I Love Artists

Look, Don’t Touch: Art and Distance

This is going to be a strange post. I want to throw an idea out and I want to hear your thoughts on it. I’m going to tell you to touch art. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to. But I think you should. Here’s why.

My favorite way to spend a day off is to visit a gallery and give myself time to wander. It’s even better when my wife comes along. I love to experience art with someone, watching and learning from their reactions to the work. If I miss something, she often catches it. She pulls me back into pieces I breeze by. I’m fascinated by our different tastes, and where those tastes overlap tells me that beauty is not always subjective, “in the eye of the beholder”. Sometimes our trips bring a real revelation as we chat about what we see. That happened yesterday on Jasper ave near 124th street.

My wife made a tiny, fast comment. She told me that she likes work that invites her to touch it. Not that she does, of course, as touching the work is almost always forbidden. But she wants to when the work is good. It is work with layers, work that literally pulls her into itself. Often it is work with texture, employing gels or wax or mixed media collage. Work, she says, that makes her want to feel its surface and discover how it was made. There is something beautifully uninhibited and child-like about that response.

Do our "don't touch" rules about art keep us out of an experience?

I try to hide my cringing forward lurches, designed to pull her back from the canvas. I am an obsessive rule-follower, she will tell you. Taking my kids to a gallery, as much as I love it, sometimes fills me with more stress than pleasure as I think to myself over and again, “don’t touch!”, their eyes getting within inches of a piece. Especially when that piece is a Renoir or a Warhol.

But why not touch? Why this ironclad rule? Sure, I understand the motivation. We want to preserve work for future generations to enjoy. The oils in our skin can ruin a piece. I get this. But I wonder if preservation is always the top aim, or if preservation for future enjoyment sometimes eats away at potential enjoyment now. Are we stopping ourselves from experiencing part of art with this rule? Is touch not a vital sense, a potentially potent part of our experience of art? When my wife wants to reach out and feel a work because it speaks so loudly to her, does this not compliment the work and its creator. Don’t artists long for viewers to engage with their work? Touch is a sure form of engagement. I wonder, on a larger scale, does this “untouchable rule” contribute to the distance a large portion of society feels from “the fine arts”? Does the prohibition to touch artwork contribute on some level to an separation from it? Some of you may know better than I if these rules were always in place, or when they came into being. And what was the driving motive?

As we are looking to create an art space in the near future, one goal is engagement. We don’t want people to simply look at the work and pass by, we want them to interact with it. Sure, this happens mentally. It happens in relationship and conversation, but could it also happen literally? What if we curated a show where viewers were encouraged to touch every work? How would their perception of the work, and of the gallery itself, change?

Taking it further, what if we had a “touch, don’t look” gallery? Artists are invited to create work that will be experienced only through touch. “Viewers” are blindfolded, or sent into a pitch-dark room. They are rendered “blind” and must experience the work through other senses. How would this change our experience of art? How would it impact the artists involved?

Earlier this year I took the family to another art show, this one by sculptor Brian Jungen at the AGA. A sign at the entrance encouraged us to not only take photos (something forbidden in every other exhibit space), but to share those photos publicly online. Before I even saw the work, I felt encouraged to engage with it. I took photos. The kids posed with the massive plastic dinosaur skeletons, sometimes standing within the ‘bones’. They were still not supposed to touch, as far as I know, but even the change in attitude made us all relax and enjoy the work on a different level. I wonder if this invitation could be cultivated intentionally in all art shows? I wonder how that sort of invitation would change our approach to fine art?

This post offers more questions than answers, because what I am wrestling with here is not an answer, but a question. Should touch play a greater role in our experience of the arts, and particularly visual art?

What do you think?

Tags: bleeding heart art space, curation, senses, touch

Posted in Art Shows, Essays and Reflections, Painting | 8 Comments »

Your Thoughts, Like Stars: My Thoughts

Edward Van Vliet likes to chew long and hard on words, like beef jerky. His words often seem as innumerable as the stars. He is the most frequent commenter on this blog and you will find his thoughts salting the faith and art blogosphere under the name of etechne. Van Vliet is a man of many words, and I wonder if he isn’t obsessed with their power. It is no wonder then that Edward Van Vliet’s current exhibition, Your Thoughts, Like Stars, presents four installations orbiting the power of words and the thoughts they carry.

