriage’. Or to further poach from that old song, you can’t have one without the other; and still call it art that is. Okay I’ll stop now with this, but jus think of sensibility as love and concept as marriage. |
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But wait a minute, what is sensibility and concept? The former is the more ephemeral of the two terms and sustains a variety of definitions. Permit me to throw its feet into a bucket of quick-drying concrete with the following: sensibility represents an emotional response to a tactile esthetic experience. Specifically of course, I am referring to a painting which stimulates the eyes with its combination and arrangement of color, texture, form and its relationship to space. In other (better) words, I define sensibility as comprising those elements that tickle the eye and to tease out feelings. Concept is more easily defined as an idea or collection thereof driving a work of art. Concepts shape sensibility into some sort of logical understanding and a reason for being. In unison both establish meaning for a work of art and as such are inseparable. But what happens when they are separated? |
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Draw an imaginary horizontal line and label one end ‘Concept’ and the other ‘Sensibility’. Anything falling within this continuum is what I define as art. Though you push toward one or the other extreme at least a small portion of the other always tugs back. Go past that conceptual delimiter and you are left with only pure idea and |
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Thornton Willis, Elizabeth Harris Gallery |
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Cecily Kahn, Lohin Geduld Gallery |
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Patricia Broderick, Tibor de Nagy Gallery |
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no use for esthetics. In the 70s ‘Conceptual Art’ was an attempt to have it this way. Art objects, as conveyors of ideas about art, were to be replaced with what was called ‘documentation’ which often took the form of photography. Yet because photography is a visual artifact an esthetic reaction was always possible (even though you weren’t supposed to react this way). This goes directly to the subversive, shall we say ‘corrupting’, nature of purely visual things. Call it what you will, anything with sensibility tied to it will inevitably undermine in some way, large or small, any attempt to be purely conceptual. |
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