On art: the greeting by Bill Viola, 2

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/13

http://www.sfmoma.org/media/features/viola/OS01.html

Beschrijf proces van understanding: boekje stedelijk geeft een hele andere focus dan tekst hier. Kijk tensltte interview.

This caught my eye immediately. The first contact might be seen as a moment of pure visual beauty. This contact with beauty is considered a very powerful criterium in the appreciation of art, certainly for the less advanced. It's possibly the comment most often given to a work of art, either in appreciation or in disgust. The walls of the museum echo the utterances "This is beautiful. This is ugly" almost as if the works in a museum are nothing more than a binary questionnaire that ask the visitors to choose for either beauty or ugliness. The ubiquitous character of the beautiful/ugly judgement is probaly due to its directness. The judgement feels like a natural reflex, unmediated by thought and knowledge. Beauty suggest therefore to be biologically given and comparable with feelings of pain, hunger and lust. This biological moment of beauty is certainly there but it is just a moment, not the whole story. The same applies to hunger, lust and pain. These impulses leave open how to react, what to do to solve it, how to explore. More than that: the criterium for pure beauty is not particular enough for appreciating art. G.W.F. Hegel rightly points out that we consider things in nature beautiful (trees, the sun, clouds, people). This reaction to beauty might inspire us to praise the inventiveness of God or if we do not believe in a God, we praise Nature (which in the end comes down to the same thing). Although god is often given credit for offeringf the individual artist the inspiration for creating a piece of art, we do consider as an artefact created by human beings. A judgement on a piece of art therefore necessarily entails a judgement on the inventiveness of the creator. Here we enter difficult terrain. The only evidence we have in front of is is the artwork. How to understand the intention of the maker? Should we deduce the intention from the direct presence of the art work in front of us? The same problem applies to the religious question why God created certain things. What's the use of evil people, for instance. The existence of evil makes people question God's sanity and/or talent as creator. We would love to question God about this. The bad thing is that we are given scarce information by God. The bad thing is that the artist and the museum offer us scarce information on the intentions of the artist.


It caught my eye purely by it's beauty. The second step was to look closely. What did i actuallly see and could i by close scrutiny start t understand more about the work of art/the intention of the artist and the reasons why it intrigued me? . Beautiful garments, slow motion. expressions, slow better view, distortion, patience, difficult, wanted to know. What;s the p In any case: aInspired by a painting of the Visitation (1528-29) by the Italian artist Pontormo, The Greeting is a video image sequence involving the interactions between three women that is projected onto a screen mounted to the wall of a dark room. In an industrial urban landscape, two women are engaged in conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of a third woman. The new woman greets the older of the two, apparently her friend, while ignoring the other. She then whispers an urgent message in her friend's ear, further isolating the other woman. With an underlying awkwardness, introductions are made and pleasantries exchanged between the three.

Artist's Proof 2 of edition of 5: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Partial and promised gift of an anonymous donor P.4.95

From an evolutionary perspective it again boils down to the same thing since every thing in nature must be explained in terms of it's survival value. From an economic point of view we ask about the practical use of a thing. Precisely because the artwork seems to refuse to be explained in the above mentioned functional uses, it has a chance to be considered as art and not merely as a thing. This is not to say that art does not serve an economic and/or survival function, but the very nature of art questions