What Is 'Art'?
Date: May 3rd, 2004 12:27:12 pm - Subscribe
Sometimes, if you feel the need to question just what the fuck 'Art' really is, you need go no further than those words spoken 'from the mouths of babes'.
I skipped the last two days of work due to 'lack of motivation'. Locking myself in my room and hibernating under the bed covers have been my main objectives these past 48 hours. I just felt as though my mind needed a rest. I was sick and tired of thinking. Fucked off without the constant mind-games going on around me, in fact, if someone had offered me a full fucken frontal lobotomy I would have gladly accepted it. I didn't want battles with my partner and I didn't want to watch my son self-destructing in a shed. I didn't want to hear the phone ringing, I didn't want to eat and even fucken breathing felt like a strain.
But today I woke up after only a couple of hours sleep and suddenly found myself thinking, "What the fuck, I've been through way worse than this shit, so I'm gonna quit feeling so self-sympathetic, hit the bastard back if he back-hands me and get the fuck back in the classroom where I belong!"
This morning my car didn't pull a U turn on me. It drove me all the way to work and, as if driving on autopilot, parked itself in my regular parking spot. The Principal gave me the usual scowl she reserves for someone who has cost the school the ill-afforded price of a scummy relief teacher and I returned the favor.
When I found myself in the familiar, safe surroundings of the classroom, everything started to fall into place. Life just clicked back into gear. The only piss-off is that I'm training up a student teacher who is sitting in the corner of my fucken room taking notes on everything I fucken do and say. I feel like a bug under a microscope. If she wasn't here I'd just plod through the next couple of days giving the kids some 'Time-Saving' stuff and lay back a little, but as things stand, I have to actually appear to look like I'm doing my job.
...So this afternoon I was having this little 'Art' appreciation session with the children and one of the questions I threw at them was "What is Art?"
Their responses enlightened me, especially as there has been a lot of heated discussion all over the internet lately as to 'What validates itself as being Art?' Their answers lent me to thinking whether anyone really has the right to determine what intangibles lend themselves to being called 'Art'. Anyway, I think that the pure, non-judgmental responses of my classroom children define Art, far better than I could attempt to do, so here they are:
What is Art?............
Art is colorful
but Art can be black and white
Art can be shapes that move and change
You can hear Art, sometimes it sounds like a roaring waterfall, other times it sounds like a tiny trickle of tap water.
Art can taste like sour grapes
Art can taste like honey
Art are pictures that are stuck in your head trying to get out onto paper
You can build Art
You can break Art
Art makes you feel all kinds of things
Art can make you tingle
Art can make you cry
Sometimes Art is ugly like a monster mask
Art can be imaginary like a fairytale
Art can be true like a photograph
Art makes you want to shout
Art makes you want to clap your hands
Art is just Art.
Pretty profound for 10 and 11 year old children hu?
Kids keep me here.
I wonder if I could build a new home in the classroom
because everywhere else fucken sucks.
Back to bed.
It's turned cold again.
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