i want paintings to be full of life (notes from a prodigal transpacifist)

about a year ago, i walked into a room in the met, never having heard of tara donavan, and left a full devotee:



tiny metal circles strung in beautiful rhythmic sequencing: so delicate, so familiar, so alive.
i've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks simply weeping with the bliss of being alive, of being surrounded by art, of being handed the indelible gift of tools with which to make art, of learning to see it in the tiniest interchanges and realizing that we are all, in our own terms, artists and creators. i spent nearly an hour yesterday feeling both exquisitely deranged and madly ecstatic while twirling a clear plastic bottle of grape vitamin water in the air, and watching the winter afternoon light creep through the slated blinds and hit the lavender molecules with resulting velvet reactions of plums and roses and sparkling greens. it was as if, for a moment, i had never known anything so beautiful - which made me wonder immediately at how to capture it, or if it even begged for capturing, or if in the act of capture that same beauty could possibly mean anything to anyone else - this exquisite beauty of photons meeting a conglomeration of molecules engaged in the delicate dance of making and breaking hydrogen bonds. it made me wonder at the point (still, after the revolution of cubism, and dadaism, and minimalism, and every other ism) of oil paint on canvas, at the point of my project proposal to install paintings in series, on squares, on canvas, hung from a wall.

of course, these are all old debates. and perhaps oil has as much its place as rust (which i'm so excited to play with this semester!) and as tiny strings of metal placed on a wall. but more importantly, perhaps every thinkable medium has its place as it redefines the art that already exists in simple organic bonds and enlarges it or glorifies it and makes us reacquaint ourselves with the pre-existing beauty of our reality. as jean dubuffet says, from notes for the well-lettered:

do not confine art, cut it off from the real world, keep it in a trap. i want paintings to be full of life - decorations, swatches of colour, signs and placards, scratches on the ground. these are its native soil.

and so tara donovan works with plastic paper cups and strips of paper and rings of metal to make us see a new dimension of paintings, both representational and brilliantly abstract, in a completely new light - new, but so familiar at the same time.