Purely by luck this week I happened to pass the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. I stepped through the door and was delighted to see that they were hosting a retrospective of the work of Carole Itter.
The exhibition was titled “Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger” and consumed a large part of my afternoon. With drawings, video, installations, and of course Itter’s lovely and captivating rattles, it was an enjoyable visit.
I know that I crossed paths with Itter on occasion back in my 1980s Co-op Radio days. Any self-respecting jazz fan made a point of attending concerts by Itter’s partner, the late pianist Al Neil, and anyone with an interest in sound art would follow his co-conspirator Howard Broomfield.
I never visited Al and Carole at the Blue Cabin, but I surely knew that they lived out in Deep Cove in a floating home.
The reason why I’m writing this today is because I wound up, over on Bluesky, getting into a discussion about the legitimacy of so-called AI art work.
I’ll freely admit that I don’t take AI seriously, and don’t even think that 99% of AI is more than super-charged Google search results. I also have grave concerns about the theft of intellectual property which seems to be so much a part of the whole AI ethos.
I believe that AI could quite likely go the same way as the endless dead-end variations of VR - the wear goggles and headphones and believe you’re in another world idea somehow never, ever quite takes off.
I think that the reason why I have such a low opinion of AI is because I have such a high opinion of the many artists that I’ve known in my life. These are people who work hard, studied even harder, and who often suffer great privations in order to practice their art.
Whether musicians, or visual artists, or sound artists, each of them made choices that left them able to create works of art. They gave up day jobs, and nice houses, and in some cases their health in order to create works that would speak for them, and for others.
These have never been people who look for short-cuts.
Perhaps more importantly, the artists in my life are people who work incredibly hard at both developing their skills as artists - be it paint, or pencil, or editing tape - and in thinking long and hard about what they’re about to create.
Yes, some artists just jump in and go entirely on inspiration and intuition, or at least present themselves that way. You’ll still find that this “in-the-moment” inspiration actually builds on hours and years of thinking, and practising, and exploring dead-ends.
No-one, and yes I mean no-one, just wakes up one morning and starts creating meaningful art.
The problem that I have with most AI geeks is that they don’t understand this, and somehow believe that whatever they make an AI computer invent is somehow on par with Picasso, or Rembrandt, or Carole Itter.
That shallow belief echos so much of what is wrong with on-line life, and with technology in general today. Every new gadget or app is presented as some kind of world-changing creation, even though most of them don’t really offer anything that is needed or even desired. More to the point, most new tech is actually worse than whatever it replaces.
(He says while typing into Substack on his Dell laptop)
I find myself remembering Arthur Miller Jr’s post-apocalyptic “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, and am thinking that the collapse of our many on-line tools and toys might not be a bad thing. Maybe it would be better for people, and for our culture, if we lost the technology, and people were forced to revert to paper or pen.
Anyhow, do check out Adreana Langston, whose ideas were central to this posting.