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nice, vanblah.
for a while i was going to alot of gallery shows and found something similar as an audience member---i figured out at some point or another that the way to do this show thing was to hit the openings because even if you end up seeing an accumulation of stuff that you find utterly uninteresting, at least there's wine. going to these things ended up being a kind of zen hunt for surprise: you couldn't really look for it, you could only make yourself available to it, and sometimes i would turn up.
surprise didn't necessarily come from the Object either. more often, it came from the conceptual games the objects put into motion.
as an audience member, i seem to prefer two basic types of work: stuff that i can think about as a species of toy or game (neither of these in the trivial sense, tho---something that puts you into a network of relations or questions or problems while at the same time leaving you space to move around, think them through---it's a fine balance to locate, this---the skill of conceptual art is in finding versions of this balance. for me, this is probably the highest aesthetic value. sometimes i think that the sound stuff i do approaches this place--sometimes i don't. but it's the kind of relation it'd like to trigger to what i'm doing.)
the other type is something i just find beautiful---but there's no single thing that i key on. this is also a threshold space, an openning onto something beyond the object---but not in a representational sense. stuff i find beautiful in this sense is a more passive experience. it's rare to run into it. last thing i remember finding beautiful in this kind of sense was/is a recording of david tudor's rainforest. (actually, this is one of the few pieces that works in both ways)
but these are simply preferences as an audience element---they have no bearing on what is or is not understood as art, what distinctions follow from dividing art into high/low, aristo/popular etc.
this started out being about conceptual art, but the post above made it carom into another place.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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