Art and Discontent on the Matter of Addressing Clouds
Jacqueline May
Place in Art
Everybody is from somewhere. All our thoughts and feelings, as we become about our lives, take their shape from our surroundings. The places nosotros live our lives create an indelible banner on our personalities, on our identities, just equally we leave our mark on them.
There is an illusion that it is easy to fall prey to: the illusion that the person I am is entirely split and singled-out from the concrete world around me, that my inner self and thoughts are in some other realm. The truth is that the line betwixt self and surroundings is indistinct at all-time. I drinkable water from a bottle or a tap, sometimes in a form flavored past some grapes and yeast. The water likely originated in some watershed, whether in Texas, or in Europe, or in Arkansas, or in whatever place I happen to be in at the moment. I become a role of the flow of h2o from place to place as surely every bit if it traveled through any aquifer. The food I eat comes from a place. The minerals that make up my basic originate in the rocky soil of some country. The nervous system I use to idly dream upwardly fanciful ideas about cocky and identify is made upward of materials from some place. And I volition again become an indistinguishable part of the Globe after I die. As trade brings usa food and goods from ever further afield, our physical unity becomes non but with our local land merely with these far-flung foreign lands too.
Every bit I look at visual art (confining myself to the discipline I know best), holding this thought in heed, a panorama is revealed that mirrors the concrete presence of place in the lives of its creators. The brilliantly colored artworks emerging from creators living in tropical landscapes undoubtedly reflect the colors of their surround. I think hither of Mexican masters such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, or the master weavers of Guatemala. Picture, if you will, the scrimshaw of more northerly climes, and imagine how not only the colors in the surrounding mural, but too the durable materials available impact this art class. It can exist no blow that the Nordic preference for elegant simplicity occurs in the context of a landscape that is often covered with snow. And the dark woods and sophisticated angled forms of African traditional masks and sculpture are brought forth in a landscape marked past the shadowy rhythm of copse.
In Thomas McEvilley'due south wonderful essay, "On The Manner of Addressing Clouds," (one) he discusses the many levels of meaning created, not simply by the conscious iconography of an artwork, but also by unconscious factors. These might include marketing, materials, size, duration, or physical placement. Imagine a gigantic billboard of a painted landscape which obscures the view of the bodily landscape, extolling the virtues of a mining corporation which is strip mining the area. Or imagine a cheap affiche representing an idealized foreign landscape, desperately framed and displayed loftier up on the wall, lit past flickering fluorescent tubes, in an extremely impersonal institution such every bit a hospital. What connection with dwelling and reality is offered to the poor patient by this artwork? Those mall-based chain stores offering cheesy partially handmade landscapes -every different additional touch on by a real human person racks up a higher fee, with a slight touch by the putative creative person going for yet more - always nauseate me beyond conventionalities, fifty-fifty more than so inasmuch as their marketing cynically exploits the unwary public'due south yearning for something real. It is sadder all the same that the full general public has come to adopt the comfort and familiarity of this processed artificiality. Irony is at its all-time as a conscious statement.
In contrast, await at the integrity of James Turrell'southward skyscapes, including his current work in progress, Roden Crater. The artist has, with immense endeavor and vision, created elegantly simple environments that compel the participant - viewer seems too 2-dimensional a word - to gaze at and savor the wonder of the actual sky, out of the actual earth. Information technology has ever been a comfort for afar lovers and family members to remember that they wait up at the same moon. Or consider young children's art, which is often lovely, and is unmistakably genuine. It can accept a lot of maturing for a trained artist to develop a consummate range of skills then return to that authenticity, to the unaffected, secure sensation of self. However, anyone can create something existent.
Although I hesitate to identify myself in such august visitor, I must be truthful to my ain experience or risk the appearance of inauthenticity. Oft appearing in my ain artworks is a map-similar aerial view of Possum Kingdom Lake.(2) Or I might utilize a fragment of an actual map featuring the lake. This is a conceptual stand-in for the brief, determinative period of my early existence that I lived within its watershed. As I abound in my awareness of the importance of place, I am beginning to utilise other maps, expanding my accomplish in hopes of providing artwork that volition serve a larger community. An enjoyable aspect of working with maps is the fact that they are a field of study affair comprehensible to a broad audience, yet respectable for their conceptual content among my peers in contemporary art. The maps lead me to accept conversations with many people near their fond connections with a identify - people who would not ordinarily exist at all at home discussing a contemporary artwork. Our shared experience of a identify gives us common basis, and leads a more general audience to experience included and respected.
I am thinking at present of an artwork I made about a yr ago, following a trip to San Francisco. I saw a tank filled with live fish in a Chinatown marketplace, swimming in beautiful, fascinating patterns equally they awaited their selection for expiry. The horror of imagining their eventual fate, and my compassion for them in their current solitude in murky h2o, stood in stark dissimilarity to the experience of their collective beauty. I was, luckily, not too overwhelmed with the verse of the moment to shoot a quick motion-picture show documenting them and their surround. In "Into Foreign Waters," one of the artworks I made based on this film, I cut out and collaged into a painting pieces of two maps shaped like the bodies of the fish. The maps are of Cardinal and Southeast Asia and of Mineral Wells, Texas, representing the contact between a Texan creative person and Asian culture. My own momentary experience in encountering the strange serves equally a single facet reflecting the earth's experience of globalization.
It is a hope that we all, and artists in item, can retain a secure enough sense of our ain identify in the world that we tin can learn to collaborate compassionately with people from other places, and even other cultures within our own, mindful of what kind of mark we make on the globe.
1 The essay is included in his volume Art and Discontent, New York: McPherson & Company, 1991, and shares its championship with a verse form past Wallace Stevens.
two An actual lake in Northward Central Texas, near Mineral Wells, with a funny, culturally relevant proper name and an bonny, dragon-similar form.
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