/////// 10tonfunk

I was fortunate enough to work on the MIAD China this summer. These are great folk and this is gonna be a great show.  Here’s the (bitchin’) poster and a foreword I wrote. Reppin’ the Midwest and the Far East…

They Might Be, They Are…Imagination Giants

Everyone knows that if you dig a deep enough hole in your backyard you end up in China. So I wasn’t too surprised, once upon a time not long ago, to be with MIAD’s bestest and brightest in a mad minivan dash to a Shaolin mountaintop, acapellaing ‘Children’s Story’ as our crazed driver raced into the oncoming lane, with the 8 of us packed in among army blankets like so much hay.

As America is going through Kennedy withdrawal, it seems a fitting time to bring up John John’s oft-cited quote, “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters-one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.” One wonders what Kennedy thought about the Cuban definition of crisis, but the Chinese construction of crisis, as Kennedy interpreted it, also applies to living, traveling and making art.

The creative process is fraught with danger and opportunity, a  journey more dimensional than a simple trek from one spot to the next. While our lives rarely fall into neat segments, artworks must reach a final form — something even great artists struggle with. “The more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it,” said Giacometti. Turner would sneak into the Tate to touch up his paintings.

To avoid becoming as morose as Giacometti, or in a feud with John Constable like Turner, it helps to remember that the journey is the destination. That’s what artist and photojournalist Dan Eldon maintained until he was stoned to death in Mogadishu. Long after one returns home, the sites and sounds keep marinating in our thoughts. The experience of travel is not confined by borders and dates; the journey of the artist doesn’t dead-end in a single work. These works represent one stop along the way; the adventure is far from over. Imagination giants have long legs. Their strides are great, the ground they can cover is boundless.

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This entry was posted by fred dintenfass on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 12:59 pm. It is filed under HI Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.