Chloe is working on her BFA thesis right now and called to ask me for some advice/resources/ideas, and I pointed her (as well as also pointing Kevin recently) to John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Tonight I busted out my copy and started in on it. I read it the first time my last semester of undergrad so I saw a certain symmetry in reading it again my last semester of grad school. Even though I'm doing mostly non-objective work, I knew there would be some relevant gems in there for me.
First, I had to laugh because the title page has a list I kept of pages with typographical or grammatical errors. Oh, me. This book is so saturated with good points that it's all marked up, but the first thing that really got me, and enticed me to get up get out my computer and type was this passage (page 11):
The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the reaction between the present and is past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.
I think abstract work can actually give use more of span of time than a rendered scene. There is more record of a past in my paintings than a painting from life in a past moment. Looking at my work the viewer can't help but acknowledge a building up over time, one layer drying before the next is applied. However I am conscious of not letting that build up, that journey become to chronologically obvious, But one is aware that the painting has a past.
I know I need to get "the present" and this relationship of the past to the present into my statement. This passage makes that even more apparent to me.
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