Slow
Last weekend I took my 11 year old to LACMA. It was a rainy Sunday, perfect for skulking around a museum. I’m fortunate to have a boy that has the demeanor to find this a worthwhile way of spending the afternoon. A break from Lego Indiana Jones on the XBOX 360. It was a New York day.
We stepped inside the massive red elevator that takes you to the Koons and Warhol. We walked amongst the giant balloon animals and the soup cans. My son’s mind was whirling. Many questions and as with all art, no definitive answers. Just impressions. We entered the Joseph Beuys exhibit. I was not familiar with this artist. His concepts were stirring. He often used his publicity as his art. Turning photographs taken during his radio interviews and turning them into silk screen pieces of art.
This wander through pop art created spirited discussion between my son and I. I told him about Marcel Duchamp and the dada-ist movement, his famous urinal sculpture and found art in general. Then a thought occurred to me that was new to me. Art causes us to slow down.
Day in and day out we walk past vacuum cleaners tucked in our closets. They are common place. Koons takes them, puts them in a plexiglass box and lights them with fluorecents and suddenly I’m staring at vacuum cleaners. Combing my eyes over the lines and colors. Perhaps trying to devine why he put them there. What did he see in them? What was he trying to say to me? Or did was he just marveling at the artfulness of their design. Was he giggling to himself somewhere that an museum patron (like myself) was going to stand and stare at vacuum cleaners for an inordinate amount of time just because he anointed them as art? Whatever the reason he caused me to slow down. The same way that Warhol had me staring at a Campbell’s label. It was the art of intention, the art of slowing. It’s fascinating. The artist didn’t create the object, they just put it in a different context forcing us to tilt our heads and examine it, slower.
So the art, and perhaps all art, really only exists in the mind of the artist. What makes us fascinated by these artists is marveling at (scoffing at, being bewildered by) is the original thought. My son made the joke that we could put a frame around a light switch and call it art. I said absolutely. At first he thought it was cheap and easy. He’s right. I then informed it that it wasn’t cheap and easy when Duchamp did it back in 1916, it was subversive and ironic. Then it lead to discussions about intention and why. That I couldn’t tell him.
