02-08-2014

So today we viewed art through the 'inspirational' words of Alain De Botaine. To be honest, I didn't particularly connect with anything I read. A lot of the writing also seemed a little obvious and a bit too broad, but I suppose it has to be relevant to everyone in the NGV, which is a huge audience.  I think reading that sort of thing is only really helpful if you're in the right type of mood too, or if there's actually something wrong. Some of his writing just seemed a little bit bullshit though, for example, on Pierre Bonnard's 'Siesta', 1900, oil on canvas:

Sickness: work, work, work. It's summer; they had lunch in a shady spot in the garden; they had salad and ate some fruit. Afterwards they came indoors to lie down for a while and escape the heat. They had sex. She is completely relaxed. In a little while she'll have a shower and maybe get started on that report. She'll be in a good frame of mind to tackle it.

I had trouble understanding how that was a therapeutic statement that could help someone. Is it encouraging people to have sex to get in a good frame of mind? Or is it intended to remind people in relationships that maybe if they had more sex they wouldn't be so stressed all the time?  I don't even know. It just seemed so far fetched and not all that relevant to the artwork. That's not to say he isn't a good writer and art critic - clearly he is, you don't become a household name for nothing. I just didn't fully appreciate some of what he was saying.

To a more positive side of appreciation, every time I visit the NGV international I notice something different. This time it was Jesus Rafael Soto's 'London Scribblings'. It's quite a large and obnoxious artwork, but for some reason I'd never stopped to look at it. But it's so impressive. I loved it because it was something completely put of my realm - sculpture and an optical illusion. There was probably a lot of mathematics behind it too, which I'm hopeless at. Though it was fixed, it seemed to move every time you looked at it. I've seen optical illusions before, but this one was in a gallery, sticking out of a canvas! Here is a photograph of it:

The other great thing about it is that the photo doesn't do it justice at all. No photo will. A video might do it a little bit more justice, but it's still not quite the same. I guess you could say that about a lot of artworks. But with this you really had to be there. If I were De Botaine trying to link this to Philosophy and self-help, I'd use that concept of having to 'be there'. I could talk about technology and viewing images through reproductions on tiny screens, people texting instead of talking, I could write a really long inspirational piece but nobody wants to read that, so I'm going to stop writing now.