Notes: Explication of presence – the process of making something clear. How we experience something is what makes art.
Awareness of perception – they don’t so much lead one to the next as they fold one inside the other; like the process of thinking.
Art is about the aesthetic perception of the viewer. The way the sun strikes a building at a particular time of day can be art.
Old values – humanistic values – don’t speak to presence/perception. (check out Karsten Harries: Metaphor and transcendence.
Consider – the mechanics of the tape. The act of viewing and being viewed.
The essence of the modernist work is experience.
Change is the most basic dynamic of our universe – our spaces need to do more to create acceptance of this.
Not about existential angst – but phenomenological wonder. WOW! A desert of pure feeling. Visual music unfurling thematic material across time.
It’s about becoming NOT being.
We are talking about the exploration of the 4th dimension – not TIME but EXPERIENCE and quality. This is Modernism. And it’s not only about emotion – it also includes texture, experience quality and the feel of things.
Setting in motion your own meaning – we take responsibility for everything.
Presence demands presence. Metaphor requires absence and evasion. Modernism eliminates the metaphor (if it’s a metaphor you experience abstractions through it). Reduction of Imagery gets at physicality and reduction of metaphor gets at presence.
Sculpture definition: Must have physical division; both organic and geometric; participation of people and kinetics of movement.
To be present in the world has far reaching implications for art and life. The whole visual structure of how we look at the world… that process has built our culture – its social systems, political systems. All our institutions are reflections of the way our mind organizes.
The modernist strives to create a different mental organization – which ultimately in time – has to result in different social, political and cultural organizations.
Artists are the only people trained to make the argument for quality.
Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe
Kristen Buckley 