The Art of Playing

Today I awoke very early, even though I was out late. The reason is that today, for the first time in months, I can return to creating art! This school experience seems to be greatly centered on academic and analytic tasks that are not presented in terms that enable or enhance the natural strengths of creative people. Hence, it feels like trying to dig a hole in the desert with a children's sand shovel.

After hours in the studio I am back at home and reading about artists and ideas. I stumbled upon this article on Bruce Nauman. So I have been reading up a little bit and found this wonderful quote on Wikipedia

Nauman seems to be interested in the nature of communication and the inherent problems of language, as well as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual language.

That perfectly encapsulates the core of what I have been thinking all quarter. My personal take is, why am I limited to language in describing music? Or mathematics for that matter? Both of these devices are not appropriate to encapsulate music, or the human experience, they can only articulate that to which they are well suited to say. In communicating with humans, only part of what we perceive can be elegantly represented in words (and that component should be communicated with words), but there are other modalities of communication, visual representation, sonic representation or suggestion, etc. Why not engage these other, often more appropriate means of communication in order to accurately and elegantly communicate?


I was struck by the biography of Nauman on the Art:21 (a PBS series) page in which certain words are highlighted. These words are in another color to indicate that they are defined, when clicked. I just like the list and the definitions, there is something interesting about the words that defined (why not define every word? why assume that these are the words that people would not understand?) It feels like a handbook to understanding modern art, which of course it is in some sense, but as soon it is delineated like this, these words are effectively framed. It is as if each word has a separate pamphlet. With that being the case, they loose their equality, these words become more equal and their meaning's importance is amplified. I applaud and enjoy this additional layer of information and implementation as well as the aesthetics involved.

Here is the list of highlighted words ::

;: contemporary artists
;: studio
;: performance
;: installation
;: process
;: spiritual
;: culture

Here is the Paragraph with those words removed (what I like to think of as my derivative work ::

It is intersting for me to note now that I have spent more time thinking about this little biography not only because of the content, which I enjoy, but also because of the new dimentions afforded by the hyperlinking and because of the visual appearance.

It seems that the type of documentation and presentation that is being promoted in my education are behind the times, according to the public television standard.

Here is a piece Nauman's work

and another