Creating a Sense of Wonder

 

Featured image: We Are What We Wonder

How do you create a sense of wonder in your life, in your artwork, if you are an artist? If you are a lover of the arts, when you look at a work of art, what is it that grabs you and gives you that sense of wonder—what stops you so you delight in the work?

Do you ever stop in your tracks and ask, how did he or she do that? And then you are so curious that you look around the work to see if you can figure it out. You look around again to make sure no one is watching you, and if I were there I would say to you, go ahead, I am curious too. How did he do that? And you both bend and look underneath and try to figure it out. And if it is indeed me, you really look at it and really touch it—first making sure you don’t have a camera on you and don’t have a guard close by. No, you don’t even consider this at the MOMA. But I have inched up way too close to an artwork and been reprimanded, and then reprimanded again, and called MISS. Oh, I hate that. Don’t they know I am an artist and that I won’t hurt the work? Grrrrr.

But I have to sidetrack here—what, me sidetrack! I was giving a tour at the Madison Art Center, dutifully watching my little tour-goers. I was also watching the tour-goers of the tour ahead of me, and before I could say boo, I watched a little boy blast both hands into a huge painting and make a great curved mark in the surface of the canvas. The surface now had a huge curved U in the middle of it, and the young man was sternly taken from the group. Everyone in the gallery tried to stop, then go on with what they were doing and pretend nothing had happened—but something did happen, didn’t it?

So I have to ask this question—what was the sense of wonder created in that moment? The art? The U-shaped dent in the art? The young man who made the dent and became the problem in the gallery? The adults who were not paying attention? The list could be even longer. My guess is the sense of wonder was not the art anymore.

Sad? Yes, I think so.

Sad—because the sense of wonder became the need to grab attention.

Does art create a sense of wonder anymore?
 Do you have a sense of wonder in your life anymore?

Tough questions.

I do believe we are moving into a new era of creativity in the arts, as we have several times before in my life. I wonder if we are ready for it. In one respect, I am sad for what is coming—machines versus the natural. I see art becoming more and more entertainment. And that old question, which I love and which never seems to be answered: “What is art?” That question truly becomes the driver of art.

I like to remember the two artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg was a prominent artist of the 60s avant-garde. His sculpture-paintings, the Combines, broke through the two-dimensionality of the canvas at a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated the scene. Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) consisted of ritualistically wiping out an original drawing he purchased from the famed painter. “I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones,” he once said. “Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.”

Jasper Johns, like other artists painting during that time, questioned the rules linked to art—and if an artist didn’t follow the rules, then the work was not considered art. For example, if an artist did not use a slab of marble to create a sculpture, then the work did not qualify as art. The list of rules was lengthy.

Creatives in every field of art were faced with rules during that time, and many were breaking them. I myself, not famous, was one of them. That was the way I understood art, and still do. That is why I am prone to go beyond the barriers that are made to keep me out. And that is also why I don’t break the rules in a museum.