UNDERSTANDING

One of my first memories was a summer trip when I was 3 or 4 years old. I was playing with
some girls in a tent on a meadow while our parents were enjoying a conversation and some
beverages nearby. After some time playing in the tent I got very frustrated and bored and
went to my father in distress. I have had enough of these girls who were older than me and
did not know how to speak. I expected they would be speaking properly at their age and I
thought they might be mentally challenged. So I told my father “I cannot play with them
anymore as they do not know how to speak!”.

The girls were actually speaking Slovenian and I was speaking Croatian. What I did not
understand was that there is a concept of foreign language and that they were using this
different code to communicate. They were in their own right speaking properly but my lack of
understanding the code left me annoyed. Not understanding the form, killed the
understanding of the content.

I had the exact same feeling once in Vienna in my early twenties. Visiting a museum there I
saw Egon Schiele’s self-portraits for the first time. The horror of angry lines, the creepy and
sickly choice of colour and not to mention strange body positions and proportions. “What is
this sick looking bodily shape I am seeing?” I was thinking to myself. Albrecht Dürer and the
likes were the supreme expression of artistic skill, if you asked me at that time. Show it as it
is, like a photograph would. That was my expectation of art. My eyes understood the
depicted reality of an animal or a flower and Dürer seemed to know how to show this to me.
Having no understanding how artistic skill has evolved or changed after the invention of
photography, I was unaware of how emotional expression has become more interesting to
artists of the 20th century. This left me with no tools to understand this code Schiele was
using to express himself.

Seeing both painters were in love with their line work slowly unravelled their similarities to
me. While Dürer meticulously draws every hair on a rabbit, Schiele shows similar dedication
to female pubic hair. Both symbols represent fertility and procreation. They show similarity in
their self portraits where they bring their artistic identities to a sainthood level of importance.
This is where their mutual understanding transcends time, space and more importantly even
style. The supreme god-like expression of “the author, when we believe in him” (Barthes,
page 4, “The Death of the author”)

Learning over the years about what modern painters were looking to achieve felt just like
learning a new language with strange grammar. Or better yet learning many languages as
every artist had their own way of saying what they meant. Art needs to be understood to
resolve the anxiety of the audience. From feelings of being out of control, full of questions
and puzzled by the newness, we seek comfort as a child looks for the safety of a fathers hug
or a mother’s tit. We need it to understand what is happening to our senses and why. We
want to feel safe. In order to feel safe we either run away or find ways to understand this
challenge in front of us. Does understanding art make it more valuable? Not sure. Does it
make it more meaningful? Absolutely.

There is some message in every artwork. Like a pun in a joke. Not getting the pun makes
the joke a bad one. But with artwork sometimes not understanding the original message
perhaps is not a failure of the work but rather a success of imagination. It manages to
present multiple stories to multiple people all at once. It is not easy to say that the art was
understood in this case unless we know the artist wanted to leave this space for
interpretation.

In my day to day work as a business analyst I like to shorten the time of understanding by
writing clear and direct instructions for software developers to quickly grasp the information
and get working. As an artist this sometimes shifts to purposely slowing down the time of
comprehension in order to allow the immersion to happen. This starts happening in the
process itself. Slowing down, in order to understand what is this thing I am trying to say.
Sometimes the art speaks for itself and helps me understand what my questions are. I
usually start with erratic thoughts, unsettling feelings, anxious, dynamic, lively inner
conversations that make me feel the need to draw. While drawing I am not trying to give
information to someone else, I am trying to resolve my inner anxiety.

One example of this are my collages on femininity. It started by accident:

“An artist's process is often unexpected as we conceive an image, a structure or combine

materials. Where does that swift voice come from saying: “Why don’t you tear a piece of blue
fabric?’ Who told you to do that?” page 213, Schneeman / On Intuition. '

Some inner voice told me to place female images from magazines with squared patterned
paper. From there I realised I was not able to relate fully with the images just like I cannot
relate to the contemporary need to fix gender identity into specific categories. This external
pressure to be categorised into something has produced a response to create my own
playground of identity exploration. Until I fully understand what femininity is for me I will not
stop producing drawings about it.

Understanding femininity through drawings will mean the end of internal conflict, end of
questioning, end of pressure to explain. The journey of the idea from my intuition to the
mind of the audience would be completed. But in today’s day and age of 20 second reel
videos, can I rely on anyone taking the time to go beyond labelling something as amusing or
boring? Can I expect for a visually jaded audience to take time to understand?

Perhaps some understanding requires time while others are immediate. Understanding the
meaning behind the art represents successful communication. Mutual understanding of the
artist and the audience where the art piece was a vessel, definitely brings catarza to both. I
can only hope my art could enable someone to understand themselves without going
through the pain of artistic creation.