What is Tarot Art?

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A new article at tarotica.com

I review recent comments of Robert M. Place and Ciro Marchetti concerning Tarot and its art(s). In the process I return to the perennial debate about who really designed the Waite-Smith Tarot, and I look at the tension between word and image in Tarot analysis and authority.

(jk)

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Hello (jk)

Disclaimer: I am a snob. :-)

When talking about Art, the first thing that would be important to acknowledge is that the art world is a magic-authenticating system that works under very specific superstitions. I believe it was Jean Baudrillard the one who said that ‘art is whatever you can sell as art’, but lets use a more basic, and broad, definition of Art as the use of forms to elicit emotional responses. Artists have been doing that for centuries using all kind of media. Within that process, some artists have tapped into successful solutions that are then adopted and repeated until those are expanded or redefined by other artists. When it comes to deal with these solutions, there is always a tense dialogue between freshness and formulation. Today it is thought that art is a cognitive game whose main function is to expand the bran’s ability to play with patterns, so that expanded ability can then be used in our survival. From this we gather that once a formal solution becomes formulaic it looses its power. So, ART is this storyline of people playing with forms, in which relevant artists push that playing forward. It is within this perspective that we can understand Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstraction Art, conceptual Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, etc. You are not an artist ‘because you say so’ but because you are good at playing with forms, and because your ability to play that game has been validated by that magic-authenticating system. Most important, you aren’t an artist just because you are somehow accomplished at this or that expressive technique. People often uses the word ‘art’ when alluding to draftsmanship, and it is a fact that severing the connexion between art and craft is probably the most important thing that happened to art in the 20th century.

So, no. Knowing how to draw doesn’t makes you an artist.

At least, not from a contemporary point of view, and the article mentions two people who are alive and working in today’s world. If you know how to draw you are a draftsman. Draftsmen are those who use their technical ability to communicate very specific ideas. Usually, they lend that ability to others, as in the case of illustrators. It would be more accurate to think of Place or Marchetti in terms of illustrators. We cannot think of them as anything more because, first, their work fails to take that abstract leap that takes an image beyond its usual function. That is what contemporary artists do. Second, their work -as the work of 100% of so-called tarot artists of today- remains within the borders of the technically and aesthetically permissible, and therefore it fails to add anything of value to our history or culture (Notice that I am not even talking about the tarot). Third, there is nothing in the images they create that would help us define or understand the times we are living. Put plainly, their images are irrelevant both from an specific and from a historical point of view.

20th Century’s Tarot has usually being bad art because it has failed, once and again, to exist in dialogue with the aesthetic coordinates of its time. Most of the tarot imagery we see is a-historical in that it lives in the nostalgia of some ‘enchanted’ worlds whose aesthetic coordinates are often a rehash of medieval and romantic formal solutions. Looking a Pamela Colman’s work alone we would never imagine that Matisse had painted The Dance and Picasso had painted Le guitariste roughly at the same time she was drawing her tarot; just as by looking at Place’s or Marchetti’s work we will never guess that they share the visual spectrum with people like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirts, Anselm Kiefer, Olafur Eliason, Gerhard Richter and many others. Whomever would fancy to think of himself as an ‘artist’ in today’s world has to measure up to these guys, just as whomever wants to claim to be a professional baseball player would have to measure himself up with Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter or Albert Pujols.

Now, from the perspective of the tarot, you will see I have referred to Pamela Colman Smith and not to Waite. For the reasons cited above, I consider her artwork mediocre. But Waite did managed to push the tarot forward by galvanizing what was just hinted before him. For me, the distance between Waite and Pamela is the distance between the artist and the draftsman, which I think is the point that’s being made in the article. I have no idea as of why someone would have wanted to do that, but that is just me. If the tarot was a game in which some sort of religious sermon was hinted, or a sermon disguised as a game, then the tarot as an artifact makes sense within its historical context and there was no need to update it. One has to be content with studying as one studies the Bayeux Tapestry or the Hieroglyphs while saying “look at what this guys did!”, without feeling any urge to update these works. (Have you ever heard of ‘The Gilded Bayeux Vampire Tapestry’?) But that is just my opinion. I understand the appeal of crafting divination systems but I have no clue as why those systems need to be called ‘tarots’. (More important, if we were to design divination systems today, it would be naive ignore what it is know in terms of meaning-making, cognition and neuroscience. Designing isn’t like applying make-up. Curiously, Illustration often is). The question I would like to ask Waite is: IF the tarot wasn’t that game-homily, if that content wasn’t appealing nor reasonable to him, what was so appealing in the structure of the tarot that he felt compelled to keep it? But when it comes to people like Place, Marchetti, or the rest, I feel the answer is as simple as: “there is a market for it”.

