Over the course of a month spent in New York this summer I managed to get to some art galleries and saw lots of fascinating art, but I think my favorite must be an installation by Larry Bell at the Whitney Museum, positioned outside of the museum against the Manhattan Highline. There is something so incredibly aesthetically pleasing about this to me, although I can't truly define what it is, even after looking at it countless times. It's just beautiful to me. Maybe that is what I find so beautiful about it, that I liked looking at it and I keep looking at it, and that I don't know why. It is so present, there, yet still so subtle. Fading. Like something so strong and structured learning to let go. Initially I thought the installation was of another artists and when reading up about it I found correlations between the writing and his work, yet it turns out Bell didn't actually write much about the significance of the work, but more of the properties and aesthetics of transparent objects.
Larry Bell has exploited the transparency and reflectivity of glass to great effect since the beginning of his career, when he inserted a square piece of glass into a painting and titled it Ghost Box (1962).
On the fifth-floor terrace, Bell has installed Pacific Red II, a work consisting of six laminated glass cubes; each measures six by eight feet and encloses another six-by-four-foot glass box. The multiple surfaces interplay and respond to their urban surroundings, where glass towers abound.
I am constantly questioning art, and what it actually is. I find myself either being pulled back by conventional paintings or in the web of needing to create deeply intricate ideas, philosophical explanations, psychological explanations. I am drawn to that. I want to tell stories. I want to speak, art is my voice. Or as my friend phrased it, 'You write poetry with objects'. I used to use painting for that, but a painting is a painting, they are either a manifestation of my mind, that stays there, or a replication of something outside of my mind. I have moved to using objects, sculptures, ready-mades... things, real things, they manage to communicate on a different level. I don't want to use the obscurity of art to justify my obscurity. I want to strive to create on a level that speaks ... something ... to someone. But I think there is trouble in that mindset too. Sometimes things just 'are'. Art can be beautiful. Subjectively, yes, but beautiful. It is about materiality, things. That too I find beautiful about that work. I am fascinated by colour. Red currently being my all time favorite. I love transparency, how plastic can have a balance of being able to be seen through, allowing for visibility of what can otherwise can be obstructed by the material, yet also for the ability to have reflections sent back. The playfulness of that is exciting to me. In a sense an artist is one who is excited about something and reacts to that by creating around their areas of interest and hopes that others can find the joy in that too. And I find joy in this. I hope to explore this further at a later point. Lots to create, so little time. But until then...
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