ART LESSON
Art happens rather than exists
It is taking place even as you view it. It is not a simple, one-time thing and different people will see the same item in different ways. Some will deny that what they see is, indeed, “art”. Andy Worhol's painting of a Campbell's Tomato Soup can might be such a case for some. An army friend of mine painted water colors of various pieces of GI gear, and I remember one in particular - of a pair of beat-up army shoes. Anyone with army experiences looking at that picture with their sagging tongues and frayed laces re-lives hiking agonies other people do not know. To him, they were interactive. The appearance of those shoes affected him inside. They constitute a form of ”art”in so doing.
Something which does nothing to our inside-self cannot be “art”. When you look at a thing - a real setting, a person or painted drawn or photographed portrait of some type, and you feel an inner compulsion to remember someone, an event long departed, you are in the presence of art.
Art appreciation is not something you learn. We might well intensify it to an extend by study and participation in a hobby or related occupation. The truth is that everyone has a degree of built-in art appreciation.
Just as seeing a picture of those GI shoes reminded me of countless agonies in forced marchin, so the food container makes people remember good and bad things they have eaten or times when they had o face genuine hunger.– all of these things have a direct bearing on us as we view them. We see them individually, too so no one else will see them in the same guise in which they may appear to us.
We all share a common “memory”.
We , as infants and young toddlers developed an awareness of the world which was an ever-widening world within real bounds.. We lived in what might be called a utopia, in a sense. We lived perfection and learned daily how,in life a bit of that was taken away way each day and we found that perfection had virtually disappeared. Yet we remember that time and we long to have perfection rekindled, revived, restored and held close.
Our yearning for art - a standard inclined toward perfection - reaches back in the lives of each of us seeking to find the perfect existence we once knew - however briefly. In art we are striving to bring back the essence of things we knew in perfection before we obtained intelligence and knowledge with set limit to things. We have retained the basics - breathing and other such processes to keep the physical mechanism functioning adequately, but something rather intangible was lost along the way.
That's why I am led to think of art as an active mode adding freshness and diversity to our lives. It enable us to glance back into the perfection of early times before we became totally aware of the real world with all its troubles. Art is with us, and in many forms .
To deny it a proper place is to forsake much of our total heritage. ..
A.L.M. March 22, 2003 [c540wds]
