At 08:11 AM 5/25/2007 -0400, Christopher Smith wrote: >Not that you personally would ever be caught dead in the Museum of >Modern Art in NYC, but in the entrance there is an enormous Jackson >Pollack canvas created by the artist dripping paint onto it (I'm >sorry I don't remember the name of this one).
If it was MOMA, I'm not sure (there are numerous), but if it was the Met, it might have been the enormous Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). Here is a little about it: <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/na/ho_57.92.htm> Last September I wrote about this in my blog. <http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/waam-20060924.html> Below is the excerpt. I feel very different about it than Phil does. :) Dennis ...Watching the sweetly unbearable complexity of the colors and shapes of autumn trees in the wind had me thinking about music by way of Jackson Pollock. In the ninth grade (that would be 1963), our class from suburban New Jersey had the opportunity to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There is one solitary painting that was made vivid and forever in this adolescent's mind -- "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)". The painting was transformational. It showed nothing but itself, paint on canvas. It didn't show autumn, it wasn't "like" autumn. Not chill, not swooping. It was ... some thing. Some vast thing, nine feet high and seventeen feet long, thick with rivers of black and white and brown. It didn't ask to be understood or even to be felt. It didn't ask anything but attention to its presence. No, not to its presence -- that sounds too psychologically territorial -- to the simple fact of its existence. No words such as those came to mind then, just a sense of having ... to ... stand ... there ... and ... look ... and ... look ... and ... look ... and ... not ... move ... feet ... rooting. Ambient sounds and voices faded away, like the moment of quiescent silence before sleep settles and the noisy dreams and terrors arrive. Those human beings shuffling by in front of me faded to transparent specters falling through the floor until that painting, that one painting, reached around me and became, no, just was the entire universe, known and yet to be known. I cannot analyze that moment, but I can still feel it. The moment was like the transforming experiences of music, a pivot-point of existence with a tiny weight of no more than a grain pulling one side down and making clear that the direction had changed to this way, not that one. And so it is at the heart of answering the prosaic question of why music as art differs from music as commerce. There is only one moment of transformation, one pivot-point, that belongs to a work of art. The experience is recallable but not renewable, unless it provides its own dementia. (You know I don't like writing this way. But it has to be captured before it escapes.) There is only one first bite of orange, first smell of peppermint, first feel of damp soil, first cut to the bone, first ride bareback, first sight of the Milky Way in the countryside, first sweat of sex, and probably first reach into the last moment of life... _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
