 |
| color study #47 |
Whenever there is a review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, I do my best to read it. More often than not, it's over my head with many ideas and references that I just don't get, but sometimes, just sometimes, I get it in a big way and I read it over and over just for the pleasure of his writing. His recent article about a survey show of abstract art at MOMA is one of those cases. One of my favorite sentences comes early on in the article when he is describing the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp: "The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart." I don't know who I admire more in this case: Taeuber-Arp for being a person who could be described so amazingly or Schjeldahl for recognizing these qualities in her and putting them together in such a beautiful, succinct way. He describes her work: "Rectangles and squares in black, red, blue, gray and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy, visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry's matter-of-fact, nubbly texture." Delightful! I know! And then, and this is the best description of why anyone would make abstract art that I have ever read: "If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn't need any great reason." And there it is. I came to my love of abstract art late and my minimal practice of it even later, but for me, Schjeldahl's description of why to do it is on the nose: it just feels good and right. I came into my jello pictures out of a need, as a photographer, to do what I do, that is, make pictures, while not representing something. It was a relief to me to pull the context out of my photos and just pay attention to shape and color. Picasso, Schjeldahl informs us, did not think abstract art would fly. He thought that without any recognizable representation in art, there would be no drama. I disagree. I think color and form and the relationships of forms to other forms can, and have been proven to, say a lot. These things are visceral. They go straight to your gut.
