Looking Around

It can be a struggle to watch what becomes "in" ... sometimes it's so out of one's aesthetic, one cringes. Other times, it's a pale version of what could be one's aesthetic, one groans. And once in a while, it strikes an exact chord with one's aesthetic, one remembers.

There's little point in giving examples of the first two, but for me, the chord was struck the first time I saw Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder drawings at the Hirshorn . I stared at them for a long time ... when I turned around, my friends already had moved on to another room, impatient with me. The gunpowder drawings were perfectly on the line between abstraction and representation. I saw Cai-Gio-Qiang's recent installation at the Whitney ... unfortunately, it was overload, which lessened the impact of both the individual drawings and the stuffed animal natural history museum reminiscent installations.

I revisited (online) Art 21's interview with Richard Tuttle. I was surprised, and refreshed, to realize that his thinking on drawing, particularly about the border between drawing and sculpture and the notion that the 2D plane is more real than 3D, paralleled my thought process independent of reading his views.