“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”   ~Francis Bacon

 

Left: Yoshitora (active circa 1840 – 1880)  Lovely Beauty Design (1870). Private collection

 

Losing Your Head in New York

ARTES, a fine arts magazine, is always on the lookout for cool images that could fit the old adage: art is where you find it. Readymade art has a long and illustrious history, beginning with the Dadaist and surrealists, who fashioned artistic statements out of unlikely material, combining them in unique and quirky ways, like Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913, 3rd version, 1951), or his Fountain (1917) right, making the statement that art is personal and doesn’t depend on the usual combination of ‘artful’ subject matter and the institutional validation of the museum/gallery culture. It caused quite a stir at the time…and still does–during this year, in particular, the 100th anniversary of the famed Armory Show in New York. artes fine arts magazine

Wrangling the dozens of images that come over the transom at ARTES, for the select few that might be considered news worthy, is a day-to-day challenge. Occasionally, a story piques the editor’s attention: first, because it’s eye-catching; secondly, because it raises lots of questions. This one has to do with a massive foam and fiberglass head, found floating in the waters of the Hudson River, above New York City. The image itself, was eye-catching—inadvertent found art—not simply because it was accidently discovered by the Marist College rowing team during practice on the river, but because the image, itself, had its own surreal, readymade ‘feel’ to it. Art caught in the act of being artful. Go figure!

I was immediately reminded of its assonance to a piece by Joseph Wheelwright, Listening Stone (below), found in the sculpture garden at the deCordova Museum, in Lincoln, MA. Like Wheelwright’s sculpture, appearing as a disembodied mythic being or nature spirit in communion with the earth, the Hudson River discovery also seems to have his ear finely tuned, as he rides the ebb and flow of tidal shifts on one of the world’s great waterways. Any resemblance to a massive plastic knock-off of Michelangelo’s David becomes irrelevant, as the search for the ‘owner’ of the discarded Leviathan presses onward. The mysterious floating head has already succeeded in ways it never could have, had it remained attached to its pseudo-corporeal body. Its sealed lips, badly-damaged nose and ears, and blank, staring eyes communicate a wealth of sensory data to anyone who cares to pay attention: our rivers and other fragile environmental resources are not  dumping grounds. The power of art to ‘speak’ to us with this important message, at the most unexpected moments, should never be underestimated.

To the person or persons who discarded this itinerant version of Listening Stone into the Hudson, with all its attendant verisimilitude, we say, Thank you!

Thanks, too,  for reading ARTES,

Richard J. Friswell, Publisher & Managing Editor

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