Long time friend and partner in crime, Aurora*, has provided me with an opinion piece regarding an art gallery we went to this past Friday.
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We
spent the evening at Towson University's senior student art exhibition
at the Load of Fun gallery in downtown Baltimore. Like most contemporary
art exhibits, the
gallery is a playground of speculative reality. Unlike those Rorschach
images where you interpret what you see, these images are what their
creator tells you they are, often defying all laws of congruency.
Tonight's were definitely exercises in the extemporaneous: welded metal
bracelets linked to replicate handcuffs welded to an eyeglass case
filled with origami birds made out of pages pulled from a porno mag is
wittily dubbed "Sexual Frustration". Photographs of plant life bursting
through plots of urban decay is "Wasted Space" - funny, my daughter is
curating a gallery showing of similar works in a couple months which go
by the theme of "The Third Conflict". Like I said, we must believe the
artist's perspective, no matter how quantum the leap from their vision
to ours.
Art is language, language similar to the speaking in tongues heard in
old revival tents (or some Pentecostal churches). Not unlike Pentecost,
each man hears it in his own language, regardless of what is being said.
I must say some of what I looked at tonight was babble - things more
geared toward the intellect than the heart.
I can't help but compare this language with the older mumblings of Mr.
Van Gough or Gogh as you will or if you follow BBC's Dr. Who, Van
Goth...(and a postmortem identity crisis ensues), Like Mozart's four to
eight measure classical constructions geared to the primate mind, Van
Gough's language is simple and direct. His vowels are color, his
consonants clean dark lines, his elisions clouded skies and starry
nights. He will get in your face and speak of hope past despair with
impeccable diction. No need fear anything being lost in translation. He
speaks to the heart, and his words leave you breathless.
I have a hard time reconciling the honesty of image found in photos by
Pollock, or paintings by any great master from time immemorial with a
gallery of works by students who have been taught to be fundamentally
dishonest in the name of creating a commercial product, created without
the discipline whose transcendence is the language of true art.
Or maybe this is the frustration of an old lady whose first love was the
crayon box. I did ok, the problem was the music was always voted more
impressive than the drawings, which may have led down the inevitable
path towards engineering, as it did for so many others on one side of my
family. I remember a high school guidance counselor looking over the
results of one of the many tests we were subjected to and muttering
something along the lines of "it seems you have an aptitude for
engineering. Too bad you're a girl. Have you considered a vocation with
the Dominicans?" and so I turned to a life of crime instead.
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*I have poked and prodded Aurora to start a blog of her own, but she prefers to remain the silent but deadly member of my crime syndicate. Show her some love so that she'll blog for me again.
About Me
- Maria D'Isidoro
- was sold to gypsies as a small child for half a tank of gas and a kitten. She was quickly, if not easily, retrieved by her mother after the kitten was revealed to be an Eldrich horror looking for a ride into the nearest metropolitan area to begin wreaking havoc. It's been a bone of contention between Maria and her family ever since, whether the Horror-kitten would've been more or less trouble than she grew up to be.
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