just saw a performance here at the museum and at first i did not find it that exciting but as it kept evolving, it caught my attention. it made me think of 5 things:
1- experimentation
the artists (lucia koch and takehito koganezawa) were doing a jam session with lights as they called it, in the auditorium. it's obviously hard to put in words but basically, it was a very playful spontaneous dialogue that created completely new imagery that somehow had a sense of nostalgia to it. because it felt very unplanned, it felt like an experimentation, maybe even an exercise. the hard time i'm having is to define the difference between exercise x art. i always divide my sketches/drawings, in my mind, between just an exercise and actual artwork. it is a tough call, but to me, my observation drawings are just exercises. i wonder how the artists of the performance feel about the nuances of just exercise x art. i guess my self esteem/ego would not let me call my observation sketches art and i wonder how much of an artist i am in the sense of an artist that belongs and participates in the field currently when i don't exactly accept experimentation as 100% art.
2- parts to a whole
another thing that i kept thinking about, and this is also upon viewing a wall full of sketches by 2 japanese artists, not only the performance: there are definitely a lot of elements in these specific artworks. they are composed of various moments or drawings that make up a whole. when so many various smaller less important (?) pieces are part of a bigger picture, symbollically, then, do the smaller parts matter? in a sense, aren't they sort of replaceable because they're only there to get the whole picture across? rings back to the process x result dilemma in the art world of the museum school i went to for my fine arts degree... hee hee...
3- next step
as a good exercise/art (haven't decided that yet), the performance was definitely a good trigger for a lot of new ideas for me. i wonder if, from it, the artists themselves also get ideas and continue onto other things and other artforms/media. (couldn't stick around for the q & a to ask...)
4- spontaneous beauty
and the last thing, again thinking back on the experimentation, it was amazing to see the beautiful imagery that was created just by chance from trinkets, water, light and translucent paper. sounds funny and maybe a bit on the over sensitive side of the world, but i saw images that i had never seen before. i feel it's nice to note that. the imagery was not grand or any major laser show at disneyworld or something. just shapes, some circles, some movement but it was very spontaneous poetry and it did look beautiful and it did leave people in the audience a bit in awe somehow.
at some point, there was a horizontal gradient (65% opacity or so) on the wall from a light mustardy yellow to a strange green and that moment felt like it had a spark in it somewhere. it was really beautiful. (i feel kinda stupid like seeing the beauty of a plastic bag flying around because of the wind, in the movie american beauty)
well either way, sensitivity is high this very minute and i have some art ideas from this that i'll make, photograph and post. have a great weekend everyone! beijos and sorry for the long post today!
