Within the Lines

What if there was nothing to discover? No story, no thousand words, no answer to a non-riddle? What if it was really, really, just a game of forms and colors?
Would it be a sin?
Does this lady need a past?
Is it really so bad for something to be "just" a pretty picture?
We know of the danger of beauty, we know the seductive spectacle means flirting with submission, yet is it really so immoral?

We possibly wouldn't say it about Rafał Wilk's works. They are often witty, playful, insightful. They play with the idea of light, of bi-dimensionality, of what a work is.
But, to continue on my doubt - does having a story constitute a challenge? Or is it just because we like the indolence of layered thinking, the safety net of there being "something else", so as to let our imagination ride a little further...? But haven't we turned it into a rule for (a lot of) contemporary art? This story-telling capacity? (Can someone say a good story about this? If so, the author of the story and the author of the work get a bonus.)
What if it's a pretty picture? What if it's pretty, pretty, pretty, a thousand times pretty? What if it's so damned pretty you don't want it to be a story, to go beyond it being pretty?
Of course, I have the right to omit the depth. And then also, every good story is many stories deep. But some of the best works I know present a fascinating resistance to storytelling. They are like a stone, at once attractive and opaque. They make me want to read within the lines.

And here, somewhat related, is a summer holiday bonus:

Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art

"Painting will reveal some of the innermost motives of existentialism if we are able to analyze the creations since the turn of the century in the right way."


This very compact statement from Paul Tillich is worth reading. His view of existentialism as revealed in art should provoke further thought today.

Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art

Being and Nothingness, by Jean Paul Sartre

The actual book can be read online, translated into English, at Google Books. In the opening paragraph Sartre states the problem clearly. At the end of the long road, you are forced to find your own solution. Although it is free and online, some important sections are missing and the translation is less than elegant. Who will suggest a better translation?

My Science Teacher Died on The Racquetball Court

Shit, I have to hurry up and dig some holes for my tarragon, which has grown out of its pots and needs to be planted today or else, but this is important. Take a moment to remember a great man, if only for his patience.

Mr. Johnston did indeed fall dead on the racquetball court.
It would have been a great loss regardless of venue: he had his Moment.

He gave up the idea of teaching me science at Square One, but shared my love of Impressionism and especially Debussy's "Images". I remember one day in my starched shirt, off in the corner of his oversized classroom, from behind a labyrinth of glassware, I walked as calmly and quickly as I could right up to him while he taught class:

"We have to get out of here. I'll help you open the windows".

It's true. read more

Send it back to New York

How many great minds continue to waste time, sending their best to "The New Yorker"? Stop. Send it instead to "The National Lampoon". Do you like peacocks? Please, read more

Rain, not words

N. Raghavan, Rain V (2009)

One reason I like zapping through artist's pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist's statements and curator's notes is that I don't need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work.
The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn't informative, which it often is. It's that it is rarely inspiring.
(Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).

We cannot go back

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture - entitled (...) - is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)