cultivated blindness -- simple sight

Here’s the thing -- brand new, truly original art couldn’t even be seen. We’re just not technically equipped to see totally new stuff. The alien standing next to you taking notes won’t impinge on your senses because you’ve never seen one before, and your mind can’t define him, her, or it. Folk lore has it that new world natives couldn’t see Cortez’s ships in the bay at Vera Cruz, and thought he had emerged from the sea. After a lot of diligent looking the shaman began to see them, like wooden houses with poles extending upward, and he explained to the rest what to look for. 

It has to do with the act of seeing, itself, the search for similar templates throughout the endless file cabinets of memories and experiences we have in our heads already, starting from when we first arrived. It happens instantaneously most of the time, but sometimes a crumpled bag on the lawn tries to be a squirrel for just a split-second, just enough lapse to be confusing, to glimpse the process in action. This collaboration of sensation and memory, altered by personal biases this way and that, produces what we see, probably at least slightly different for everyone.

Here we come to a basic premise of art, long left out of the conversation. Is the source for the art found in life as lived, or is it derived from other antecedent art, a long progression? There’s is a good reason to ask this question because we’re specialized, and can have similar sensations but see things differently, so true when it comes to art. Let’s suppose you have a degree, maybe took some classes, flipped through a few magazines, just trying to keep up you see, and you’ve filed a lot of art in your memory banks the typical citizen might not have. Makes you cool, right? Maybe.

Art about art cantilevers out over the abyss, but can become pretty flimsy, loud but anemic, requiring constant fan support from the wealthy and intelligent. So here we have a gallery space four inches deep in white flour with a surround of clear plastic sheeting, the pure whiteness festooned with twisted cigarette packs, gum wrappers, and other signifiers of what, exactly? Do you know, would you be impressed? I’m guessing on some level this exhibition cuts like a laser, witty and wise, but over my head by a mile, and it seems that bothers no one. That’s where they were aiming in the first place, it’s art about art. 

The whole business reeks of complicity, is nothing if not expensive, a social-club cult of economic exclusion and tribal totems. Only a prude would bother to object, so easy to just walk away and find more direct engagement, a more rational playing field, but wait. What about an art about life, some variation of representation that draws its comparisons from the common experience side, that seeks access to the mind and heart by opening a file compiled from daily living? As art, it would surely be considered quaint by the subsidized crowd, but it might resonate with everyday citizens in unexpected ways, an art that can be ‘seen’ by everyone.