June 13, 2021

Friday 6/11 Rebecca and I had a pleasant luncheon with friends at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Afterwards Rebecca led me into the rooms of here https://honolulumuseum.org/collection_exhibits/ . Lee Bontecue has a wall art three dimensional piece which drew me in to her world, her minds view, and her humanity.  





What do you experience? 
To put into words a description of our encounter with this art object is very difficult. The artist has created a world for us with her essences used so I'm captured and feel frightened and curious so all of a sudden there's an entity behind with eyes, a mouth, zipper mouth. A borg creature? the biography of the artist is very interesting and her artistic journey from pieces like this to others created on canvas with an acetylene torch is worth exploring. Artists bring us into experiences and worlds that have meaning but to translate into words is very difficult. There is meaning here and pieces like this can bring us to other realms that we did not live in before. 
Our intellect and experiences and understanding come from study in which we learn through concentrating and solitary practice sometimes valued but this limits our capacity for a more fuller appreciation of the subject we are trying to understand and master. The old school method of teaching wanted the student to have solitary study but what occurred was that the student finds their limits of their cognitive capacity. I.Q.s did increase for a time but n ow they have leveled off. But what if we use the social benefits of our evolutionary journey. We have come to understand things for social reasons so our understanding has cognitive biases to either join or rebel against the group. We may come to understand to support our biases not for a better understanding of the issues. However, if we include others with other points of view and other information systems our understanding through argument and dialogue increases. So where do we end and the world outside begins?   https://icds.uoregon.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Clark-and-Chalmers-The-Extended-Mind.pdf Andy Clark and David Charlmers proposed that our mind extends beyond ourselves onto the world helping us understand more than our brains were capable. To me a good example of this relates to the problems solving history of NASA missions. The astronauts and the equipment used ran into problems that required understanding and solutions requiring thinking outside the box. All hands on deck at NASA with arguments and seemingly unlikely suggestions leading to innovative solutions.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html . 



Ruth Duckworth created this for me to be amused and delighted while even somewhat worried! She experienced a lot of horror in her life but managed to get sexual play here. 









Edwin Keinholtz and Nancy Redoin Keinholtz used thrift store and worn materials to produce this masterpiece with themes of racism, poverty, and humanity for us to confront if we dare. 

Yosef Komungukaa Poem

Written as a tribute and commentary of Dizzy Gillespie the music is classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfLVVHxk4IM

A Night in Tunisia

How long have I listened
to this blues & how long
has Dizzy Gillespie been dead?
I remember an old longing,
a young man reaching
for luck, a finger paused
between pages of Baldwin’s
Notes of a Native Son, a clock
stopped for a hard, crystal-
clear moment. This was
a lifetime before the night
streets of Tunisia burned
on cell phones in the clouds,
tear gas & machine gun fire
& my head in my hands
an hour. I traveled there
many times, humble
side streets & sweetness
of figs, hot seasons of meat
on the bone, naked feeling,
& Dizzy’s horn still ablaze,
a bleat of big fat notes
in the dark. Even if I’d never
stepped above simple laws,
my youth had betrayed me
with years still to come
& jasmine in bloom.

Music is another realm of human experience that conveys important information but again hard to translate in words.  And then there's poetry in which the words create sounds if we speak the words aloud so the words and sounds then bring us into another realm to experience.

O.K. I'm getting hungry for dinner. Rebecca is creating a new piece of art which I'll eventually be able to experience. I'm playting some new classical short pieces on the piano which I can more easily recreate for my pleasure and sometimes Rebecca's. 

Hiking and picture taking continues.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/leonardsjacobs/albums/72157603520494610














Comments

  1. From Michael:
    I wish I had listened more to Peggy when she talked about art, then I would have been more qualified to comment on this blog, but I missed this opportunity and I will live with my ignorance.
    When I look at modern art I rarely try to decipher what the artist had in mind, because , after reading background material ,I realize that my interpretation is almost always wrong. So now I appreciate the craftsmanship, but I treat the content like a Rorschach test.
    What I see in Lee Bontecue creation is a greedy society which gets fat like a pig, but in return it isn't allowed to criticize (zipped snouts). The nice thing about reviewing art is that everybody is entitled to his own opinion.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some people like their art wrapped others want to unwrap.
      L

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    2. Wee-e-ell, I think that different people may have different views of the same piece of art. And many may not agree, even, with the views or intentions of the artist themselves. But i, personally, am OK with that. I don't think there's a right or wrong way to understand or feel a piece of art. For myself, I think i can see, sometimes, what the intent of the artist is/was. And, again sometimes, i can see/feel something in a piece of art that appeals to me or reveals to me something about either me or the universe or my understanding of or feelings about them. It's not the art piece, exactly, but what it might suggest to me. And sometimes, not! Sometimes a piece is, to me, just a piece of wallpaper, maybe decorative but otherwise silent.
      And all of this blather, of course, is one man's opinion, artistic or not!

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