| With my brother in Soho. I live five minutes
away on Stanton st., he's on Wooster st. in the thick of it. Broome street
warehouses washed by winter sun, that cold yellow light on white painted
brick. We visit one gallery after another. George says it feels like
post-apocalyptic times.
It's 1995. Money's gone, the market crashed, art world's dead and we're sifting through the ashes. We talked of Baldessari, his followers. Of the patronage system. Some of these galleries are museums, ideological temples, preserving
fragments, histories, styles, cultural icons. |
That's the past, now we're in a transition period... Various movements bubbling in the soup, invisible, some will emerge victorious. What can we foresee? Ideology probably won't take priority; the work will be as important, if not more so. This due to an eventual recognition that text and words cannot translate a visual code, nor a musical one. Additions to our intellectual storehouse can only come from outside the known. Therefore the new work will probably differ from what is expected. |
Creation is a spontaneous process based on difference,
rather than in a validation of current belief systems. Ideologies take a
back seat to actual creation, which they interpret and classify.
Concepts may be safe but obviously there are no discoveries in what we know. And yet the new is unfamiliar, uncomfortable, frightening. The very nature of art bespeaks a balance between intuition and thought, a combat between feelings and ideas, and a strong predication towards discovery. These tensions are structural, a priori. In the midst of such polar opposites, a little discomfort comes with the territory. |