Joe
When you say:
>But this seems not only reductive to me, but to confuse cause & effect. It
>seems, too, sentimental to claim--& how would one know?--that an artist
>committed suicide because he couldn't think of any new directions. Such a
>claim devalues both art & suicide. If I had to choose, I would prefer to see
>the paintings as a record of some much larger despair. But in fact that also
>seems overly reductive. We have the paintings.
I simply agree. I don't know what caused the despair, but I 'know' the
paintings & I find myself totally involved in them, but not for some
posited emotion from the artist's life so much as the reality of paint on
canvas, the mesermizing presence of the artact (artifact) before me. It is
possibe, in terms of the directions the art had taken, to wonder where he
might have gone next, but he'd been doing (refining?) what happens in those
canvases (&, as I said, water colours, smaller works but glowing) for some
time, & in the ones I saw in that retrospective I felt no falling off or
sense of boredom with what is happening on that flat plane...
We're back to what happens in a work of art: yes, we can't help (especially
in poetry) responding to meaning, emotion, etc, but for the artist, on some
level, what happens is formal (which is why I really really am against
allowing only one group to claim the term for themselves), part of the
working out of the materials at hand...
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Beauty's whatever
makes the adrenalin run.
John Newlove
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