Who is an artist? Why make art? And what does the good life look like? These are the profound—and also workaday—questions I puzzle over with clients and through my own creative practice. But an unexpected confluence of deep, atmospheric thinkers has inspired me in responding in new ways over the past several weeks, and I’m rebuilding my inner pantheon accordingly. I’m interested in work that is stunningly beautiful and strange, art that shivers as it passes through the body, entraining all the senses, and art that is bigger and more connected than the word itself can hold.
It’s been a long while since I’ve spent much time in a big city, but over the past months I’ve lived close enough to New York to have a fresh understanding of its very noisy cultural scene. I won’t say that most of what I’ve seen is limited, but I’m extremely grateful for the stellar few who are forging new territory between humans, their bodies and art with richly nutritive and nuanced perspectives, plus a lot of knowing tenderness.
Delcy Morelos’ new work El Abrazo at Dia Chelsea, which we saw just this weekend, invites you into an enormous cleaved monument of packed mud, hovering just over the gallery floor and sprouting a vertiginous field of hay. Entering its narrowing passage you experience an embrace that’s comforting and also terrifying, scent of earth, hands pressing the soil as it presses back. Morelos invites your touch, but offers instructions:
“Let the hands listen, see the smell of the earth
with the fingertips, let its taste be savored by the skin.
let the hand rise and fall, gently caressing
the surface…”
In a similar way “Wall of Beeswax,” Meg Webster’s newly installed and beautifully cleaving wall of golden wax—8 feet high and 24 feet long—lends its honeyed scent to the galleries further up the river at Dia: Beacon, creating a sensorium as the late afternoon light strikes—I mean, the wafting sweetness entices you from several rooms away. “I want you to recognize the form but to also feel the form with your body,” she explained to visitors approaching her work in a video I found online. “My connection to form is intellectual, but also visceral.”
It’s trickier to create such an encounter via film, but two movies among the dozens I’ve seen lately—we love our local theater—have invited an encounter that felt physical, and fresh, while also addressing these questions of art and artists. “Every film teaches us its own perception,” Win Wenders has said of “Perfect Days”. “Some films teach us to see carelessly, others show us how to see with a loving look.” The movie is about many things, including the lead character’s love affair with the trees, but also how doing things as if for the first time “gives a whole different dignity to any repetition.” Lead actor Kôji Yakusho’s Hirayama is the quintessential artist, developing a nuanced approach to beauty through repetition, discipline and desire, even though—and perhaps because—he works cleaning city toilets.
Another humble artist executes her vision through celeriac and brook trout at the center of director Tran Anh Hung’s “The Taste of Things.” A soundtrack of birdsong and chirping cicadas spins a defiantly tranquil peace in the kitchen where Juliette Binoche cooks with the same devoted repetition, pulling the innards from a fish, lovingly, with curiosity, patting them dry on a fine linen cloth. The film is an ode to the moment, to the garden, to the French countryside, but, as with “Perfect Days,” for me it was also an invitation into deeper sensuality, acute connection and a new consideration of what makes a true artist. I noticed yesterday that I’m cutting my vegetables differently now, with more awareness, considering their colors and textures anew as the light falls on the cutting board.
One of the film’s dinner guests, gratefully, and albeit a little casually, calls Binoche’s character an artist, a comment overheard by her young understudy. “He says you’re an artist—is it true?” she asks. Binoche sighs and smirks. “Il dis n’importe quoi.”
And while it is true, of course—while it’s also true he’s just flattering her—in answering this question and those posed by Wenders, or Morelos and Webster, we need another word for artist, something with more breadth, more nuance and mystery to it.
What is it called when you live your art, and live through art too?
This question is a slow burn for me right now.
I'm going back tonight to see The Taste of Things for a second time. It is a stunning film from all perspectives--emotional, visual, aesthetic, philosophical, plus the sheer brilliance of the cinematography. I just threw that word in, I'm not sure I know what it means, but for me it sums up the whole experience of acting, setting, design, structure of the film itself, and the emotional power of it all, especially the ending with its emphasis on a continuing path.
I should add about the Morelos, however, it brings out very strongly my innate sense of claustrophobia. I would not be able to enter the piece. Such a contrast with the film!
lovely post!