Stretching My Mind by Edward Albee

Author:Edward Albee [EDWARD ALBEE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

JONATHAN THOMAS

1993

ART CAN BE about anything, and it can employ whatever means it wishes to succeed to that intention; art must be judged by how well it succeeds to its intention and whether that intention is worth the trouble of succeeding to. Lesser art does little to disturb the status quo; it is, of course, equally true that art which disturbs, provokes, renunciates, or tries to do serious damage to established artistic coherence does not necessarily succeed in moving out of the “lesser” status simply by its agressiveness.

What must happen for art to become a major factor in our aesthetic perceptions is that it must expand (relocate?) our judgmental boundries and, at the same time, be a “moral” act, in that it allows the logics and coherencies of art to affect—and effect—our responses to the world around us and its quandries.

To the extent that we permit the arts to impinge upon our consciousness we are altered; our perceptions are either honed or dulled and our moral comprehensions are either broadened or diminished. Art can enliven, and art can kill.

It shocks me every time I write of these matters that I need do so, but as I see the chasm between what is desired and what is to be desired in the arts deepening, the mind-deadening excesses of our popular entertainments, and the lemming-like drive by our majority critics toward middlebrowism, I see that the battle is never unjoined, that there need be—perhaps at best—a holding action against the corruptions of our arts values.

The concept that “high art” need be a minority participation in a democrary stems, we must assume, from the appalling lack of arts education in this country; otherwise, we must assume that we are populated by philistines and the retarded. We know that this latter is not so, and we keep hoping that what can be will be.

Institutions like the Wadsworth Atheneum, through its Matrix program, can help tilt the balance in the direction of sustained and useful dialogue between those who make art and those for whom they take the trouble, if you will. The Matrix program has been going on for a long time now, and has exposed the public to a host of provocative, innovative, disturbing, and thoroughly fine artists. It has served the noble double function of presenting the artists to a larger public and broadening the public’s awareness of the possibilities of art.

Which brings us to Jonathan Thomas—an artist who fulfills the criteria mentioned earlier, who combines audacity, intelligence and talent in equal parts. Even a quick look at his work will make it evident that more is going on than meets the eye and mind at first glance. Exactly what are these paintings about, these elegant, brooding, somber abstractions which suddenly become—in revealing their materials—disturbing messages, private and yet communicative, and which then go on to rebecome what we first apprehended, though deepened?

It is this vibration—this cross-fade—between the explicit and the implicit, between the totality and its construction, which gives these paintings their disturbing magic.

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