You’re walking in late afternoon when the shadows are very long. You notice that shadows can take strange, aggressive shapes on an expanse of lawn. Click. In the picture the shadow looks even stranger than it did in reality. Why is that?
Walk on. At an intersection you see shadows on the distant lawn. Click.
But you took a wide angle, getting the street into the frame of your camera. It’s merely a documentation of this corner of an unremarkable street.
You raise your arms and you zoom in on the distant lawn. Click. Now you have an image of triangular shapes on a green surface with some rectangle in the upper part of the frame. This is getting interesting. But you still have the street in there.
Now crop the reference to the street because it’s too much context, which makes the image point to something outside itself.
Why is this interesting? Because now you have an image that can be seen two ways: one, as a reference to a green lawn with triangular shadows cast by neighboring buildings and two, as a pattern of geometrical forms that refer to nothing outside of themselves.
If you want to see this duality even more clearly, take out the color.
Now you have an arrangement of shapes that “does not stand for something outside itself.” Is this art? Hmmm, maybe.
On second look, yes. Notice how the image has a unifying texture: the bricks of the wall have specks of black shadows that echo the specks of leaves on the lawn. This unifying texture has nothing to do with what’s being represented. “Art does not stand for something outside itself,” as Fairfield Porter would put it.
You can frame this, hang it on a wall, glance at it in passing and momentarily inhabit the realm of form, which is pure feeling. Like music.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 