Look at your life from a different angle
I went to the Whitney the other day. Right now they have a Warhol retrospective that has a line around the block on the weekends. That wasn’t what stuck with me, though. There’s another show Programmed, that really resonated with me.
There is one piece, by Jim Campbell, where from a distance it appears to be a low-resolution image of birds flying across a white sky. As you approach it, it becomes less recognizable as a video. When you reach the screen you can step inside of it, where there is a room containing a grid of light bulbs suspended in the ceiling. You can stand in the middle of them, lights flashing on and off at random.
When we’re in the middle of a situation, there is no way to see what’s going on, nevermind make sense of it. But if we step back far enough, suddenly there is a coherent narrative. All of these black and white moments somehow convey nuanced information.
Nam June Paik’s wall of televisions captures the attention of everyone walking by, but there is a ‘prepared television’ that I found more interesting. Most of us look at a television set as a one-way medium. Someone decides what we’re going to see and we just get to choose the channel -- or turn it off. Paik placed a giant magnet on the set, taking the signal and turning it from the broadcast someone else created into an abstract image that is a collaboration between artists.
Concept art may not be your cup of tea. It’s easy to walk by a piece that is, essentially, a pile of literal garbage, and not feel drawn to figure out the message. Or create your own. But sometimes we need to find the meaning of crap in order to keep doing what we do.
There are so many things outside of our control. But the way we receive these things -- and respond to them -- is up to us.
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