A Trenchant Critique

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I’m not going to try and sell you on my visual arts credentials; I don’t have any. Like most of my experience with the arts in general — graphic, visual, industrial, musical — I rely on intuition to experience something. I’m the kind of person who hates being told that he can’t touch a sculpture, the guy who rolls his eyes when a museum placard explicates a piece of work by offering that the “project provides an oblique commentary” about something vaguely political. (We should note that the word “oblique” suggests that this type of “commentary” would not actually have a point to it — which is like saying there is no substantial discourse happening at all. Better, then, to say that “this project could be saying something important, but we might just be making that up.” Or something like that.)

I went to the Dia:Beacon over the weekend with far less cynicism going in than going out. Among the exhibits: a pile of industrial scraps, a collection of boxes, and an entire room dedicated to this guy, who essentially painted a series of canvases in the kind of flat white paint reserved for public restroom walls. The artist responsible, Robert Ryman, is “often classified as a minimalist, but he prefers to be known as a ‘realist’ because he is not interested in creating illusions, but only in presenting the materials he has used in compositions at their face value.” In other words, Here’s some stuff you can buy at the Pratt Store.

Last weekend, I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with all of the tourists and marveled over its construction, its symmetry, its sheer majesty. I saw the year etched in stone, 1883, and tried to process that information: The Roebling family actually designed this bridge in the nineteenth century — three years after the first cash register, two years before the first motorcar. (Further context: Jesse James and Billy the Kid were, like, real people when they did this.) It took conceptual thinking and a sense of grand-scale aesthetics — in addition to engineering prowess — to pull it off, and as I stood at the center of the bridge it occurred to me that this was art. It was deliberate and meaningful and humbling — some stuff you could buy at Home Depot transformed into something you never imagined possible. Sometimes you need to leave your museum memberships at home to remember what that feels like.

Photo: Peewee