Introduction: Art as Experience
It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any past cultures. Each age finds its own techniques. --Jackson Pollock, 1950
In his book Art as Experience, philosopher John Dewey proposed that in order to truly understand a work of art you must be committed to finding out all you can about what went into influencing and creating the artistic object (1). This visual journal is my exploration of how new forms of media such as multimedia (mixed media, video, audio, etc) are being used by contemporary artists to attempt to understand how they fit into this world. This summer I had the opportunity to visit three very different places. In Santa Fe, New Mexico I attended the Currents New Media Festival, a week-long exhibition of new media artists from around the world.
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In Iceland I spent some time looking at how such a formidable landscape influences the modern artist, and in France where artistic expression is it's life blood, how artists are responding to contemporary life using new forms of media. As many questions arose as insights were obtained. I guess that is the way of discovery. As John Dewey put it, "The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, not by a relentless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself." Indeed.
1. Dewey, J. (2005). Art as experience. New York, NY: Perigee |