Let’s drop back in media to the days of magazines, physical pages we turned with pictures and captions. ‘Life Magazine’ was largely full page b&w photographs with four five lines of explanation underneath, posing the ever present if unspoken question, ‘which will you believe, what you see or what you read?’ Saw a travel ad once with the caption ‘discuss the weather with a friendly native’ below the photo of one pissed amazonian with death by spear and liver eating in his eyes, a bit of dissension on the shoot no doubt. Folks went on the cruise anyway, I’m guessing.
Randomly switch all the captions, William Burroughs style, and see if anyone notices, maybe not. Visual thinking isn’t ‘thought’ at all around here, teachers intoning ‘if you can’t say it, you can’t think it,’ or is it the other way around, the point is -- we use words. We be a literate culture and there are both advantages and costs. We’ve been taught since preK that what we hear, reading is decoded through our hearing circuits, is more important than what our eyes tell us, and it hasn’t been easy for any of us, like trying to force the left handed person to eat and write with the other hand.
We teach reading, linear thinking, cause and effect because it’s so handy for building bridges and communication systems, but we also live with top-down authority structures, gender and class distinctions, and the immense weight of our biased reading of history determining a narrow, restricted future. Using the eyes, and the fifty percent of our brain devoted to sight, leads to more associative and parallel thinking, shared insights and collective understanding, would be the suggestion.
Picasso said we all start out as artists and are talked out of it year by year, consider your own school experience. If there are two modes of thinking in competition, words rule for the moment, even in art. At the Art Institute of Chicago there’s a large room devoted to the work of Robert Ryman, an infant of an artist who never applied a color or made a mark, never got past the stage of forming a foundation, and yet there are three or four paragraphs there by the door that justify this use of downtown real estate for his big white squares. You might have to read it twice.
Words don’t like visual art, can’t describe it, are never going to understand it really. Art as just an analogue for cosmic thoughts and olympian insights, the fever dream of contemporary art, is often downright difficult to look at. Consider Jean Michel Basquiat, on a rocket ride of stardom that started when he met Warhol and only accelerated when he OD’d, my god is his stuff expensive. He’s also easy to google so pick out a piece you’d like for the living room, skulls and scrawls mostly, and a chorus of commentators sing his praises, all in words. Try looking instead.
The age of aquarius, we’ve been waiting, is going to be more visual, more open to parallel thinking, and we’re going to need more art. We’ll still be able to build bridges, but a bit more balance in our lives, in our thinking, could prove helpful. Sorry if that sounds indefinite, in words, but since words won’t go the places paintings take you, writing has to stop. If you want to go there yourself, you have to exercise your forgotten left handedness, your ability to think visually, and you do this by looking at art -- in large part that’s it’s job. Art speaks in its own language, with its own voice, when you ignore the explanations posted on the wall, the muttering in your ear buds, not because they’re wrong but because they’re words.
Randomly switch all the captions, William Burroughs style, and see if anyone notices, maybe not. Visual thinking isn’t ‘thought’ at all around here, teachers intoning ‘if you can’t say it, you can’t think it,’ or is it the other way around, the point is -- we use words. We be a literate culture and there are both advantages and costs. We’ve been taught since preK that what we hear, reading is decoded through our hearing circuits, is more important than what our eyes tell us, and it hasn’t been easy for any of us, like trying to force the left handed person to eat and write with the other hand.
We teach reading, linear thinking, cause and effect because it’s so handy for building bridges and communication systems, but we also live with top-down authority structures, gender and class distinctions, and the immense weight of our biased reading of history determining a narrow, restricted future. Using the eyes, and the fifty percent of our brain devoted to sight, leads to more associative and parallel thinking, shared insights and collective understanding, would be the suggestion.
Picasso said we all start out as artists and are talked out of it year by year, consider your own school experience. If there are two modes of thinking in competition, words rule for the moment, even in art. At the Art Institute of Chicago there’s a large room devoted to the work of Robert Ryman, an infant of an artist who never applied a color or made a mark, never got past the stage of forming a foundation, and yet there are three or four paragraphs there by the door that justify this use of downtown real estate for his big white squares. You might have to read it twice.
Words don’t like visual art, can’t describe it, are never going to understand it really. Art as just an analogue for cosmic thoughts and olympian insights, the fever dream of contemporary art, is often downright difficult to look at. Consider Jean Michel Basquiat, on a rocket ride of stardom that started when he met Warhol and only accelerated when he OD’d, my god is his stuff expensive. He’s also easy to google so pick out a piece you’d like for the living room, skulls and scrawls mostly, and a chorus of commentators sing his praises, all in words. Try looking instead.
The age of aquarius, we’ve been waiting, is going to be more visual, more open to parallel thinking, and we’re going to need more art. We’ll still be able to build bridges, but a bit more balance in our lives, in our thinking, could prove helpful. Sorry if that sounds indefinite, in words, but since words won’t go the places paintings take you, writing has to stop. If you want to go there yourself, you have to exercise your forgotten left handedness, your ability to think visually, and you do this by looking at art -- in large part that’s it’s job. Art speaks in its own language, with its own voice, when you ignore the explanations posted on the wall, the muttering in your ear buds, not because they’re wrong but because they’re words.
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