art’s job -- perceptual aerobics

The world you live in is as broad and as deep as your perception only, reflecting just what you pay attention to, and for some it can be extremely limited. In totalitarian states the world of the masses is kept as small as possible, limited to symbols of authority and ritual, the leaden oppression leavened with a constant round of parades, noisy festivals, and pointless competitions. By contrast, here we have freedom to see anything we want, experience the world anyway we choose, on paper at least, but instead we’re presented with a constant streaming of commercial messages suggesting what we should buy and what we should think and who we should vote for -- a closed box.

If you’re going to try to find your way out by thinking, good luck. You’ll find the language you’ve been given has been constructed like a fish trap, narrower and narrower, until you find yourself active and aggressive, passive and fatalistic, and won’t know why. Are there subjects and verbs in your thoughts or just states of being, logical conclusions or mindless conventions, all sticky webs to crawl out of. If you would like to broaden your own horizons, don’t read reports and go to lectures, try using your eyes. Just look at stuff. The more you look the more you’ll see, and there isn’t any end. The suggestion was made long ago, that ‘seeing is the only form of eating that provides its own meat,’ probably more graceful in the original, and in its time, but the paradox is clear.

A good place to start seeing more is by noticing shadows, clouds in the sky, anything you might normally take for granted and dismiss. For you it isn’t there, not even if you want it to be. Stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon with the warm updraft in your face so much like the subway, you’ll get that part, but you’ll wonder why other people are taking pictures, it’s just a big hole. Same goes for large swaths of experience other folks seem to value, since for you these realms don’t exist, living a monochromatic  life, nothing much beyond traffic and the evening news, what’s for dinner? Well OK, maybe you aren’t as limited as that, but what are your limits, really? Compared to everyone else, how wide is your perceptual net and how much in your immediate surroundings are you aware of and responding to -- there’s no way to know this directly, but it’s fairly certain anyone can make improvements. 

A work of art is like exercise equipment for perceptual tone and fitness, not actually productive in itself, but a stand-in that will ultimately make seeing everything else easier. Deciphering a painting requires levels of recognition the mind usually bypasses in a normal day. You may think you see a city street, an arrangement of fruit and flowers, bathers on a beach, but your visual apparatus had to scramble to figure it out. The artist is leaving cues, making suggestions, leading you toward conclusions about what you see, but it’s really just colors on a flat surface and not that thing at all. It’s up to you to engage and apply your own imagination to make the image work, to recognize and find meaning in the clever imposter. As a result of looking at art something changes, and senses are on alert, jolted awake by some artist tricking them so boldly, and the average person is bound to notice the difference. Spend two hours in a museum looking at landscapes and then go for a drive in the country, a perfect sunday afternoon, and the question won’t be asked again. There’s not a lot of theory here, really, just a practical rational suggestion that art doesn’t just hang on the wall, it pushes the walls back, expands the vision and opens the mind, that’s its job. 

islands in the streaming -- works of art

There’s nothing wrong with the way you live, not so different from others in your neighborhood, but how does it compare with the life of average humanity in, say, the last hundred thousand years, our time on the planet? Life just slides by these days, new models every year, new kinds of media, updates all directions, the kids keep up but will be back in the pack soon enough. There was a time not so far back when the chestnut tree down by the livery would become even taller and more robust in a lifetime, but no one even noticed. The prominent buildings in the town were constructed at least a lifetime ago and for common citizens might as well have always been there. Life had signposts, safe harbors, stable anchorages, and all this formed a foundation for facing the world. No need to look back with nostalgia, but it might be handy to account for what’s been lost, and to consider our own inborn psychology, how we construct our identities and see the world.

For the thoroughly modern person adept at surfing the digital tide all around us, go be free, don’t let the nasty organic flesh part of existence, so subject to fatigue and breakdown, inconvenience you over much. Any remaining, average people who find themselves here but who see further than the latest app, who feel some kinship with people of different times and even respect them for their accomplishments, might want to consider owning art. It’s this era’s personal hitching post, so nice to come home to, and even makes the new place home whenever you move. From the moment you acquire it, art’s never supposed to change, that’s the deal. Art carried home under the arm and hung on the wall will always be there, absorbing and recording major events in your life, reading back when you look at them years from now.

Original art burrows into your brain, bonds with your point of view, and becomes an old friend before it’s over -- ask anyone, anyone who actually owns art, although that’ll exclude all sorts of arts administrators and academic experts willing to live with reproductions, it’s all the same, right? If you intend to spend real money don’t listen to them, don’t listen to anyone, just look. The artist has been putting colors on the canvas trying to find common ground with someone, anyone, maybe you, and it’s something you just recognize. If gallery personnel go buzzing in your ear about famous celebrities who collect the work, honors and awards, understand they’re discussing price, selling you up, it’s just their job. Focus your attention on the piece in the room that looks back at you, simple as that, and do your best to go home together.