Art rips through me.
In the dream world of art, I am me. I am new… finally. I am here, or there. I’m within what I’m looking at, or was looking at.
There are 72,879 photos in my iCloud account. Two-thirds of them are related to art. I am looking, still just looking.
I hear the bus’s droning in my head.
The paint from all of these artworks, having seen so very many, is like a viscous sludge coating my insides.
The sculpture is enshrining me within its structures, sprawling me out on display.
Is it not like that for some people? For some pieces? I guess art, the fine arts, they don’t have to be that intense.
Though they are, for me… actually a lot of the time. That’s part of the reason I’ve taken so many pictures.
I’ve read references to the author John Berger talking apparently about the need for effective, meaningful art, as he was seeing it, to have a particular, illuminating, social slant. (I’m reading him myself now.)
Do I think that art has to do something similar on a personalized, internal level? That it has to sensuously rip something from the inner world of what it means to be a human being, in all of its disgusting, decadent glory? That it must… communicate something? Maybe I do. Something must be moved. Rattled.
Art, I think, sometimes screams and cries in terror, as it rages against a cloud of violence. It sits delicately, fluttering towards whatever’s below, and moving outside familiar expectations. Rejecting them. It embodies those of us contributing to its presence, made anew every time that someone looks at it.
I am no longer as enmeshed in expectation and anticipation myself. I am transgender, and I came out in recent months, helped along in my personal journey by spending time with fine arts I could find, which helped me see the wide-ranging reach of life far outside of what I was so often told to expect. I am basking now in the wonderful trepidation of trying to answer the question of what that — what the new — truly means.
I feel, at times, small, as I sit against the wingspan of the staggering, expanding, and enveloping weight of history. But I’m part of it. And I see someone in this art, and even when I didn’t let myself look fully at the person I was seeing, I knew somewhere who it was. It was just me. And I think the wonderful thing about the arts is that, in very real ways, that same kind of experience is available to… I mean, essentially everyone. I would love the chance to share that with people. Thus, we have this website.
The sublime, the celestial, the roaring, the quiet, the gentle and embracing. The vibrant, the fun, the lighthearted, the casual, the assured, the uncertain and worrisome. The lounging, the enigmatic, and the subtle. The blaring too, like that car horn I’m listening to. All of that is here, in these works of art.
I tend to be an intense, voracious person, which I am sometimes self-conscious about, and which I do sometimes actually use as a diversion from more vulnerable, direct truths (I’ve dramatically re-edited this piece of writing several times before sharing it with people, making it more genuinely communicative), but anyway, it’s important to me to also emphasize the casual cool I see in some arts, together as wide-ranging as the people responsible for them.
Sometimes something strikes me as, you know, just some really cool shit to look at, and that’s part of the ecosystem too. Sometimes the real, impactful “meaning” of something is, I think, in the lack of it. A lack of a direct explanation can still illuminate. I think sometimes people just leave the more open-ended arts, whether somber or more casual, at the notion of having no direct explanation without moving into how that can still be genuinely illuminating.
And in any case, the commonality that I see in arts that really strike me as of serious quality — and as part of what a lot of people mean when they talk about “art” as its own, separate concept — is an ask to be seen, however specifically that manifests itself.
It comes back to just being there. I think I am trying to figure out what “there” is. There’s a delicate, enrapturing beauty when the visual assumptions with which we are usually presented start to fall away. Arts are not artifice; they are essential, embedded methods of communication. And I’m excited.