Burn out the Day, Burn out the Night...Willie Cole's Artistic Vision...

I was in the Tate Modern on holiday a few years ago, when I used to take vacations. I thought that the building was an absolutely fantastic vessel to house art, but maybe I missed a lot of things, hit the wrong rooms, because I saw a lot of things that I was not thrilled with. I have to believe that I was in too much of a hurry and missed some significant things there, because for the most part I prefer 20th century modern art to earlier periods. But during my visit I saw an exhibition there that truly impressed me.

I stumbled upon these modernist looking rusty blockish artworks, made of repetitive designs, perhaps somewhat reminiscent of the early twentieth century so called "primitivism" (bad term I think) or Matisse's late period construction paper work. Maybe the best comparison is to Indonesian Batik patterns. But it drew my attention immediately. It took me a while to focus my eyes; then I was able to discern what this was. Apparently, the artist, Willie Cole, originally from Newark, USA, took steam irons and burned the impression into patterns on cloth. And that simply bowled me over, because beyond simply making a beautiful artwork, there is some transcendent thinking involved here, a certain kind of genius at work. That is a stark contrast to one artwork I saw there; a snow shovel stuck in a pile of sand? I just don't get that on any level and it made me feel like I was being Punked (like the Ashton Kutcher show, not in the good Ramones way).

It's always enjoyable for me when I find something that I wasn't expecting to see. Sometimes it can be difficult when you go to a big museum like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, because there is so much there that I get visually overloaded. If I notice something interesting, odds are it will be in the first 90 minutes, otherwise I get burnt out. And I was very pleased to see something this interesting. But I guess some people will find this uncompelling, and find more enjoyment in a bowl of fruit, or maybe the aforementioned snow shovel in a sand dune. But that's why having choices is always a good thing. My hope is that by shining attention on worthy things in this blog that maybe somebody will find out about something they never knew about before.