Quantum Art

Yesterday at Clayversity we were having an interesting discussion about Art. (Not "Ahhhhrrrrt" that the Spamalot French Taunters loved so.)

The question was about Clay Aiken's masterpiece, "Lover All Alone," and whether or not it was more moving now that he is out of the closet. Were the lyrics really about what he was experiencing, and is that what made it Art?

For all I know the feelings
And the picture that I
tried
So hard to find
Isn't mine.

I was frustrated because I was trying to say that the song is art not because it was a true and accurate description of Clay's feelings but because of the way it makes me feel. If all an artist does is tell us what he feels, I don't give a shit. If the art work makes me feel something, then that's why it is art. It communicated something to me.

I realize that isn't completely true. Unless the artist also felt something in the creation, then making the viewer or listener feel something is flat-out manipulation. Those old telephone commercials that had us all reaching out and touching someone - that wasn't art. That was commerce.

So I am revising my statements. It's art when the artist makes you feel what he feels.

A friend asked me about #11 on my Random list, why did "Starry Night Over the Rhone" make me cry? What it came down to was that being in the physical presence of that painting (not looking at a picture of it) took me to the time and place where Vincent was.

In a sense, this is time traveling, but in the quantum mechanics sense of entanglement (I think the New Age term is synchronicity.)

At Clayversity, I snarkily mentioned that I would be attending the Corcoran Gallery's Member's Preview tour of the Maya Lin installation, "Systematic Landscapes," and said maybe someone there knows what art is. Of course that would have been a stupid question, so I didn't interrupt the curator doing the hour-long tour of the five rooms of Maya's landscapes.

(I couldn't help asking one stupid question, though - how the wire-frame grid depicting the undulations of a mountain managed to stay up on the wall. The depiction of the Potomac River using nails as pixels was easy to figure out - NAILS - but I couldn't see anything holding the grid up. It turned out that the end pieces pierced through the wall, clutching it.)

Maya's art consisted of breaking apart the landscapes she experienced into component pieces and systematically reconstructing them. Her vision is so encompassing, it is hard to imagine how it can be broken apart. She brings landscapes indoors where people can look at them and experience them as objects. This changes the way we look at things.

On the way to work, I was looking at the systematic landscapes I pass every day - the stones in the low walls surrounding the property of an office complex, the patterns in the bricks in the sidewalks.

Art is communication and transportation. It's interactive. It makes you see and feel things you hadn't seen or felt in quite that way before. This time-travels you to the heart and soul of the artist and establishes that quantum connection, even for a brief moment.

Here are some photos I borrowed from the Internet. Just Google Image search Maya Lin:







This last one is from the Systematic Landscapes exhibition. The peak of the tallest mountain is probably about chest-high, and the viewer is invited to walk through the landscape.

Once again, I look at art and marvel at what human beings can do.

Love,
hosaa