So, I went to this launch at the Contemporary, last night. It's the kind of art show that's right up my street, because of my instant love of sound installations. Plus, I have a friend working there who tends to keep me posted about what's on. I caught the last few minutes of the work upstairs, which consisted of some crude and hilarious paintings, performance pieces that strongly resembled the brain bugs from Starship Troopers, as well as a life-size catbus for children to climb into. The sound installation downstairs was a very intricate piece in the form of a boxed, rectangular space, where you could walk inside and hear the very subtle sounds that played from small lights that dangled from the mesh ceiling. I walked around in this space for five/ten minutes, feeling like my hearing had become more acute and sensitive.
Later on, I had joined a few friends in the bar for a rare treat of beer and experimental jazz bands. Said friends had also seen the exhibition and were talking about the weird paintings. These friends don't really have much of a background in art like I do, but their reaction to the paintings were the identical to mine: giggling hysterically. This opened the way for a conversation about how people react to art like that, and the tension of a gallery space was pointed out. To my own surprise, my immediate response to the question of how artists wanted viewers to react was "Fuck what they want." This reminded me of the studies I had made in my second year of Art History at DMU, mainly involving the writings of T.S Eliot and Clement Greenberg, as well as the exploration into the irrelevance of the creative individual once he/she displays the artistic piece in a public domain. This is why I am coming full circle within my proposed project, and I am still unchanged in the view that it is thoroughly down to the viewer whether an artwork achieves or fails its conceptual goals.
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