Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky
There are sultanates in the Middle East and there is the sullenate of Manhattan which appears as midtown begins to empty out in the
hours before Christmas Eve. If you are foolish enough to think you can avoid the crowds lining up
for the newly installed Inventing Abstraction Show at MOMA by going on Christmas Eve, you are left holding the bag, i.e. holding your overly
salty perennially disappointing oversized pretzel in your hand as you are greeted by an unbeauteous yellow notice behind a closed grate, “Museum Closes
at 3:00 P.M. Today." But you can enjoy the low definition approach
by which the imagination fills in the space between the lines. Inventing
Abstraction…who needs a show? You can invent inventing abstraction in your
own mind. To begin with it’s not realism. So you don’t have to worry about
illusion and therefore perspective. You don’t have to worry about the painting
representing anything. Why? Because the painting is about itself. Admittedly
you read these ideas when you were studying Clement Greenberg and
you also read about people like Duchamp who said that art didn’t have to be a
gilt framed portrait of the dauphin. It could even be a urinal. Though
you’re making your way down Fifth Avenue rather than Broadway, you’re reminded of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Yeah, art can be a
little bit like music too, patterns interrelating for the sake of themselves.
You’re still itching about not being able to see the new show. Secretly you’d
also hoped you’d get lucky and have been one of the fortunate ones who
didn’t have to sacrifice their lives in order to see The Clock (also on exhibit
at MOMA. However, in your frustration in not finding something to fill the
emptiness you always feel on Christmas Eve, you started to talk to yourself and
in the course of talking, you leaned a little something about what you thought about art.
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Reflective and a reminder that empty spaces are not necessarily a vacuum.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
thanks Jylle and speaking of vacuum. I’m finding vacuuming, particularly vacuuming in the buff to be an activity in which many ideas come to me. Vacuuming with my clothes on is equally effective, but does not make for good copy on a blog post.
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