I was back in Lubbock last weekend for the opening of our Land Arts exhibition. It was great to be there and have the opportunity to set things up to my liking. Only about half the group made tactile pieces (as opposed to video, written, or audio work), so I had a significant portion of the wall and table space. Everything looked beautiful and everyone’s pieces worked together nicely.
The experience of setting up and then talking with people during the opening, after having had a formal crit in December, was illuminating. Some of my pieces were successful and easily understood as stand alone items. In particular, the watercolor palettes as landscapes received a lot of interest and praise. “Assemblages,” which were very successful during crit and earlier pin-ups, were arcane in a museum setting. They seem to require the discussion around them to hold up. The ceramic “Site Recordings,” while extremely fun for me to make, were perhaps not as interesting as other things, but I suspected that even as I was making them. The hand built ceramic pieces are by far more stimulating than the thrown vessels. The “Let’s Have a Blast” gun cartridge jewelry collection didn’t inspire the emotional intensity or enervate the rest of the works as happened during the crit. That said, it may not have conveyed its meaning successfully either time. The text in the book helped it, but was not displayed on the wall, and was easily overlooked since the book was only open for reading during the opening (it now sits under a vitrine for protection). “The Rock Hound’s Tale,” which in many ways is the simplest of the works, was fun for people. Everyone likes to look at pretty rocks. I’m still not convinced the poems meant to elucidate it are any good, or even necessary, though the meaning is ephemeral without them.
I feel like I have blindly created art that sits squarely within this artistic moment accidentally and entirely by intuition. None of it is what I expected it to be or become. I think about paintings: for centuries revered as the highest form of art, but now, after Modernism, almost singularly avoided by the art world. I did make several, but even those are removed from the expectations of a painting, and done in what was once the lowliest, most pedestrian and unserious paint: watercolor. In many ways, I suspect this is how art works: by experiment, inspiration, and intuition. It is not like the practice of design: there is no end goal, no final purpose, no functional outcome required. It just is, as an expression, conveying its own truth to the beholder or the maker or perhaps just itself.
If visual art is great, it is because it is intangibly appreciable to people, regardless of whether the true meaning is revealed or easily internalized. I often think of Rothko, who insisted his work was not abstract, critics be damned, and find I agree with him. He painted deep emotions in oil, and if you’re willing to feel through your sense of sight, you understand each one, and perhaps none so clearly as those in the Rothko chapel, but it is not work that can be easily intellectualized. It is simply felt and this is why it is great.
