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Peter Schjeldahl on the arts

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http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/07/art/...tt-earnest

EXCERPT: This summer he [Peter Schjeldah] met with the Rail’s Jarrett Earnest to discuss the interconnections between seeing, feeling, and writing.

[...] Schjeldahl: The arts are a great little laboratory, of absolutely free play of ideas and emotions which normal social space can’t cope with: you can play war and nobody dies, and play love and nobody has their heart broken. It’s also an education in physiology: the mechanisms and functioning and limits of consciousness.

Rail: When did that interest start?

Schjeldahl: In the ’60s, the drugs had a role. I dropped acid maybe five times. The first time was kind of great, the second was iffy, the other times were nightmares. That wasn’t a good enough excuse not to do it, because if you had a bad trip that was a character flaw—you had failed the drug. But it gave me a lot of information. It’s hard to describe, of course. It’s as if every bit of the mind is active and being seen, but by nobody—phenomena without a witness. Which may freak a person seriously out.

Rail: You described that Hopper painting Sun in an Empty Room (1963) that way: nobody has ever truly been in an empty room.

Schjeldahl: Well that’s Hopper in general. People talk about “voyeurism” in Hopper. But there’s no voyeur. Look at Night Windows (1928), there is no possible place for a viewer to be, or Office at Night (1940), unless you’re hung by a hook on the wall. It is pure envisioning.

[...] Schjeldahl: Looking at art is like, “Here are the answers. What were the questions?” I think of it like espionage, “walking the cat back”—why did that happen, and that?—and eventually you come to a point of irreducible mystery. With ninety percent of work the inquiry breaks down very quickly. You reach an explanation that is comprehensive and boring. Bad art, as any good artist will tell you, is the most instructive, because it’s naked in its decisions. Even adorably so. When something falls apart you can see what it’s made of. Whereas with a great artist, say Manet or Shakespeare, you’re left gawking like an idiot.

[...] Schjeldahl: Sculpture is a learned medium for me, and I’ve come to love it. It is far and away the hardest art. The demands on it are crushing, especially since it came off pedestals. A painting is an imaginary world, and it hangs on the wall out of our way. There is room in the real world for an infinity of imaginary worlds, which you can deal with or not. The conditions that apply to anything actually in the world apply to sculpture, with the added challenge of blatant uselessness. Three questions we might ask of a sculpture that we unexpectedly encounter are: “What is that?” “Why is it there?” and “When will it go away?” If those questions take hold, the sculpture is sunk. There has to be some immediate emotional response that skates past them. It can be dislike. The sculpture has to excite your feelings immediately to have a chance of working for you....




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