Recently, it has become inevitable to think of our society about where it goes, and what has been the wrong doing in the past; whether we should keep the faith to whatever we thought valuable and even the newly elected President of the United State of America.
I traveled back to my home country, China, in the past weeks. The blaming voice to the US was overwhelming, the moral wrong doing to the entire world – the wars, the imposing and unfair deals with the developing countries; the self –dig grave on the Wall Street which is now sweeping the entire world.
After I came back to New York, I walked in the galleries in Chelsea. It wasn’t an intentional visit. I saw the exhibition of David Schorr, GOODS, (http://iaspub.wesleyan.edu/media_users/!v1i_dept_display1.search_results?v_dept_code=FAE&v_collection=91890&v_start=0&v_end=2). The convenient size and square format oil paintings delighted my spirit in the cold morning. I couldn’t help on thinking Edward Hopper and William Eggleston along walking in front those paintings in the small gallery.
A few days later, I went to Whitney Museum of American Arts to look at William Eggleston’s exhibition, Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video 1961-2008 (http://whitney.org/www/eggleston/index.jsp). Again, my spirit was so much delighted by looking at those images.
I had problem to distinguish the scene in Mr. Eggleston’s images taken in 1976 from what I just saw in the Deep South in the recent years. The restless attempts of rebellion and reaching to a compete liberty co existed with the reluctance and lacking of courage. I practiced in architecture, it also puzzled me how conservative a lot of American clients and architects are. The people were obsessed to differentiate the social class in this suppose liberal society. This obsession has attracted and enabled the architects from the traditional Europe to build the Neo-Braque house for the riches in the US. As Mr. Robert AM Stern is designing for the richest American with hypo conservatism and faked European details, he was proclaimed humble. Up to this point, I looked back what I saw in China, the exact same obsession is killing the country.
I think it is right that America should confess to the world for spreading out this cultural pollution, but fairly speaking, not everyone should. It is delightful and encouraging to see the infinity of optimism embedded in Mr. Eggleston and Mr. Schorr’s works. I guess neither Democracy nor Liberty kills the world, but Conservative does.
1 comment:
Eggleston and David Schorr are capturing the most ordinary scene in our lives, thus free in whatever they want to capture, or to express. Democratic cameras, I believe that the ability to give each moment or scenery equal significance is what makes it art, not a reporting, not a statement. Susan Sontag reflected on the same idea. Thus it is liberating for our mind as well, nothing to aspire to, just simply be.
What we see today in China, the newly rich eager to make a statement of who they are and what they own, is reflected in the buildings, the clubs they go to, the sort of art they purchase.
They are being told what others are doing, and how the riches of the foreign or past have been doing, they are just following. They are not embracing the new, they are just trying to catch up in lacking the abaility of making their own taste, this applies to the newly rich in America once upon a time, so they seems conservative and anti-new in their chosen style and taste, because they have none other but to imitate.
So the stories are repeating themselves, and I was suffocated in china for lacking of refreshness and depth in many people's thinking, but it could be very much becuase the country just start to accumulate wealth, and only a wealthy and secure society with good and democratic system can truly support the freedom of lifesytel as well as expression capability of its artists and architect. I hope that situation in China will improve, as it did here.
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