As for the tarot being art ‘from the beginning’, I will only say that the tarot is a footnote in human culture whose formal results could have -at best- benefited from the art of these periods in which certain decks were created (Which is not the case of contemporary tarot BTW); but there is no evidence to suggest that the process also happened the other way around, with the tarot bearing any influence on the way art was made in any given period of our history. So, some tarots may be beautiful, but they are closed to design objects than to art objects.


All my Best,


EE
What’s honeymoon salad? Lettuce alone
Don’t look now, mayonnaise is dressing!

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Enrique:

You start here, which isn't a bad place to begin:
lets use a more basic, and broad, definition of Art as the use of forms to elicit emotional responses. Artists have been doing that for centuries using all kind of media. Within that process, some artists have tapped into successful solutions that are then adopted and repeated until those are expanded or redefined by other artists.
and slippery-slide yourself, but not me, down to this:
Whomever would fancy to think of himself as an ‘artist’ in today’s world has to measure up to these guys [Jeff Koons, Damien Hirts, Anselm Kiefer, Olafur Eliason, Gerhard Richter], just as whomever wants to claim to be a professional baseball player would have to measure himself up with Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter or Albert Pujols.
after asserting three or four different and essentially incompatible redefinitions of art and artists.

But no, really.

A novel or poem might be (merely) competent, or good, or great. It is still a poem. A painting might be competent, good, or great--it need not be ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FANTASTIC, BOUNDARY-BREAKING, TRANSGRESSIVE, MIND-BLOWING OH MY GOD STOP THE PRESSES! in order to be "real art." Being good at "playing with forms" for a tarot deck means making images that resonate with readers and are recognizably tarot.

As for the artists whose work you point to -- really, E. Where have you been? Start here:

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/haindl/

cheers, m'dear...

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Hi Debra,

Remember that I prefaced my post by saying I am a snob. :-)

You are right, I was talking about historically relevant art. (An argument can be made about how the tarot doesn't fit into that category). When it comes to art that may be personally appealing but of no historic consequence, your example fits indeed beautifully. Thanks for pointing it out!

All my Best,


EE
What’s honeymoon salad? Lettuce alone
Don’t look now, mayonnaise is dressing!

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Hi Enrique.

If by "snob" you mean having a developed aesthetic sensibility, I'm all for it :)

If the standard for art or anything else is that it be historically significant (something known only in retrospect, eh, and a judgment that shifts over time) we might as well all jump off a bridge right now, and you too, as the odds are slim that any thing in any individual life will meet such a standard. Still we can try to live imaginatively and compassionately and produce beauty, truth, joy, justice and all that good stuff. Our lives are meaningful to us even if they will be lost to history--why should people in the future be any more privileged to judge what we do than we are?

Tarot art works best, in my view, when it communicates not an intensely personal individual expression--that's passe and boring--but rather the socially recognizable meanings of the cards. Tarot cards are not "for" pure aesthetic experience. However, that doesn't mean that tarot art is automatically "mere" illustration. Good artists help people see in different ways, and that doesn't have to be about technique or style.

In tarot history, the Waite-Smith deck is about as significant as they come. I think this is partly because by the artistic decision to show "characters on a stage," Smith allows people to project themselves onto that same stage. "All the world's a stage" may be an old idea, but so what. It's still great.

There's plenty of ugliness and suffering. Work that enriches people's lives, with beauty, insight, joy etc. should not be dismissed lightly.

Best wishes,
Debra

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Hi Debra,

Thanks for your post. I really appreciate your thoughts and the opportunity they bring to talk about these themes, which are of fundamental interest to me.

