Dear Students and Friends of VISA,
Sometimes at the end of a long day, one just wants to go home and look at an abstract painting. While I love sculpture, installation, photography and video, the thing I enjoy about sitting in front of an abstract painting is that it is a contained space (unlike the space of the world outside the perimeters of the painting) and the lack of specific imagery allows the imagination to wander and wonder rather than to be placed in a specific time or space.
The Walker Art Center is having a retrospective of contemporary paintings (the first painting retrospective they have had in 12 years) called Painter Painter: Reframing the Medium. I always find it exciting to see how painting is continually getting reinvented. It seems we can't really ever abandon the human impulse to take pigment and apply it to a flat surface. Or in the case of Jim Hodges, also showing at the Walker Center, using the not-so-flat surface of giant boulders. Hodges' work is a simple yet poetic gesture of an artist superimposing the language of abstract painting onto large three dimensional natural forms.
As someone whose whole life revolves around art, I need little convincing of the power of art but I do enjoy hearing this confirmed and validated by others. Here is a great interview with poet Martin Espada on Bill Moyers where Espada talks about the possibility of poetry changing the world. The interview is very moving as Bill gets Espada to read the same poem twice, once at the beginning of the interview and then after a more in-depth discussion of the poem, so you hear two different poems. In our cynical age with so many things being about the bottom line and with many arts and humanities programs in post-secondary institutions being cut or suspended, I really appreciated hearing Espada talk about the importance of poetry. The possible impact of the arts on individuals or society as whole is not something that is quantifiable on spread sheets or budget analysis reports. How does one measure the impact of spending time with a painting or reading a poem? As artists we know that these things have immeasurable value. The challenge is to convince the rest of society. So kudos to Bill Moyers for having poets as regular guests on his current affairs show. Bill gets it.
Wendy
|
