My Awfully Long Introduction...

Hello, hello and welcome to my first ever attempt at a blog. Please bear with me through my wandering thoughts and feeble grammar, and please oh please share your views on what I have to say. My goal here is to take a closer look at the art that is often misunderstood at first glance and seen as meaningless, offensive, or too horrific to consider. There are times when we might wish we could only find pristine beauty before us, such as the comfort of a pastoral landscape, or the serine balance of a marbled Greek beauty. But if these things express the pinnacle of enjoyment and harmony that are part of this world, what of the blacker states of being that exists along side them? The banal and ugly, death, fear, sorrow, sweeping boredom, and the grasping reach of decay are also a part of our world. It is my belief that through mediums such as art, music, and literature artists (in their various ways) have encouraged us to recognize and embrace the full spectrum of what it is to be human.

You’ll notice as this blog goes along that art may take the forefront to subject matter more often then not. This is because art has so often taught me to see beyond my own first impressions and also better understand myself. I remember the first time, in my art history studies, that I saw one of Rothko’s paintings in a text book and Duchamp’s Fountain as a slide in survey class. I didn’t get them and I certainly didn’t like them and that was that. But now I ardently love them both.

Why?

 I learned to look beyond the form that was merely before me. Art challenges you to look beyond, but if you don’t know what you are looking for that doorway is often closed. Enter art history. Sometimes we are so removed from a time, a place, or the artist’s daily experiences we do not understand what the object in front of us says about any of those things. For instance the Fountain was nothing more to me than a flipped over urinal. It was not until I had learned that the work was a challenge to the art world, a pushing of the boundaries of what was recognized as artistic, that I began to see the beauty and power behind such a trivial everyday thing. So in looking beyond, and learning the history, this particular work began to take on much more meaning for me.

On a final note I love art for its subjective abilities that allow me to better understand myself. Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster pretty much tells you upfront what the meaning is behind it. Goya has created a political parable and scrawled across it a warning that when reason sleeps the society and politics of the human world suffer. Yet for me this work came to mean something wholly different. In a video clip I watched recently on smarthistory.org they made this lovely statement…

 “Art can help us remember someone we care about or help us remember ourselves.”

That is what Goya’s work did for me. At the time when I first came upon it, and had no further context then what I was seeing, I saw myself in that nightmarish image. I knew what it was to sit, as that man sat, surrounded by the horrors of what I believed to be his own mind. In my case my reason had slept, and I had pushed away things I knew to be true, leaving myself surrounded by my own reasonless thought. I believe the art we come to love the most are those pieces that we find ourselves in. Art is often a comment on the human condition and sometimes a more personal comment on what we feel and see within ourselves. In studying art I have often found it to be a strange ever changing mirror that tells me of myself, and even my time and my place within that time.

K.