There is a creative impulse that lives in all of us and can be expressed in many different ways. It would be specially important to notice that such creative impulse is expressed daily outside the realm of what we define as ‘art’, in the work the the lawyer that envisions a novel strategy to win a case, in the impromptu solution of the plumber who fixes a pipe in an unexpected way, and in all these occasions when a person applies its inventiveness in a way that have her transcending the limits of ‘here and now’. Then there are formal languages, ways of expression like talking, writing, singing, dancing, painting or carving stones. Many people find personal fulfillment in the practice of these languages (As far as I understand, Western culture is the only one that separates the practice of these languages from daily life, making art something we need to get out of our way to experience). Now, within these languages, there are those who simply babble, and those who use them to actually address collective urges and offer unseen sights. As you, I welcome and cherish such diversity, since it very often makes the world more interesting.

My problem with claims such as “I am an artist/the tarot was art from the beginning” is that, in a world built on unsustained claims, as the tarot world happens to be, such claim isn’t simply enriching people’s lives, but contributing to make things muddier by adding a bunch of vampires, moronic goldfish and dancing skeleton to the mix. The claim sounds either arrogant or misinformed. Visually speaking, every single tarot that is produced today is derivative of some artistic movement from the past (sometimes, as in the case of the Haindl tarot, from art that happened more than a century ago). In today’s terms, the aesthetics of the tarot world (and the New Age world as a whole), belong to what is defined as ‘Kitsch’. We could define kitsch as something that has failed in its attempt to be beautiful. As sympathetic as I am with such desire -I tend to link a desire for beauty with a predisposition for goodness- from a contemporary perspective the kitsch can only be enjoyed ironically. Such ironic reading is absent from the tarot discourse.

So, we can confidently say that there is nothing relevant happening in the tarot world in aesthetic terms. Lulling ourselves into looking at them as works of art forces us to exist within a bubble, carefully protected from the realities of the art world.

Instead of that, seeing the tarot as a design object could give us feasible coordinates to tackle any tarot deck, old or new to asses its relevance. Design focus on improving an object’s function by reorganizing its forms. That is what makes a claim such as “I am an artist/the tarot was art from the beginning” a little bit insidious, in that such claim intends to imply that, by being an artist, a person is exempted of offering any reasonable justification for his aesthetic choices. There is nothing in design that can be exempt from justification. That is what makes relatively easy, at least in theory, to know if a work qualifies as tarot or not, just as it is very easy to determine if a chair qualifies as a chair, or of it is really an ukulele. But then again, in a world of unsustained claims, a world that has been built on misreading the past with feverish subjectivity, things are always tricky, because in order to address the relevance of any tarot deck we need to ask ourselves: How does this work improves the tarot’s function? In the case of the tarot, does the question pertains a problem of functionality, message, or both? But things get even trickier because to answer that we need to also ask: What are we improving from?

The way I see it, if we claim temporary insanity and forget any feasible historical hypothesis about the tarot actual origin (this is, if we start by overlooking what seem to be an obviously failure in the occultist movement to understand the tarot as a game informed by some didactic intention set within the coordinates of medieval spirituality), what we have today is pretty much a misreading of Waite’s system turned into a soda pop fountain in which the same structure can be sold in any flavor we like, from vampires to mermaids. This makes me suspect that there is nothing relevant happening in the tarot world in conceptual terms. When compared with the most interesting things that are happening today both in aesthetic and conceptual terms, there doesn’t seem to be too much happening with the tarot. What we have is more or less visually and conceptually bland. What we really get from all these ideas polluted by capricious theories is confusion. Being a snob, as I am, and as you so beautifully defined, I fail to see in which way such pollution makes our world more interesting, or our work more easy.

But that is just me.


All my Best and Thanks again!



EE
What’s honeymoon salad? Lettuce alone
Don’t look now, mayonnaise is dressing!

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Far be it from me to defend the vampires and goldfish.

But. If they bring some amusement, they're not much different than a light play. Drama has room for comedy and silliness as well as tragedy.

Tarot, like many art forms, has certain formulaic requirements. Church art, for example, was never free-form; there are conventions and expectations that must be met to communicate. Working within a tradition may be a greater test of artistic creativity than doing whatever one fancies.

