On Aug 20, 2009, at 8:59 PM, William Conger wrote:
Given that most art is bad, and most of the bad stuff is terrible, and so very little is any good and almost none is really good, I'm always ready to be impressed by those rare examples of really good. None of that has much to do with how I work, or my still-developing idea. I mean I don't go running to the studio to try to copy something that just knocked me down with its aesthetic power. I have my life-long project, as it were, and it is contemporary, of today, and I hope it's not transient. But I look at everything.
The really good stuff stays with you. The lesser works come and go and are quickly forgotten. But you hang onto the good stuff, so that later you find you've continued to recall it and pay attention to it. Whether or not you adopt anything from it--copying or imitating--is beside the point because its force has already imprinted itself.
One of the direct effects of artworks is their ability to propose alternate views (or talkings, or soundings, or showings) of life. "Here is this picture. It's got angels and people walking in the air. Forget the apparent impossibility of that: but if that can be so, what else can also be so?" "I looked at my friend Kanhweiler, and painted his face like it was made of shards of glass. Makes you think of him differently, doesn't it?" "What would happen if you woke up as a cockroach? Or in a room without a door? Or on the beach in Algeria? Or Australia after a nuclear war?"
BTW, art can do this *only because it doesn't have to be literally true, documentarily true* -- you know, it doesn't have to conform to external truth conditions.
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