Anyone who has followed Van Vliet’s work will find familiar images and themes. Books play a large part. Recipe’s For Kneeling, II, revisits the illuminated books and kneeling cushions of earlier installations at The Paint Spot gallery. the space between, a smaller installation, features a single book, half buried, fossil-like, in a mound of glittering sand.The imagery for “The Weight of Things” brings an explosively expanded vision to imagery created for his NAESS show, I’m Not Finished Yet and Whisper before that. Text is again laid over the nebulous wonder of outer space. Edward also returns to his love for viewer participation and feedback, this time inviting his “readers” to create a page for a yet another book by reflecting on the significance of a single block of color (red, blue or green).

While much is familiar, none of it feels repeated. The exhibit as a whole is surprisingly fresh and bold. It is the show one would hope to have evolved and grown from the sprouts of past efforts. Each piece builds upon and enlarges an earlier concept.

Taken as a whole, the show weaves a thread of contemplation, wonder and ultimately action. We are not here to simply look. We are here to think. We should wrestle and, if Van Vliet would have his way, act in some way. Not counting viewer contributions, which continue to increase at this writing, Van Vliet has presented us with 113 “thoughts” in total here. The cumulative effect is both overwhelming awe and the inability to focus in one particular direction. There is a paradox on display. The phrases offered read as timeless truths, and the images Van Vliet evokes, from the expansive universe, the vast seas and countless sand on a shore to ancient books and inverted Albrecht Durer etchings of the Apocalypse, draw us into into a transcendent timeline. But the collection of so many thoughts in one small space feels more suited to the bite sized attention span of internet information addicts. How do we make sense of all this knowledge? How do we catalogue and process the wisdom of the ages? Perhaps this is the thought behind the title for “The Weight of Things”. Are we to view all 100 thoughts, displayed like polaroids, in one go, or are we better to sit with just one?

After taking in the whole, one does well to sit with each part and reflect. I began with The Weight of Things, where “thoughts” are rooted to sculpted bases, white and porous as sand dollars in the sea. The pieces pinwheel out from the center into five tentacle-like arms, also evoking a sand dollar. These arms seem to be moving, reaching to pull us inside, towards some center. Knowing Van Vliet’s faith, I’d guess that centre is the very heart and mind of God. I walked the length of each arm, one by one, letting each thought sink as far as I could in a short span of time. By then end I did feel the weight of things. At times encouraged, at times convicted, each phrase leaves little room for complacent comfort. Some sooth, but in surprising ways. Each phrase and image creates a world we could lose ourselves in. We could dive inside that expansive space and get to work kneading the wisdom of these words into our lives. But, as all to often happens, we must soon change the channel and move on.

I continued to The Art of Kneeling II, where 12 illuminated books hung low, awaiting my kneeling gaze. I approached each cushion and opened covers to reveal beautiful woodcuts, inverted to appear harsh and dark. The covers were notably more drab than those in Van Vliet’s previous show. The images inside have no color or gradation. Black and white alone convey a sense of absolutes. The font used on these pieces feels as old as the woodcuts themselves, a gothic script spelling out messages that are immediately jarring. I am being watched. There is power in my tongue. I begin to feel I am part of the battle depicted in these dramatic scenes of Apocalypse. My actions here and now are tied to then and there. What I do and what I say is of eternal importance, and it also matters today. Twelve is an easier number to digest than 100, and so this piece comes together for me, clearer than whole of The Weight of Things. I feel an urgency.

I move on to the space between, where the focus narrows onto one single book, unearthed part way from a pile of sand, like a fossil from a sea shore. I cannot help but notice the sparkle of the sand, it’s thousands upon thousands of tiny pieces mirroring the titular Stars of the whole exhibit. On the book’s cover a single skeletal torso is overlaid with flaming red and the words “made of earth/made of stars” (the latter half printed upside down and backwards). This piece feels ancient, organic and intimate. Something of our true origin and nature is to be discovered. This torso would house and protect a heart. A heart born of the earth, and yet beyond. A heart to house the countless thoughts on display. Perhaps to act before the tide comes in to wash away this moment. the space between somehow touches me most deeply of all four installations. It somehow gives me hope that I am more than dust.

And now it is time to add my own contribution, as I move to NAME THIS, where I am invited to write my reflections on a primary color. I choose red. I think of the fear and pain and passion of loving. I think of myself undone, broken and transformed by love. It’s a good place for an art show to have brought me.

I leave awash in thoughts of beach, sea and stars. A million points of light that can illuminate as well as burn. A million points of light spanning time and space. Dying out. Being born again. Without seeing Christ, or reading His name, I have been drawn to Him.

I leave in the grip of the Thinker, whose “thoughts, like stars” keep me moving.

Tags: art show, Edward Van Vliet, exhibit, profiles gallery, review, Your thoughs like stars

Posted in Art, Art Shows, books, Essays and Reflections, Galleries, Reviews | Comments Off

Progress and The Art Gallery of Alberta

Perhaps I’m thinking about progress a little too much these days, but as I wandered the halls of the Art Gallery of Alberta this morning, an overall story arc couldn’t be stifled. The juxtaposition of images and ideas frames each with new context, and I cannot help but mine for meta meaning.

Framing is precisely where my journey began today, and mining is where it ended. The fact that each verb, to frame and to mine, can be full of either possibility or potent is perhaps no accident. Ascending the iconic AGA staircase from bottom to top I moved from images of the Canadian landscape towards Edward Burtynsky’s Oil. The higher I climbed, the deeper I sunk into an onerous feeling of forward momentum that cannot be slowed.

I began with a room full of architecture imagined by Piranesi, centuries ago. His etchings of Roman prisons, overlaid with physical impossibilities and complexities, somehow bring optimism and play to the darkest of places. How one can be inspired to imagine and create within such dismal surroundings is beyond me, but imagine he does. The ingenuity and spark displayed are indeed the driving forces behind industry and progress throughout history (well, those and money). It is as if my AGA journey began by questioning what is possible and answering, “most anything!”

Those possibilities soon meet the inevitability of changes to our landscape. The beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and how its portrayal has shifted over time, were the subjects of the next gallery I visited, “Reframing a Nation”. Idyllic forest scenes weave heroism, whimsy and beauty into a tapestry of Canadian identity. As lovely as it all is, even in the midst of this apparently virgin wilderness an irony is noted in the description of one piece. In order to discover these vistas, the artists travelled roads or rails. In cars or trains. Their view of natural wonder was made possible through the technology that would encroach upon it. One wonders what nature was disrupted to make possible even the gallery itself where these images can now be enjoyed. Perhaps, without progress, we cannot even look backward effectively?

For now, one can forget such questions as he ascends the stairs to floor two. Here I found the mind-boggling imaginations of MC Escher, who took Piranesi’s ideas further beyond possible, along with an homage to the animation of Warner Bros. I didn’t enter these galleries, having enjoyed them on a previous visit. Still, I couldn’t help note the significance of their placement, next to the installation Celestial Bodies, which I had not yet seen.

Entering Jonathan Kaiser’s Celestial Bodies I felt immediately afraid. An eerie air filled the darkened room as I entered an empty children’s bedroom. Beside the main room, pajamas hang in an illuminated closet. The beds are empty, though one seems somewhat inflated, held down to the ground by a set of children’s storybooks. I cannot help but connect those stories to the dreams that have apparently given the missing children flight. Or perhaps nightmares. Though the room is devoid of people, a presence looms to the left. It is the giant head of a bison, horns bared, black as the paper-flowers that compose it’s ambiguous body, receding into curtain and shadow. I could not help but be terrified of the monster, nor could I stop staring at it. Though it stands adorned with brightly colored flowers, somehow made beautiful by the young minds imagining it, it broods still and black as oil. To me, the beast was encroaching upon the innocence and optimism of Bugs Bunny next door. He was coming to tear up the sketches of Escher and mar the landscapes of the Group of Seven below. It was as if we, dreamers of a bright future and idealized past, were the missing children in this bedroom, facing a nightmare in the midst of of our dreams.

One floor up, Edward Burtynsky takes that nightmare on in large scale. Oil, like all Burtynsky work I’ve seen, somehow blows up industrialization to the scale of beauty, wonder and even abstraction. As we see these new landscapes from his perspective, we are forced to question the world we have made, and whether it can be unmade or remade at this point. I cannot say I felt hopeful at the end of Oil, and I’d be surprised if I was supposed to.

In the “Afterword” Burtynsky has written for the exhibit, he tells of the sense of wonder and awe that drew him to these “manufactured landscapes” when he began photographing large scale industrialization. Over his twelve years living with oil as subject matter, his wonder began to char and flake into ash. HIs personal punctuation next to “progress”, once perhaps an exclamation point, now seems at best a question mark.

This mirrors my own relationship to technology. I consider myself a “gadget loving luddite” because on the one hand I love the MacBook Pro I’m typing this on. I love that I can get internet in the downtown core and carry over a thousand songs in my pocket. I love that I can capture images on digital film and add a virtual symphony to the skeleton of my songs with the click and drag of a button. Yet, as I have aged, my love affair with technology has soured. It has ceased to be messianic. It has begun, at times, to be invasive. I’d rather not be “always on”, because some days, well … I’m off. I want private spaces and moments kept sacred in packets of time. I want face to face relationships and for my imagination to arrive at point B in tact. I fear these things are being extracted from me like oil from the tar sands. I feel, sometimes, like I myself am becoming a manufactured landscape. I feel, sometimes, I have little choice in the matter.

Perhaps there is more hope to be found here than I’ve yet discovered, because the fulness of one’s glass is all about perspective. Perhaps, as was suggested at the beginning of my AGA journey, a frame has everything to do with the landscape one views. Perhaps I need to return to these galleries, this time descending from the top floor to the bottom. For now, from idealized landscapes to those manufactured, today’s trek to the AGA, itself a marvel of innovation, has got me asking deep in my spirit that recurring question; Is this progress?

Read more about the current AGA exhibits here.

Tags: aga, Art Gallery of Alberta, canadian art, edward burtynksy, gallery, group of seven, is this progress?, jonathan kaiser, mc escher, piranesi's prisons, review, Technology

Posted in Art Shows, Is this progress?, Reviews | Comments Off

The First Bridge Songs photos

This year, more than one person took the time to capture Bridge Songs on film on June 5th. I’m glad they did, because it was a wonder-full night we want to remember for a long time. And for those of you who weren’t able to make it out, these images give a glimpse into “the sound (and sight) of glory”.

This first batch of images was captured by Susan Wilde, with post-processing by our own Jennifer Wilde. They’re simply lovely.

http://wildelifephotography.com/Events/Bridge-Songs-Faerie/

Tags: Bridge Songs, Bridge Songs: Faerie, event, performance, photos

Posted in Alberta Avenue, Art, Art Shows, Bridge Songs: Faerie, Concert Reviews, Event Reviews, Galleries, Photography | Comments Off

That Bloomin’ Garden Show and Art Sale

Posted in Alberta Avenue, Art, Art Shows, Events | Comments Off

To Say I Was There: The New AGA Experienced

I’ve been to the new Art Gallery of Alberta, and I have not been disappointed. But how to sum up the experience? I could shout at you to simply GO! My descriptions will, I fear, make it smaller and not larger in your mind. There is so much lost between words. There is so much my soul saw that speech cannot satisfy. I could tell you about each exhibit and what I learned there and how each has inspired me. Perhaps one day I will. But for today, what seems right is to “criticize by creating”, as Michelangelo has entreated. I will respond to art with art. My own poem. My son’s drawing. My daughter’s photograph. For what is a gallery if not a place that inspires more creation, pouring forth beyond it’s own walls into the waiting world?

TO SAY I WAS THERE

to say I was there
climbing moonlight stairs
blue illumination of
name after name
builders and blocks
delighted by details

My son Jack's drawing of the Art Gallery of Alberta (click to view full size)

to say I was there
stealing the children from school
playing hookey and playing
ascending secret stairs in long lines
all of us waiting as
years’ worth of waiting boil down to
one more line
all of us waiting
as young as my two children
mouths and eyes agape,
looking up
taking this in for the very first time
seeing

My daughter and I attempt a Karsh potrait

this new thing that will be that old thing
this one moment that will settle back into flat timelines
this loud and boisterous “yop!” waiting to fade
and echo
and fade

but not today
not yet today

to say I was there today
somehow different than tomorrow will be
somehow other than yesterday was
today was
carbonated anticipation
and we all drank deep

to say I was there
beneath the borealis
swooping and diving like a whooping crane
a ski slope past gliding through present
on towards future

we were
in the belly of a burgeoning behemoth
in the laugh of a generous giant
in the glimmer of a city’s hopeful eyes
widening
reflecting on glass
held up on steel
skyward
reaching

to say I was there
and it was different than I thought
and it is really something
and I can keep the memory

a gift

Tags: Art Gallery of Alberta, Poetry

Posted in Art, Art Shows, Creativity & Inspiration, Event Reviews, Friday Feature, Poetry | 7 Comments »

Conversation: Photographer Jeffrey Nachtigall and The Art of Waiting

The following is an email interview between Dave Von Bieker and analog photographer Jeffrey Nachtigall. Questions were sent by email, one at a time, with each successive question building from the last response. The goal of the email interview form is to create a sense of true dialogue, while maintaining the advantage of solitary reflective time to formulate questions and responses.

self-portrait by Jeffrey Nachtigall

Jeff, can you describe your film photography project, the Art of Waiting? We’ll link to the website here as well [see bottom of this post], but for those who know nothing of the Art of Waiting, what’s the project all about?

There are so many great themes there, and I like how you can draw them all from something so simple and silent as waiting. Perhaps because waiting is such a universal experience. You mentioned hope, and I’d like to return to that later, because it is a theme we’ll be exploring on iloveartists throughout 2010.