Try this one: http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/rotin/

best,
Debra

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Speaking as an artist and poet myself there are several points I would like to make regarding Tarot Art and the various definitions and ideas discussed within this post. An artist does not arrive in the world fully formed and artists in the Renaissance really had to work hard and study to develop their careers. Artists relied on patronage while today many rely on state subsidies. Not so now, a few years at art college is all you need to confidently call yourself an artist. But what really is an artist, what do they do and how do they contribute to society as individuals or as a group? We might ask the same question of "art", the thing that artists produce. I have personally defined artists as 3 basic types those working instinctively, those that work somewhat unconsciously, and with some level of self-awareness one might say those that work consciously. However, we are talking about a school of art when referring to Tarot and that school is called Symbolism, which itself is a branch of art practice particularly well known in France called Orphism. The role of the Orphist was to enter a subconscious state of mind and annotate or record their experiences - this might be literary as well as visual. From Orphism also developed Surrealism and Magical Realism which were considered more potent and dynamic in expression than that of mere Symbolism. I have a set of 22 engravings at home by the French Artist Jean Duvet 1485 – after 1562 depicting the Apocalypse (Revelations) -He was born the son of a Dijon goldsmith in 1485, presumably in Dijon itself, which until a decade before had been part of the independent state of the Duchy of Burgundy. He became a master of the Dijon goldsmith's guild in 1509, and may have travelled to Italy in about 1519. His metaphysical style which imitates older medieval art is well known.
However, Real Art is not developing a unique or particular style or approach, that would reduce it to a mere act of imitation, acquired formality or skilled or specialised technique. Good Art as I define it is often ambiguous or perhaps paradoxical, it often does not tell you everything at once and may even contradict itself. Therefore the purpose of a "work of art" is to impart the sensation of things or circumstances as they are truly perceived in life or create the situation where they are perceived subjectively or objectively, and not as they are more commonly known or accepted. The technique/s and the various schools of art, being too numerous to mention here, are employed to make everyday objects and familiar experiences seem unfamiliar, disconcerting or "strange". The artist therefore can imitate, distort or arrange any objects/ideas/forms in such a manner or according to their "own individual style" that they are difficult to grasp, understand, discern, or quantify within the conscious or rational mind. This allows the unconscious mind to participate in the pure, unsullied appreciation or enjoyment of art. It serves also to enhance human cognition or perception, to celebrate or even to promote art appreciation in others. Art can also satisfy the thirst for aesthetic value from life itself, and it has the power or ability to prolong mental concentration, provide new perspectives and or reactions to images or symbols for the human psyche.

Scientists have now identified what they call the hypnoguogic, trance-like state, a transitional state between sleeping and dreaming, governed by a high level of theta brain activity, during which creative activity or inspiration is taking place. It seems that being creative in any sphere of work or life involves the total abandonment of the frontal, left hemisphere that rules intellectual rationalisation, the avoidance of the mental and emotional inhibitions and more logical functions of the brain. As many people now know the left cortex of the brain rules the right-hand part of the body and the right cortex, the left hand side of the body. It has been mentioned in metaphysics that the left part of the body is feminine, hence creative or irrational and the right is masculine and therefore rational. Creativity can actually be stimulated with the aid of certain machines attached to the head that encourage theta brain activity, for example the sound of crashing ocean waves stimulates theta waves, while alpha brain activity is stimulated by the sounds of a babbling brook. Different forms of meditation, reflection and contemplation can also stimulate these slow types of brain-waves giving rise to new insights and stimulating inspiration.

While art is largely a psychotherapeutic process that has been institutionalised by the state, the skill of Design incorporates rational and intuitive elements, form follows function and outer decoration or style denotes personality of expression. Design has become a commercial profession. Creativity defines the product, in this case playing cards, Design mass produces it and Craftsmanship, the individual detail or aesthetic value creates employment for apprentices. So playing cards were an ideal commission for any aspiring artist to promote himself. The arrival of printing also had some bearing on artworks that could now be reproduced.

Re: What is Tarot Art?

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Rather than get into the debate of who designed the Rider Waite and what is a copyist and and Artist or whether Tarot should remain a game (which is rather pointless anyway) or whether Tarot is Art and therefore a medium of expression where an individual and a culture come together- either skillful or not, meaningful or not...I offer this

Art is a male personal name, both in its own right and as a diminutive form of the common name Arthur; therefore in this case a little Art and a rather large Pamela. :p

~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts