Tuesday, December 06, 2005

i ramble sometimes...

If you’re in Cleveland, there’s a pretty nice show up right now. Cool, clean and fairly elegant.

at
spaces
2220 Superior Viaduct
Cleveland, OH 44113

216-621-2314
www.spacesgallery.org

The name of the show is Multiplicity and it’s up through Jan. 6, 2006.

Danielle Julian Norton’s delicately lit rice boats are the nicest, most poignant part of the show. It’s success as a piece is assured by the curling tethers of monofilament that mark the loss of one of its vessels. The missing vessel’s place in the air armada remains unfilled – a void.

It’s strange – I’m an artist and I love art but very little of it really moves me. --- I said this to my students recently and they asked me why, if so much of it leaves me flat, do I dedicate my life to it… I had to tell them that it is a statement of faith. To believe in art is to believe that there is something beyond the grinding practicality of this day to day life. It is an expression of a belief in a reality that consists of something other than hard surfaces, a turned gilder, and an end without remorse.


Fate is an illusion created by history and video tape. When the nineteen screwed their courage to some unknowable sticking place and crashed into those hard surfaces, they exploded into the ashes of an un-accounted number of lives… a rose is a rose is a rose… instant replay… the image of that moment was repeated over and over again… repeating it, like Gertrude’s rose, made it real, somehow comprehensible… It also seemed to make it possible to hold back that moment through the watching… but rather than staying that execution it writes it down as fate.

Fate is created in an instant.

And here we are… our future, and our fate, was written in a response to a response and now we are playing it out…

Was it just yesterday that eleven American soldiers and thousands of “others” were taken…

Who do we grieve for? Our own? And what about those “nameless” others? Those who know their names – how do they grieve? Let us humanize one another…

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