Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Vantage points

Thinking about this afternoon's lecture I was struck by Joe Fyfe's self-descriptive use of the term "flaneur."While it was, on the one hand, refreshing to hear that traditional role of the artist updated to the global era, it was, on the other hand,a stark contrast to the activist mode suggested by Nato at last week's lecture. While the combination of images collected from travel and those generated by "the daily practice of painting" in the solitude of the studio was rich (and arguably inbued the non-objective work with a kind of content it would have had difficulty accessing in the absence of such images), when we breezed past an image of a homeless person's bedroll in Hanoi, I hope one might be excused for feeling not-quite-up-to-the-task of aesthetic appreciation (at least, for this viewer, abstract contemplation became a little trickier after that point...)

For some artists, the studio is a refuge, for others a lab, for others...what? I'm curious if anyone else had thoughts on this...

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