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| Map by Nelena Soro |
One of the pleasures of curating You Are Here and Exploded View's residency at The Great Falls Discovery Center is getting to spend time with the art, pausing, returning, focusing and pursuing the unfocused gaze.
Abstract art, both visual and musical (and here I am thinking about improvisational music and jazz, especially), is sometimes difficult or frustrating, sometimes it is considered foolish, a mess or a waste of time.
American culture makes almost no room for it. I suspect this is because so much of our communication and working life is representational, or literal, and we are often punished or considered suspect for associative thinking or creative pursuit. Time is money, they say, are you wasting time?
With increasing saturation of surveillance technology, people may pay more attention, whether overtly or subconsciously, to what is expected of them.
And people may, increasingly, do only what is expected of them.
Can we even grasp the loss implied in this?
This is the subtext I hear when people say that surveillance technology provides a convenience and it is only a problem when people have something to hide.
Because it refuses to tell us immediately what it is, abstract art confronts people with the act of feeling and creating meaning on the spot. This is, perhaps, unsettling. It immediately violates the rules of a culture that wants you to do only what is expected of you, because no one can know what you will see or hear in such art. It requires you to respond.
For me, this unknown ability, this invisible organ – sensory nerves fueling muscles of the imagination – is the best thing about being alive. It is at the core of our ability to think, to solve problems, to make something new.
And as we move toward an increasingly surveilled state of being, in a culture that has always been suspicious of art, I think it is even more precious and worth making.
*To learn more about the artists in You Are Here, go to:
https://explodedviewma.blogspot.com/2020/01/you-are-here-in-personal-cartography.html