Before we go there, what drove you to take all of these reflections and form a collaborative photography project? How did it start out?

I can relate to much that you’ve said about finishing, and certainly the accountability of community. That’s one of the reasons I jumped at the opportunity to take part when I first read that magical invitation that arrived by mail. I know that by participating, I have something to look forward to at year’s end. I know that I’ll have completed something i can be proud of. Perhaps this waiting touches again on hope. A hope that I’ll finish. A hope that when I hand over my rolls of film in twelve months time there will be images worth looking at. Or images at all.

Those who aren’t involved in the project as participants likely don’t know what is involved for paticipants. Can you explain how the project works? What is expected of those who’ve joined the project, and what type of work will be making it’s way onto the website for all to see?

Yes, a photoblog without the photos. That concept is funny to me, and I imagine a little scary to you? You must feel a bit of pressure to string readers along for a whole year? It’s such a strange project, to build a whole year’s worth of material from sheer anticipation. And waiting. You already have a lot of great written content posted on your blog, so I look forward to seeing where the project goes. Especially come 2011 when the photos begin to appear.

Getting back to hope, and perhaps this is a good place to wrap up our conversation Jeff, what do you anticipate will happen with the project? What are you hoping for?

You said that waiting can conjure different emotions in different people. In some hope and others despair. I like that concept, of waiting as a crucible for the human heart. A revealing. Your emphasis on process over product, or perhaps process AS product is admirable to me. I can certainly learn from that.

I look forward to reading and seeing what is revealed as we wait.

I realized that we skipped the small talk at the beginning of this conversation Jeff, so could you answer one more simple question for us? Who are you? Well, OK, more simple than that. What is your day job and how do you spend your time when you’re not on The Art of Waiting?

This interview took place in early January, 2010, over the course of several emails. More of Jeffrey Nachtigal’s photography can be found online at http://www.lomography.com/homes/dirklancer. The Art of Waiting project lives online at http://www.theartofwaiting.com.

DRUMHELLER MAXIMUM 30, BY JEFFREY NACHTIGALL

Tags: art in community, collaborative project, group project, interview, Photography, project, waiting, website

Posted in Art, Art Shows, Artist Interview, Photography | 8 Comments »

Sweet Jesus – from CNN.com

Video – Breaking News Videos from CNN.com

Artist Cosmo Cavallaro – a self-avowed Catholic – has created a life-size, chocolate Jesus Christ sculpture with genitals and without a loincloth. Controversy abounds.

I just watched the video clip on CNN.com and I think the sculpture is incredible, especially considering it is made of over 200 pounds of chocolate. Interestingly enough I didn’t see the “parts” creating such a stir. They were blurred out by the news service.

So, why the controversy? Is it the chocolate medium or the bare private part that is getting Cosmo into so much trouble – even including death threats?

I wonder if this doesn’t reveal an awful lot about us, as any good art will do. Does it not speak to our own gnostic tendencies to elevate spirit over body? Is seeing Christ this way all too human for us? “Sure, He was a man, but not a man with a penis!”

I wonder …

Or, is it just sensationalist eye candy?

Or, is it just candy?

Posted in Art, Art Shows, Creativity & Inspiration | 1 Comment »

Recap: Art in Transition

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Art In Transition – a solo show put on by local artist Alexis Marie Chute.

I know Alexis from a while back – first at Vanguard College, where she was a Bible-College student, then from Harvestmoon, where her work helped us launch the ArtTent project. When I got the invite to Art In Transition, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted to see what Alexis has been up to.

I was invited to bring my whole family, which is a rare invitation that I snapped up readily. Art Exhibits are not always the most welcome place for kids (which is odd, because kids probably get art a lot better than we do). My family and I had dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant on Alberta Ave and then headed over to the art show. I felt like such a cultured super-dad.

When we arrived at the address, we were a little confused. There was really no hall or venue around, so we defaulted into the local United church, where a separate event was running. After declining to have our family photo taken (not sure what was going on there), we stepped out into the crisp fall air and strained our eyes towards a sign on a lawn. And then saw some figures and lights on that same lawn. And then some silver-painted mannequins. Ah. This is the place. … Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Art Shows, Creativity & Inspiration | 4 Comments »

Art Outside the Christian Ghetto

We do a lot of talking around here about art and faith. But not as often do we look the art itself that is truly engaging culture. The art that “gets it” and is taking Christ into culture bravely.

I stumbled across this listing of evangelical artists today, at The Evangelical Outpost, and liked what I saw.

You can view the list and their works here. A good prescription for the Elijah complex, perhaps.

http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/archives/001199.html

Posted in Art Shows | 5 Comments »