[The following is excerpted and modified ever so slightly from my Introduction to the Catalog of artwork submitted for the Museum of Computer Art's annual 2014 Donnie contest.]
While looking at Dreilich’s photo of an athletic field with a set of empty bleachers in the background my eye drifted off to the right and caught a glimpse of someone in a robe carrying a cross out of frame.
How odd, I thought. Beyond the obvious narrative, what else am I seeing here?
With that question we find ourselves standing right at the point where reality and art part company, between the apparent and the assumed, between the perceptible and the imperceptible.
Several years ago I discovered Impressionism, French Impressionism, and the works of Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot in particular. After looking at dozens of their paintings it suddenly struck me that each artist sought to express their own peculiar vision of the world around them in a unique way: not through attempting representation of reality, rather by trying to capture how that reality “impressed” their sensibilities. And each one did it quite differently from the others. Quite.
So it is with computer art.
Of course, to say that each artist sees a thing with a peculiarly distinct, personal vision is to state the obvious. Each artist then attempts to express that very special vision in a way uniquely his own, like the Impressionists, with a vision at once personal and public, impregnable yet vulnerable.
For it is right here that the viewer comes into the picture (pun intended). For it is the viewer, the observer, the reader of minds who must discern what the artist’s vision may be and fit that comprehension into the context of whether the viewer cares for the vision or the presentation.
We reflect on the canvas (or monitor screen) and wonder "what is it I’m seeing?" While some visions cannot be comprehended at all, others are patently obvious. Or so it may seem, but things are rarely ever as they seem.
I like much of the work found at the Museum of Computer Art: some pieces speak directly to my sensitivities; others leave me perplexed as to what the point is (or may be). But that is art. Art is at once personal and public; personal in its individual appeal and yet public in the general exposure, at once unassailable because it comes from within the artist and yet vulnerable in the extreme since the artist seeks to share it with total strangers.
Which artists draw you into their vision, and which leave you cold, unmoved, unengaged? Most importantly, why you feel such passion or ambivalence, indifference or animosity? Why do you prefer a certain vision, a distinct expression and not another?
Art is give and take, see and understand, accept or reject. Art is a dialogue. Join it.
[so, check out the MOCA site, browse for a bit, sink your mind's eye into some of the most luscious art to come out of another human's being. . . ]
