AJ Sabatini Notes Art

When it comes to the arts, I figure I am continuously involved in about seven different types of conversations. Or, more precisely, I talk to a variety of people, and read a lot, including: artists, students, colleagues, friends and collaborators (a number of whom are musicians, dancers, visual artists, writers), acquaintances, along with friends and others who are not into – or even care about - the arts (this includes my Mother). Since I also read journals and blogs and am “in the loop” regarding various projects, I am float around general and highly esoteric discourses. Of course, there is also the dialogue with myself that takes place in notebooks, when I write…you get the picture.

So, when Scott invited me to add a blog to Hearsight, I said, sure: blogging is talkingthinkingwriting with, maybe, contributions from other voices. I like that.

It has to be excessive, felt, a part of a life, necessary, a long story, imagination careening or walking, complicated, in performance, reflexive, intelligent or dumb intelligent, aware. Empty/Full. Maximal/Minimal. Perfect/Flawed. Raw/Raw. Drunk/Sublime…anything that ebbs or rushes toward the unsayable.

Work by living artists, I mean. In fact, for starters, I should state outright that “art objects,” individual “pieces” of art, this or that play, novel, poem, installation, song, composition, opera, thing, bit, gestus doesn’t interest me that much. It is the artist and their life and their thinking, their elaborations, mistakes, asides, imagination and process that makes sense to me. In one of the courses I teach, students have to select an artist (living or dead) and find out everything about them and take up every angle, every work and then respond. The alternative is to see artists in a list or, worse, to only know the work and not the artist. When it comes to living artists, I ask students to think about someone they would like to know about for the rest of their life.

Like Merce Cunningham, whose Company I saw perform this summer at Dia Beacon (upstate New York). In a work titled, Beacon Events (http://www.merce.org/thecompany_hvr.html). Cunningham’s dancer spiraled, held iconic poses for minutes, and changed places in lucid angular intense moment to moment phrases. This was all in front of and around four monumental steel pieces, the “Tourqued Ellispses” by Richard Serra. These are cavernous, curling sculptures you can walk into., the sides sometimes no more than two feel apart. In the center of each Ellipse,” a composer/musician generated electronic sound that echoed, popped and slid over the space.

I saw Cunningham dance once, decades ago, while John Cage read from notecards (I think the work was a section from Indeterminacy). This was before I knew who they were. Cage, in his serious lilting voice was simply saying things that struck me as funny/profound/light/important – elliptical, but not torqued. Cunningham floated, leapt, spun round him, arms outstretched and held in punctuation of space, like those of the dancers at the Dia Beacon Event. Totally absorbed for about an hour, like I had been while listening to Miles Davis or reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I said to myself, I want to know more about these guys and keep up with what they are doing. Very, very glad I did.