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Reprinted from ....
 
"THE SURPRISING &
ABIDING OPPOSITES"
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For
instance, there are George Nama's woodcuts, beautifully enhanced with watercolor.
Nama finds form within the disquieting. In "Air Monument," a sort of machine
with 4 black air hoses like the legs of some strange creature, jiggles
in fixity as it lets off steam. Consider it now in the light of Mr. Siegel's
question about Grace and Seriousness:
Is there what is playful, valuably mischievous, unreined and sportive in a work of art? - and is there also what is serious, sincere, thoroughly meaningful, solidly valuable? - and do grace and sportiveness, seriousness and meaningfulness, interplay and meet everywhere in the lines, shapes, figures, relations, and final import of a painting?In all three Nama works, he gets to a sense of expression and frustration simultaneously - in a valuable and sportive way. |
Three works by poet and photographer Louis Dienes show the factual wonder in ordinary household objects - "Doorknobs," "Cotton Tipped Applicator," and "Safety Pins." They arose from an Aesthetic Realism assignment: to write, every day, three sentences about an object, and this is one of Louis Dienes's sentences: Here we have safety pins in the box they came in, light glinting on their curving surfaces, pointing every which way, all closed.Both photograph and words show containment and abandon composed in these objects, as we would like them to be in ourselves. And in the artist's statement, Louis Dienes quotes from Mr. Siegel's "Aesthetic Realism and Scientific Method": When I ask people to write about objects, it is because I feel that if they honestly try to make sense out of, say, a brush, or a button, or a coat, or a pair of spectacles, that much, by looking at a specific object, they will try to find order in the world. In finding order in the world, they will find it in themselves. That is the only way to find it in themselves. |
Also on exhibit is an early silkscreen by Alex Katz, "Luna Park," a large landscape with two slanting, black trees silhouetted against a lake of gray. Between the thick black leaves we see the round, white moon, and her vertical, curving reflection in the water. There is, in this nighttime scene, stark contrast and yet serenity - opposites we have had to make sense of, as a beautiful September morning had within it sudden, stark change. "Each time anyone sees something as beautiful," Mr. Siegel wrote in an issue of The Right Of, "he sees the structure of the world; and it is this structure of the world seen in an object that causes the beauty; is the beauty....Even when we are distressed or confused or humiliated, the world retains that structure present necessarily, inevitably, in everything that is beautiful." Knowing this can have people stronger, wiser, at this time, and that is the purpose of "The Surprising & Abiding Opposites." The exhibition statement concludes: "We have learned from Aesthetic Realism that the lesson of ethics and aesthetics is this: When we give true meaning to what is not ourselves, our selves are larger. The safety of our world depends on people's knowing this." The exhibition runs through February at 141 Greene Street, NYC; (212) 777-4490. The website is www.TerrainGallery.org. Carrie Wilson is an Aesthetic Realism consultant and one of the coordinators of the Terrain Gallery.
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In SoHo, off West Houston