Artistic Space: Foreword

When a person decides to make a piece of art--whether it's serious or not, whether it's intended for others to experience or not--they start making choices.  Every moment of the creative act is a choice.  But what allows the artist to define and explore the available choices?

When you sit down at a blank canvas, it would seem that the possibilities are endless, and in a sense they are.  But "endless" is perhaps not the right word.  You cannot, for example, make the canvas sing, or play bass (you might design a recording to accompany your painting, but I think you'll agree that's different).  The first-order choice of a specific artistic medium defines the second-order choices it is possible to make.  However, within the boundaries of the chosen medium, the choices are effectively infinite.

This state--the blank page, the white canvas, the uncarved block, the silent recording studio--is intimidating enough to keep most people from creating anything at all.  The feeling of standing before a field of infinite choices, each as valid as any other, can be crippling.

That's when it helps to have a concept of Artistic Space.  When I use the word "space" I'm not talking about physical space (although that can be one dimension, depending on the medium), I'm talking about the range of possibilities related to any facet of the medium.

I realize that's pretty vague, so allow me to illustrate.  I first encountered the idea of artistic space with respect to the art of music.  In music, there is the concept of sonic space.  Most musical instruments are capable of producing a wide range of tones and sounds, but each instrument has a certain "base frequency", which can be thought of as the average frequency the instrument produces.  A bass guitar, for example, generally produces tones that are on the lower end of the frequencies perceptible to the human ear.  Those low frequencies can be thought of as a particular group of locations within the available sonic space.

Another dimension of sonic space is tone color; an instrument's voice or timbre.  Both a trumpet and a guitar can play a middle A, but the notes have a qualitative difference that allows the ear to distinguish between the instruments.  Artists must navigate the color dimension of the sonic space when they decide on the instrumentation of their band or song.  A given song might be played by a full orchestra, or it might be played by a single woman with an acoustic guitar--either way, it's the same song.

Decisions in each dimension of sonic space (and artistic space, generally) can be made in a variety of ways.  Sometimes they're chaotic: a band might consist of drums, bass and saxophone simply because those were the instruments available.  Other times, a particular recording will use instruments of certain colors because they present the melodies of the song in an emotional context that suits the lyrical message.  For example, Great Big World's "Say Something" would not sound as melancholy if it were played on tuba and kazoo, and sung by oompa-loompas.  In the hands of skilled players, those instruments might be able to produce the melodies of the song, but the emotional context would be wrong.

Choices of artistic space differentiate good artists from amateurs.  In bad art, choices of artistic space are often made arbitrarily, or arise randomly because the artist is unaware of a particular dimension of artistic space.

I would argue that the single defining factor that makes one thing "art" and another thing "not art" is Intention.  That which is intended as art, is art.  It might not be good art, but it's still art.  If intention is the defining characteristic of art, then it follows that all artistic decisions should be intentional.  Even the choice of chaos is a deliberate one: Jackson Pollock chaotically threw paint at a canvas, but the choice to do so was deliberate, and fans of his work would consider the chaos meaningful.  It is choice that imbues art with meaning.

Any choice which is left unmade because of the artist's ignorance lowers the art.  The artist's ignorance or knowledge may not always be apparent to the audience, but I find that even an audience of laypeople will have a vague sense that something is "off", or worse, the work will simply fail to capture their attention in the first place.

...

The next few installments in this series will examine the idea of artistic space with respect to a handful of artistic media.  Some will be media I've worked in myself, others will be a layperson's speculation.  My hope is that I will be able to lead myself, and you, to an exhaustive exploration of narrative space, the artistic space that exists in fiction writing.  I hope you enjoy the journey!

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