Wednesday, December 07, 2005Notes from MOMAAmazing thing about all this art - the struggle to produce it and the consciousness behind every piece. Before I really understood writing, I didn't get it. It all seemed so random. A pure blue canvas - WTF? Campbell's soup cans? Stupid.When I was younger, the "goodness" was in the difficulty of the execution. And that was judged by how close it came to reality, because I had tried to draw a face and know how hard it is. It was just like using big words. The proficiency was gauged by the difficulty to execute. Doing art that was hard to do "right" was good. Just like reading a book that was hard to get through. The harder to understand, the bigger the words, the better it must be. Then you get Hemingway, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack. Boy, that doesn't look so hard, does it? Short words, big canvases, wild splotches of color. Until you've done a bit of living, thought about it awhile, tried to do it yourself in your own work. Seeing these works at this point in my life is like having a conversation. It's like talking to the artists. When I was younger I was working from the outside in. Today, this stuff talks to me. It cries out and sings to me. I realize that it's all about the alchemy of conscious and unconscious work. At a certain point the artist gains enough craft that the soul is able to express itself fluently in a vocabulary all its own. The energy pours forth suddenly, now that the voice has a form. Now the voracity is able to start its roaming, looking for food, warmth, sustenance. Now that it has the tools, it's able to convert all that stuff inside and spill it all out again. It has grown up. It is now all about a constant seeking of engorgement and release. And the content that emerges is largely out of the conscious mind's control. Jackson Pollack's wild energy and splattering is his vocabulary, whereas Picasso is obsessed with space. Some of them have to paint fields of color. Others don't. It's not like Yves Klein woke up one day and said Hey, if I paint this thing just one color, I'll be famous enough to be in MOMA when I'm dead AND I'll be able to catch up on some laundry. Nope. His soul wanted blue so it did blue. Rauchenberg wanted to do cars and Johns wanted to do flags. The content chose them. The soul had something to say and it chose the way to say it. The paintings here at MOMA - the Braques, the Cezannes, the Picassos and Van Goghs - they represent such an ultimate rarification of that process. The underpinning of all of it - the years of acquired craft that enables to artist to control the spewing and execute the explosion with a fine-tuned eye and hand - comes from the mental and physical discipline. To hold it all in; to roam and find; to know when to ingest and know when to let go. All that had gone on for years before any of these great works were produced. How many hundred of meals were done without to get these works completed? How many relationships foundered? What was the price to the body and life of the artist to pay the soul's ransom required to fill these rooms? The eyes of the Desmoiselles stare at me. The swirling sky of the Van Gogh bathes me in serenity. "He was having a good day that day," the words appear in my head like a thought bubble. The swoop of the line is ecstatic and sure. He sweeps that S with a master's command and precision, while exulting with the inner spirit's song at the glory of its expression. It is divine mastery, executed on a day when the alignment is right. The voices are stilled, the whole being lost in the moment of its art. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:13 PM  
Comments: Post a Comment << Home
|
