Lead with your heart
Think back to the last song you heard that filled your heart with joy. Did you get up and dance? Did you roll down the windows and sing along at the top of your lungs? Or did you sit down and write a paper about it?
I’ve been listening to a lot of Miles Davis lately. I’ve probably listened to Kind of Blue a hundred times in the last year. Is there anything that Miles Davis, or anyone else, could say about Kind of Blue that could make it any better for me?
I seriously doubt it.
I won’t argue for a minute that there isn’t value in the intellectual analysis of art. I’ve attended symposia, read books, and gone to endless lectures and artist talks, all in the hopes of “getting it.” But I would give it all away for the first 60 seconds of All Blues. Or five minutes alone in a room with a single Lee Friedlander print.
Jesus Christ, Lee Friedlander!
The primary value of art in my eyes goes far beyond intellectual discourse. I look to art for inspiration, for an emotional connection with others. I choose to make art because I am in a constant state of wonder about the world I live in, and the process of creation is my struggle to communicate that wonder to others.
I’ve spent the last 5 years living and breathing photography, absorbing everything about the subject that I can get my hands on. What I’ve come to realize is that the process of creation and the process of analysis are two very different things. There are some who happen to do both well, but I think that’s rare, and I don’t think that one is necessarily a prerequisite for the other.
Camden Hardy recently paraphrased Frank Gohlke as saying “It’s too bad we can’t just be artists any more; we have to be scholars too.” Hardy sees this as a sign of a lack of intellectual rigour on Gohlke’s part. As someone who is very familiar with Gohlke’s work, I have to think that Hardy has missed the point completely. Gohlke’s rigour is in the work; his photographs are as conceptually stimulating as anything you are likely to see. It’s up to us, as viewers, to provide the context and make of it what we will. To me, that’s what the experience of art is all about.
April 10, 2010