The Storyteller’s Manifesto
The correlation between painting and website design is thus: the manifestation of complication into one final flat projection, free of decoration, entirely in control of the subject being portrayed.
One might say they differ in that a website is interactive. A painting, however, isn’t simply a representation of what it depicts. It is in itself an embodiment of the very thing. Sculpted out of color, value, shapes, and edges, it communicates a narrative to the passerby without delay. A painting retains a level of immediacy that requires little transaction of backstory. It is the ultimate storyteller.
You can’t touch a painting, of course. I mean, you can, but it’s highly frowned upon. How can a painting then, if it is this expressive force that tells a story, be compared to an interactive website where a user can move things around, venture through other pages, and customize and configure whatever he desires?
A painting, literally at first glance, can seem like a one-way conversation. What I mean is when we go to the museum and stare at an artwork, our instinct is to first understand the artwork. We like to play detective. What is the artist trying to say? What’s the message behind it? The moral, if any? It’s only natural that we seek meaning out of what we find unfamiliar.
But what if we took a step back from trying to dig for a message, and asked ourselves this instead: what can I say to this painting if it spoke? If this painting and I met up for a coffee, could I keep up a dialogue? What would it say? What would I say?
What does it take to hold up a discussion? I don’t need to research everything about the other person in order to exchange some dialogue. All that is required is this: a fundamental belief in that who/what I’m talking to has an inner self, a nature, an essence.
How can I talk to something who represents the thing I’m really trying to talk to? What kind of conversation does that produce? An absentminded one. It’s of a lesser kind. It’s indirect. It’s detached. Vacuous.
And art has a history of being the exact opposite of vacuity, of detachment, of absentmindedness. So it must be that art produces some intimate version of interaction. A work of art isn’t tactile the same way a user interface is, but is palpable in this very sense I’ve been drifting towards:
Paintings are living presences.
Ask any museum. Ask any gallery. Do paintings come to life late at night when no one is watching? The very magic I’m alluding to is staged right before us during the day in plain sight. The gathering of people. Conversation. Critique. Sentiment. Emotion.
Technology: the camera, the website, the app. They are great things. But if I were to ask its opinion on the water lilies, I would not get a response.
And this is something we have to be careful about not forgetting.
The myriad of phones have infiltrated our museums. The evidence is plain.
Impressionist art was a mirror of contemporary society, and now the very museums they are held in have become the mirror also. Monet’s Water Lilies come from the movement that fought against paintings devoid of authenticity and genuine emotion. Now it is the people who are devoid.
A painting is now contextually-independent. An image has become an image no matter where it is located. The original has become just one of its copies. They have become the equivalent of celebrities in the middle of a suburban party. There is such an intimidating presence that no one will speak with them.
This, then, is the drift of my illustration, that we are called to devote our labour into the reincarnation of the painting as a living presence not just for today, but for the future of art. A re-envisioning of the painting is imminent. But it does not have to adapt. In fact, everything will have to adapt to it. The tradition of painting has to come back as another imitation of antiquity, but also as a renovation, more worthwhile than being a photo placed in someone’s personal container for “sacred” things, more meaningful than a moral or symbolic representation.
So for the storyteller, I have but one question for you. What more noble purpose is there than this one, to adjust the sails and head towards fertile soil, to execute your plan and do truly revolutionary things?
