Visual Arts, Columbia University, New York

This course examines ways of looking and ways of seeing, both personally & professionally as artists and in a larger cultural context. Through field trips to contemporary art and other cultural sites, conversations with visiting critical thinkers and practicioners, readings, discussions, and visual & written responses, we will examine how we look, think, act, create and respond--critically questioning our own artistic practices and ways of looking at the world.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Imagine how many images you could see if you were a fly!



There are images and images. Everything we look at is framed like a round image;  limited because we only have two eyes that function like a binocular. Imagine how many images you could see at the same time if you were a fly? But instead of hundreds of eyes we have a memory and a subconscious that store millions of images. For the artist what matters is that some images will stick to become isolated and reinterpreted by the subconscious, images that other people might have seen too, but not realized could be autonomous images. In other words images that have something special that touch a sensitive cord in us.
I was thinking about Piero Manzoni the other day while walking home from class, while looking at the color of the light on the crude wall of a building.
His thinking corresponds with mine. It's about freedom of the mind to let the unknown show you what images have stuck to your unconscious among all the images you see all  the time. 
By freedom he means to put yourself in a state of mind where everything that can hinder you from retrieving virgin images that you have seen is discarded, pretty much the way we see things for the first time as children before our minds have been programmed by society. Of course you can use your images to criticize something socially too, but the image must come first to supply you with the idea and to become tangible flesh in your reprecentation of the image. But, also something we hear or feel can put us in this state of mind, where images pop up that we did not know existed in our subconscious, because images in addition to light are also affected by sounds and feelings.

No comments:

Post a Comment