Reading 3 Spring 2014

In reading Ezra Shales article, "Where What's Done Comes Undone," I think about my own personal experiences in a museum of how Ezra describes the lack of connection and the desire to touch and experience the objects that are barred behind glass. So much of my exhibition and museum experience has been my hands dutifully stuffed in my pockets and my eyes moving and shifting from one piece to another piece without truly digesting what I am truly seeing.

Ezra talks about how in households, pieces are meant to be touched or they are locked in the China cabinet, waiting for that special occasion. You can only experience a piece in how it is presented in a museum or in a home. But you also have to think about how the piece was suppose to be experienced. How did the artist experience the piece while making it? What was the intent or purpose of the piece? Was it to stand their to be gazed upon or to be used? So many of these questions I see are being answered by a variety of contemporary artists on the idea of permanence in a museum or interactive art. I also think performance art is taking on that whole idea as well. It can be video taped and saved for the decades but the true experience is hearing, feeling, and watching the art be performed right infront of your eyes and being etched into memory. So much of art is lost in memory by the fact that we can not engage our other senses that memory requires. We see so many things in our day that walking in a museum, there is no understanding or digesting of the information that lays before us on pedestals, there are just vases or bowls with surface decoration. It is said that a person would not look at a painting or any art piece for more than 30 seconds now a days. If we could touch and experience art, how long would people be engaged for? How much knowledge would one grasp with not just using their eyes?

I find this article very relevant to me because the questions and points Ezra has raised is exactly what I face in the classroom. None of my students can name a contemporary artist or describe a piece of art that they just saw in a museum. I feel that we as artists compete with the technology age and how things are communicated and should be able to grow along and build onto that visual communication to be experienced not in just a visual way but a way that takes viewers from seeing and walking away but to feeling and bringing themselves into the pieces as well.