Anodyne
Friday, May 30, 2008
 

Seals and bunnyfish by Kozyndan. There's much to be said for art that entwines realist details (the seals' graceful curves; the rabbits' ears, trailing out like bull kelp fronds) with fantastic or otherworldly content. It's fashionable to think that art attains its criticality by depicting images of conflict or unfreedom, and to disparage works depicting other types of interactions either as reifications of a preexisting social order, or as "illustration." I disagree: art's job is simply to depict what is there, without reflexively editing or prejudging. Goya's work means a lot to me, but I would not have gotten to it without, for example, Richard Scarry's Busytown, which trained me to spend a long time looking at visual details (posture; dress; "narrative grammar"), and to then orchestrate those details to "produce meaning." Images of joy and celebration are definitely part of a truly critical art. (Think of Brueghel's dancing peasants. Or Manet's La Musique aux Tuileries). And images of radically different cultures meeting and mingling (as above), each intrigued by its other, implicitly critique what presently passes for "debate" in public life.
- posted by cjb @ 7:18 PM


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