Fascinating stuff, Christopher; don't stop I at least am enjoying it.
And it does, perhaps, have something to do with what we bring
individually to the other work of seeing.
This is interesting as it moves forward from Van Gogh's painting of
the old shoe, which obviously did ask that it be seen as it 'was' as
well as as a new version/vision of artistic 'beauty.' Did the artists
also see it already in a gallery, so gathering the privilege of same?
Or did he just pant it because he actuall saw it, clear?
And, like many poets still, do some artists do what they do, painting,
because they have this need, rather than, simply, because they've been
so 'absorbed' (without concern, sans thought (ful self awareness)?
Doug
On 15-May-08, at 5:07 AM, Christopher Walker wrote:
> What was it Isamu Noguchi said to Cage? 'An old shoe would look
> beautiful in
> this room'? That's the effect of a gallery. Since it's also the
> effect of
> *choice* by the artist one could argue either (a) that some artists
> use the
> object to bring a sort of privileged gaze out of the gallery and
> into the
> world, a useful thing to do, or (b) that creative practice has been
> absorbed
> by the forces of cultural production and consumption, that the
> artist is now
> just an agent of the gallery system, and that the world (around
> which we
> continue to wander like alienated visual tourists) is now part of the
> gallery in some sense, a condition of *real subsumption* in Marx's
> terminology.
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
and this is 'life' and we owe at least this much
contemplation to our western fact: to Rise,
Decline, Fall, to futility and larks,
to the bright crustaceans of the oversky.
Phyllis Webb
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