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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Formative 16: Visual Arts

All arts are "visual." Even music.

I've always considered that a weakness of mine, my inability to draw well and my ignorance of visual arts. Really, though, I am not too bad. I would look at my parents' art books, like one they had of El Greco, and I admired ancient Greek sculpture in my mythological phase in mid-childhood. I know if there's an old painting with a guy with keys, it's Saint Peter. My favorite painter is Rothko. I went through an intense Joseph Cornell phase.

I always thought poetry had close connections with music and visual arts (all arts are visual). I've always thought that visual and concrete poetry was not visual enough. I remember Charles Bernstein saying, about a painter famous for incorporating text into her work, that maybe she should hire a poet to help her. I respond to visual art strongly, especially its poetic and rhythmic dimensions.

I keep finding more to say in this "formative" series. I see that Clarissa and Leslie have joined me in this thread. I still have to talk about: my parents, nature, sexuality. And possibly other topics.



5 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

Care to elaborate on the notion of music being visual? "One O'Clock Jump," let's say.

Jonathan said...

Synaesthesia, in my case. Though not strong in my case, strong enough to make the case.

I see color when listening to music. I had nothing else in mind.

Vance Maverick said...

Ah, thought you meant something stronger. I don't experience synesthesia (though sometimes strong memory-associations). This is as much a quirk as the reverse, I suppose -- even with texts about the visual, like "Helsinki Window", I resist the invitation to see.

Anonymous said...

I had a dream tonight where I came to my office and you were sitting there, extremely angry. You told me that I had no right to write these posts because you came up with the first and I was a plagiarist. So I started deleting the posts and you were yelling at me, saying that it was too late and what a horrible thing to do.

Jonathan said...

Weird. I'm really liking your posts on Bildung, in fact.