A Matter of Perspective— At the West End Gallery
Truth—not the full truth, which may not really exist— but even that bit of truth we can attain immediately seals our lips, binds our hands, and leads us on toward ‘nothingness.’ Then there’s only one way for an individual to remain upright, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-oblivion … or self-contempt. That’s calmly to turn away from everything, to say, ‘‘Enough!”’ and, folding one’s useless arms across one’s empty breast, to retain the ultimate, the sole attainable virtue, the virtue of recognizing one’s own insignificance—the virtue at which Pascal hints when, calling a human being a thinking reed, he says that if the whole universe crushed it, it, that reed, would still be superior to the universe, because it’d know the universe was crushing it, whereas the universe wouldn’t know that. A meager virtue!
— Ivan Turgenev, Enough: A Fragment of a Note-Book of a Dead Artist, 1883
The painting at the top is A Matter of Perspective, a 12″ by 36″ canvas that is included in my current show at the West End Gallery. It’s a piece that appeals to me, one that affirms my feelings about our relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps the French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal was right, that we are but thinking reeds that are aware of our own smallness in an unimaginably enormous and uncaring universe. Having such consciousness is, indeed, small consolation but it is something in which we can find some sort of comfort or rationale for continuing onward. It allows us to find what little meaning there might be in our relative insignificance.
I guess that is where art in its many flavors enters the picture– to make sense of the insensible.
Here’s a slideshow of some of the Lewis Hine photos of child laborers in the early 20th century. A time with kids working in dangerous jobs, robber barons amassing obscene wealth, women and people of color without voting rights– or many other rights for that matter. That is one of the times to which the GOP, in its current form, wants to return, along with pre-civil rights 1964 and pre-Civil War 1860. It is set to the Gary Jules version of the Tears For Fears song, Mad World.
Redtree Times 