Jeanne and Arnold
Along a San Francisco Beach,
Virtual, Of Course
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Back to the poem.
Read a little more on Jenny Saville's Strategy, 1994."
I have done this before. Sometimes as projects, like online gallery exhibits, go on, you get the same painting more than once. sometimes I'm working at turning that painting into a site map or gallery exhibit map. This week, it was just my fondness and pleasure at staring at those two old codgers wandering down the beach together that made me do it. We're going to be in San Francisco this weekend, with Michael and Pat and Marlene, at the National Meetings of the International Visual Sociology Association and the American Sociological Association.
It should have been simple. Most of the work was done before we left on the Queen Mary II. But, of course, the work is never done. There was not the necessary technical equipment in San Francisco at the meetings, so Arnold, that dear old penguin, got me a laptop. Last weekend CSUDH changed all their servers, and I can't upload to that site. My tech came out and hooked up the laptop to my wireless network, but that refused to work. Until he went home late. That night it started working. The next day he went on vacation to Poland. Then the Habermas site refused to let me upload. No one knew why. I screamed, and offered suggestions, and they did something, and it worked again, but, well, not perfectly. Arnold suggested we ask the CIA to find our tech in Poland.
From all this I have concluded that we really do need all three mirror sites. And I need a full time tech, never mind a full time shrink for atttempting all this. Old penguins should be left to wander along the beach. And so you see why I put those old penguins up again. I will look at them lots while I'm gone. On my laptop.
But there was another piece to all this. My work with visual analysis and expression has led me more deeply into questions about art, about why IVSA seems to place so much more emphasis on photography than on other art media. The penguins were on a National Geogrpahic Calendar we received, a photo. To express what I felt when I saw them, I had to paint them. The photo didn't give the same feeling. It wasn't interdependent with my vision, my feelings.
Photography is wonderful, and certainly some of it is art. But the camera intervenes and imposes the order of realism. There are times when that order is best not imposed. But we are not artists, and so is there not a problem with our creating art? Excuse me. Where, oh where, did those definitions, all socially constructed, by the way, come from?
I'm not sure what to call what I'm asking you to do. But I know it when I see it. It's those penguins tottering along the beach. I suppose that Titian or Raphael, or Rembrandt or Picasso would have rendered them with far more skill. But they were going for museum quality, and I was going for memories.
I can tell you what this is not: it's not public art, except to the extent that we share it as friends; it's not public art in the sense that graffiti are public art; it's not museum art, in that our appreciation is private, and largely meant to stay private; it's not commercial, in the sense that it wouldn't fit in polished advertisements. But it's not crafts, in that its goal is closer to fine art, the pleasure of recalling what we have seen, in the world as we see it, or as we experience it spiritually or physically.
In connection with these thoughts, I spent quite a while tonight reading Misfiled Conversations about what it is, art. Read it. Caution, there are a few four letter words, so don't give it to children. But think about what these artists are saying to each other about their feelings on art. They never consider art as we are using it in our discourse and gallery shows; but I wrote to them tonight to see if they might.
In this connection consider the new series in the New York Times on Touring the Civil Rights South:
John Loomis for The New York Times
In Greensboro, N.C., the Woolworth where lunch-counter sit-ins began in 1960 is to become a museum.
Civil Rights Battlegrounds Enter World of Tourism By Shaila K. Dewan. August 10, 2004. Backup.
And don't forget that Susan and I take in unicorns, too. They do stop by more often lately, and we fully expect to meet a few in San Francisco. Susan finally got all her photos through, technical problems or no.
Back to Table of Contents.
Back to the poem.
Read a little more on Jenny Saville's Strategy, 1994."