“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
I delight in combining ideas, as in making a “braided essay.” I just found out at a deeper level that, besides seeing differently, including seeing past our culture’s foliage, not at it… painters combine things too.
Flying home from London, I reflect on artists like Britain’s David Hockney seeing things differently. I mean really differently, as shown by Hockney’s artistic range of cubism, paintings-made-of-photos, surrealism and more.
Over Greenland, I muse that I resist noticing anything that contradicts my everyday “received culture.” For example, in a grumpy voice: I shouldn’t have to think about my condominium buddies being assimilated.
Something I only realized a week before seeing Hockney, while I was walking around the Tate museum of modern art: Artists not only see the world, but our man-made culture too. For the physical world, they may see and explore in new ways, often by juxtaposition. Such as, say, a combination of textures. Or “still space” and motion. Or periodic random sound in a great turbine hall. Harmless-to-my-ego stuff. For the human world, they may see our culture in a new way. As if artists are not blindly assimilated.
I suspect artists don’t begin by verbalizing a focused proper grammatical left-brain thesis. More likely they explore our culture broadly at first, through a right-brain no-words lens of blending. Like, say, combining a rich green splash of foliage into the middle of an empty expanse of cement cityscape.
For me, not having “an educated palate” for art, I might think: “I like my concrete sea, you stupid eco artist, so go put your foliage in some tidy corner.”
When art provokes, when one feels a hot rage to “blame the messenger” then maybe one should think about that. Too bad art, in viewing as well as in making, is often, like music, hard to put into words. I was skeptical years ago when people verbalized “the expense of meat” as the “reason” for their hot rage at a lady artist’s “Meat Dress” on display at the city gallery—She had to keep replacing that meat that symbolized how women are seen. I think people would have been merely lukewarm to the sight of a meat “suit and tie.” I wonder whether they thought so too, subconsciously.
There is a huge pop-art war picture at the Tate by Roy Lichtenfeld. With a T-shirt version in the gift shop. War ethics are in the eye of the beholder. I doubt Roy meant to be pro-war, OR anti-war, for his piece called Wham! His medium was both words and a picture, inspired by a comic book. I think Roy was interested in exploring a violent image—a fighter jet being blasted apart—juxtaposed with the very calm words of a narrator-pilot saying something like “I fired a burst.” In a real battle, of course, warriors are emotional, they demonize their enemy. Not like in peace time when a former test pilot says, “Houston, we have a problem.”
I’m still chuckling over an artist exploring popular culture using a combination: They drew someone falling down a building, face upwards, Matrix style, while shooting two guns—…wearing a cotton dress, with a wrinkled face. A grandmother.
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Sean Crawford
Amongst tropospheric trade winds,
Within a soaring miracle,
February, July
2023
Related Note: about making essays, like making art, without a thesis
“… A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you’ll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing…”
Paul Graham, The Need to Read, in the essays section of paulgraham.com
Art Note: Graham, who studied art full-time in Italy, also did an essay about (mostly) art called Is There such a thing as Good Taste? (link at http://www.paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html)
Blog Note: Happily, some fellow writers at a drop-in group gave me feedback. Although I’ve been essaying for years, the truism still counts: “Two heads are better than one.”
