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200th Birthday of Karl Marx
Repost from my Instagram and Facebook post on 5/6/18:
I’ve always thought artists are somewhat of rebels. We strive to see through seemingly mundane mechanisms of everyday life and come out with a special something that affirms the depth and width of our true condition that goes far beyond the framework forced on us by the establishment.
We stay in our studios and we train ourselves to see how to connect dots and how to grasp the profound flows that lead to a burst of visual language.
Yesterday was the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. He taught us how our society, guided by accumulation of wealth and power, domesticates people in order to harvest humanity as profit. His angle has given us crucial tools to understand our time. Needless to say, as we shift our eyes to outside of our studios, we notice glaring contradictions smoothed out by acrobatic rituals, fear and outright deceptions in culture, economy, politics and so on.
Yesterday, I was in Boston. I stopped at Museum of Fine Arts. Among the mesmerizing exhibits the most stood out was one of Martin Puryear’s pieces. I’ve always liked his work. He has exceptional eyes to focus on that something that speaks to our essential beings in such a profound way.
With the particular piece, I noticed how casual, raw and wild the mode of expression was. There was a playfulness in how he worked with dynamics among elements–the harmony among wood stains, small whimsical wood parts, seemingly random patches of wire meshed surface, chalk markings on wood and so on gave it an unassuming front, but the essential insight was unmistakably expressed as a solid life emanating from the assembly.
When I tried to leave and looked back at the piece, I was struck how transparent the mesh surface was. I could see through to the room behind it. Yet, the ellusiveness and frankness of the expression cleverly emphasized the profoundness of the life with its elusiveness.
A work like that certainly gives us courage to keep going.
I've always thought artists are somewhat of rebels. We strive to see through seemingly mundane mechanisms of everyday life and come out with a special something that affirms the depth and width of our true condition that goes far beyond the framework forced on us by the establishment. We stay in our studios and we train ourselves to see how to connect dots and how to grasp the profound flows that lead to a burst of visual language. Yesterday was the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. He taught us how our society, guided by accumulation of wealth and power, domesticates people in order to harvest humanity as profit. His angle has given us crucial tools to understand our time. Needless to say, as we shift our eyes to outside of our studios, we notice glaring contradictions smoothed out by acrobatic rituals, fear and outright deceptions in culture, economy, politics and so on.Yesterday, I was in Boston. I stopped at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Among the mesmerizing exhibits the most stood out was one of Martin Puryear's pieces. I've always liked his work. He has exceptional eyes to focus on that something that speaks to our essential beings in such a profound way. With the particular piece, I noticed how casual, raw and wild the mode of expression was. There was a playfulness in how he worked with dynamics among elements–the harmony among wood stains, small whimsical wood parts, seemingly random patches of wire meshed surface, chalk markings on wood and so on gave it an unassuming front, but the essential insight was unmistakably expressed as a solid life emanating from the assembly. When I tried to leave and looked back at the piece, I was struck how transparent the mesh surface was. I could see through to the room behind it. Yet, the ellusiveness and frankness of the expression cleverly emphasized the profoundness of the life with its elusiveness.A work like that certainly gives us courage to keep going.
Posted by Hiroyuki Hamada Art on Sunday, May 6, 2018