Chapter 2, “The Audience” (all quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from the book)
Thought scenario: Take a moment to visualize this scenario: pic a gallery you have visited or viewed art in, imagine yourself there. You walk up to a work of art, look at it, and then…what? What happens? What is supposed to transpire in that moment you are viewing that work of art?
From last week:
“Art helps us live in the moment without having to explain it, to find ‘meaning’ in it.” p27
Quote:
“A painting is not its interpretation. At the moment it encounters me in the art museum, a painting exists for me. But it does not need me. It exists for me in a particular way, a way that challenges my control, rendering me receptive (i.e. passive). T.S. Eliot once said that the meaning of a poem exists somewhere between the poem and the reader. And so it is this ‘space between’ that the painting creates, transforming me, if only briefly, from subject to an object. It is this moment that Rilke describes in his poem ‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (1908) – the statue confronts and makes a claim on the narrative, whose eye it catches:
for there is no angle from which
It does not see you. You must change your life!
The work of art opens up, or perhaps better, reveals the space that exists between the world and me, a space of response and accountability.” p32
Questions: Think about this quote and the “thought scenario” and discussion you had. Are there confirmations between the two? Are there differences? If so where? Think about these same thought in relation to new ideas you would encounter, how is this the same and different from an encounter with an art work? After some discussion read the next quote and continue.
Quote:
“My encounter with a painting exposes my ontological passivity, what (Martin) Luther called vita passive, in which I stand, as Oswald Bayer says, in the ‘dative case,’ that is, in the case of ‘being given’. Yet I fight against it by asserting my control, by behaving as if the painting is a static, inert object, with ‘subject matter’ that needs my interpretive activity to give it life – not an artifact that speaks to me, addresses me, makes me accountable. And so my experience of a painting also reveals my resistance to the receptive life of faith and my addiction to the active life of works, refusing to respect the painting before which I stand as a singular event of creative agency that makes a claim on me, reminding me that I am not the subject of my own life story.” p33
Exercise:
– Take this last quote and in the places where the word “painting” and “artifact” are read, replace it with the word “idea”. And continue your discussion.
Quote:
“(Martin) Luther calls the human person a ‘rational being with a fabricating heart.’ The painting before which I stand generates these fabrications – ideas, concepts, frameworks that I create in order to tame it, disenchant it, transform it from something radically other, into something prosaically familiar.” p34
