the woven word

I have several acquaintances who are folk art collectors -- both here and in The States.

To visit their home is to be transported onto a Shaker furniture showroom floor or into the parlor of a grandmother who has a tin, pottery, and clay fetish.

I must have missed the folk art gene when God was mixing up my DNA batter.  Some of it strikes me as interesting -- especially a few pieces from Michoacán (morelia mordidas).  But none of them are going to show up in my house.  Even if I did not have the Escape rule.

Yesterday I was briefing an acquaintance on my upcoming trip to Oaxaca.  She told me I needed to take an extra suitcase along to bring back all of the folk art I could not do without -- especially the woven pieces.

She doesn't know me very well.  I could tell that when she repeatedly used the word "magic."  In my world, "magic" is the equivalent of saying: "There is no logical reason why I feel the way I do, and I am embarrassed to think it might be gas."

But I am an actor.  I know what it means to get in the mood.

So, yesterday afternoon as I was folding up the laundry, I noticed a folk art installation in my own courtyard.  Isn't that just the way it is?  Art is happening all around us.


And next to my new-found art was the inevitable description written by the curator.  Where the word becomes the art.
"The show disobeys a universal principle of logic to introduce a dialectical order of things, productively reconciling two essentially different entities.  The architecture complicates the notion of specificity and expands in other directions, permitting two spacial extensions to merge or mix in a single phenomenological work."

I couldn't have said it better myself.  Especially, knowing that only I would see those two essentially different entities being reconciled right before my flat world perspective.

And who says contemporary art has become just plain silly?


Note -- I have plagiarized the description from an art show currently on display at the Jumex Museum in Mexico City.  My attendance is not required.

If you have not yet read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, I highly recommend it.