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.
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.
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