Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon
Loving art requires time and attentiveness, just as any relationship does. An additional, more important impact of my visit to the Walker struck me after I finished the last post.
In the encounter with a work of art we can bring any level of ourSelf. The Walker, at the moment more powerfully than the MIA, allows me to visit objects with what Paul Ricoeur calls second naivete. I can visit them with the knowledge I’ve gained over the last 10 years at the MIA, yet experience them fresh, with beginner’s mind, yet, even with beginner’s mind I also have the other, more experienced me accessible, too.
This creates a wonderful frisson, a magical moment in which the artist speaks to me through the work, not through its content, but through its creation, and in that act of creation emboldens me to create, to stretch out, to confound my highest hopes by yet higher ones, not for fame or money, but for expressive power, for a work that can do for another what these works did for me.
So, I come away from an afternoon like this with energy borrowed from these artists and transformed within me.