Photographer Sam Falls on conceptual art:
More and more I think that the only art that really sticks with me is art that I have an emotional connection with. I really dig conceptual art that requests time and mental processing, but this usually ends up in a sort of “knowing” that doesn’t necessarily drive me back to the artwork. The pieces I always return to and can look at over and over in a museum’s permanent collection are works that make me feel and not think, where there’s no pedagogy but just empathy.
As an artist I definitely fall on the side of pedagogy, but I know exactly what Falls is talking about in regards to empathy, because those are the pieces that I return to as a viewer.
An artist friend told me a couple years ago that his goal was to make people cry, and that has always seemed to me like a very worthy endeavor and the reaction I have with my favorite pieces of art, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, or Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy—I don’t know why. I don’t care if an artwork makes me really sad or elated, so much that I really feel something. I like Romanticism and the old notions of the Sublime, thinking about Melancholy and the huge role it’s been playing for centuries in western culture. I don’t think these concepts are passé and the individual’s flux in emotion relative to nature is still a very real and worthy endeavor in the arts.
I tend not to think about being attracted to art because it makes me feel, because I’m not really sure what that specific feeling is most of the time. Some art is just magnetic.
Definitely worth checking out the interview and Falls work, his descriptions of how he approaches creating his work reminds me of what I love about photography.
(via jenbee)
