What is fascinating [to me] is not whether Marla did the paintings…but the discussions that revolved around reactions to art in general and modern art in particular.
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT
A documentary by Amir Bar-Lev
[b]Michael Kimmelman: In a case like Marla, because it touches on all sorts of deep-rooted issues about whether modern art is real or not, it has a kind of strange, hypnotic appeal to it. So, I wrote something that seemed to interest me, really, about the complications of abstract art. Why people don’t seem to really feel that there’s some way of judging what’s good, what’s bad.
There is this large idea out there that abstract art, and modern art in general, has no standards, no truths. And that if a child can do it, that it, sort of, pulls the veil off this con game, and shows you that somebody who is 4 years old can do something every bit as good as what a famous artist who sells pictures for millions of dollars could do. That idea that art is not really about some truth but it’s about some lie being foisted on a public…that abstract art in general and modern art in particular, is one kind of racket, is a put-on.
If you take an artist like Pollack, you know, everyone basically figured this is the ultimate example of modern art gone crazy. It’s a guy dripping, splashing paint. Pollock literally invented a whole new way of painting. The photographs of him just dripping and splashing, walking around these canvases made it look that much more like he was really not an artist.
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Reporter: My mother had a thing against Pollock. She hated his paintings because she felt like every time she saw a Jackson Pollock painting, it was saying, “You’re stupid and I’m not, and there’s people smarter than you that get me”. She felt personally insulted by his paintings.
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Michael Kimmelman: …money, money is the ultimate, sort of distorting thing [in the art world].
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Michael Kimmelman: I think one of the fundamental problems people have with art, because a lot of it used to be transparently clear, it was telling a story, that there’s some assumption that art has an obligation to explain itself to you. And that if it doesn’t that, somehow, it’s the art’s fault. But modernism wanted to tell a variety of stories. Now, it continues to tell stories. There’s narrative in all sorts of art. If we’re talking about abstract painting there are still stories being told. They may be stories about the characters who made these pictures and that was the case with Pollock.
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Michael Kimmelman: [Marla’s 4 year old] innocence also says something about the ultimate cynicism of the art world. There’s a lot of art that’s been made, especially in the modern era, which is about alienating its viewership. This idea of actually, kind of, sticking it to the very people who are supposed to be patronizing it. Probably the worst thing you can say about an artist is, everything this artist does is joyous and wonderful, and openhearted and just simple and free. In certain circles, that might sound like you’re not serious. I think, probably, some of the appeal, though, to a large public of the Marlas of the world, is that it seems pure, innocent joy, no cynicism, no irony, no sarcasm. None of that kind of stuff that goes along with modern art. You know, nobody’s saying “fuck you” in this picture. They’re just saying, “I’m a happy girl who loves painting.”
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Michael Kimmelman: All writers, all storytellers, are imposing their own narrative on something. I mean, all art in some ways is a lie. It looks like a picture of something, but it isn’t that thing, it’s a representation of that thing… Your documentary is itself going to be a lie. It’s a construction of things, it’s how you wish to represent the truth and how you’ve decided to tell a particular story. By that I don’t mean that certain things don’t happen. Of course they do. It’s not that there is no such thing as truth. But we come to like and trust a certain story, not because it’s necessarily the most absolutely truthful, but because it’s a thing that we tell ourselves that makes sense of the world, at least at this moment.[/b]