Not since the days of following Dad and Garth through weekend art shows in Denver (guys, you know the ones I'm talking about - over by the stadium), have I spent so much time going to art shows. Viewing art in Istanbul is always worth it. If the art is not my thing, there is always the venue - an ancient water cistern, a warehouse-turned-art-museum on the Bosphorus, a tiny gallery tucked away on a back street. And there are is always, always people watching!
Saturday evening found me at a collaborative art exhibit by Take Me To The River (http://www.tmttr.org/) which was focused on water and our relationship with water. And Sunday I headed down to the Istanbul Modern art museum to view the "In Praise of Shadows" exhibit which includes work by Kara Walker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_walker and http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker).
I didn't find the Take Me To The River exhibit to be very interesting and I can't say more about why than that it didn't make me think about anything. At least not about the art itself. I did find watching the people viewing the art to be rather interesting.
The work by Kara Walker at the Istanbul Modern was thought provoking and very raw. Her work discusses the brutality of slavery in shadow cut-outs. These cut-outs are, at the same time, very detailed and very vague. Full-size, black cut-outs on a white wall. The outlines show hair, teeth, bone, but it is just the outline, the shadow. As I looked at her work, I wondered how the Turks were viewing it. Did they see the emotion there, the brutality, the power battles? Was it reinforcing broad overviews of slavery in America? How do they view something that is so much a part of someone else's history? How does anyone? How does it effect them, having not yet traveled this far down their own country's brutal past? I was too captive by my own response to the images on the walls to step back and observe other's reactions to it. Perhaps I will go back to watch people viewing the art.
These trips have raised, for me, the eternal art questions - what is it and how do people view it? To answer the last of those, I've started watching people view it. Just watching. How do they move around a particular exhibit? Are there common reactions to it or does it effect everyone differently? Some people approach art methodically. They take their time, move around the piece, see it from different angles. Others park themselves in front of it and stare. Still others look at it quickly and move on, sometimes making several passes by one piece or the whole exhibit.
The first question is harder to answer. And I think that is as it should be. Art should, at the end, evoke a personal reaction. The reaction does not have to be good or bad, one of acceptance or denial, but it does have to be a reaction. If there is no reaction then it is not art.
