In a group chat recently we had a conversation about loving and hating museums, and there was some agreement that going to a museum is less about the art and more about the spatial experience of "being in a museum."
This really resonated with me. I do, flatly, like art: I was only a class or two away from an art history concentration in college, I love reading about art, and I go out of my way to see it, too. Despite this, I've often had a hard time articulating exactly my tastes and preferences for fine art, and how or why it meshes with my tastes in dance-ey spatial-ey performance art. This conversation helped me acknowledge that yea, I almost prefer museums to the art, and the art I do like explores the feeling of the body in space, the relations between body, space, form, architecture. This is part of why I like community work spaces so much: full of people, tools, and physical constructions getting reconfigured over time.
In summer 2015 I spent some days in Paris and I was able to visit Brâncuși's studio which speaks directly to this: his "mobile groups" are performed sculptures, impermanent arrangements of different shapes in space that slowly or sporadically get moved around and reworked. I lapped it up. The fraught finality and commodified positioning of an art "object" can be so frustrating; like the relational postmodernist I am (you have full permission to shoot me for saying that) I am excited by the un-collectability and more nuanced value assessments of ongoing, performed work. To me, this approach embodies more of a maintenance mindset: Brâncuși keeping the sculptural arrangements moving could be viewed as an act of care, providing moments to touch and attend to the constituent parts. It becomes an act of gardening—not an object but a process.
When I moved to the west coast, I became more interested in land art, and landforms in general. I backed my way into being an environmentalist out of a love for sculpture, recognizing that the forces that carve and shape landforms are just as fascinating; you just swap the artist's intention for the emergent dynamics of the world. Large-scale land projects require maintenance as well: this is what led me to go into civil engineering. But, we too often budget and plan for one-off projects instead of investing in a system of maintenance and care; this pattern writ large has done the human race no good.
I went to a museum a couple weeks ago, my first time in a space like that since the beginning of COVID. I still love that shit, but mostly I'm thankful that these days I can go outside and move plants around.
Rearranging,
Lukas
This really resonated with me. I do, flatly, like art: I was only a class or two away from an art history concentration in college, I love reading about art, and I go out of my way to see it, too. Despite this, I've often had a hard time articulating exactly my tastes and preferences for fine art, and how or why it meshes with my tastes in dance-ey spatial-ey performance art. This conversation helped me acknowledge that yea, I almost prefer museums to the art, and the art I do like explores the feeling of the body in space, the relations between body, space, form, architecture. This is part of why I like community work spaces so much: full of people, tools, and physical constructions getting reconfigured over time.
In summer 2015 I spent some days in Paris and I was able to visit Brâncuși's studio which speaks directly to this: his "mobile groups" are performed sculptures, impermanent arrangements of different shapes in space that slowly or sporadically get moved around and reworked. I lapped it up. The fraught finality and commodified positioning of an art "object" can be so frustrating; like the relational postmodernist I am (you have full permission to shoot me for saying that) I am excited by the un-collectability and more nuanced value assessments of ongoing, performed work. To me, this approach embodies more of a maintenance mindset: Brâncuși keeping the sculptural arrangements moving could be viewed as an act of care, providing moments to touch and attend to the constituent parts. It becomes an act of gardening—not an object but a process.
When I moved to the west coast, I became more interested in land art, and landforms in general. I backed my way into being an environmentalist out of a love for sculpture, recognizing that the forces that carve and shape landforms are just as fascinating; you just swap the artist's intention for the emergent dynamics of the world. Large-scale land projects require maintenance as well: this is what led me to go into civil engineering. But, we too often budget and plan for one-off projects instead of investing in a system of maintenance and care; this pattern writ large has done the human race no good.
I went to a museum a couple weeks ago, my first time in a space like that since the beginning of COVID. I still love that shit, but mostly I'm thankful that these days I can go outside and move plants around.
Rearranging,
Lukas