I adore Miro, Klee, Mondrian, Kandinsky and a few others – but on the whole I am a very tough-sell on abstracts. Not because I’m grumpy (that’s a separate subject!) but only because I see so many different fascinations in the world around me, which move me more than the less-imaginative work in that field.
But but but – I’m not a bigot – I bring a fresh mind every time, and always hope to be suddenly taken with something that used to completely escape me. Like ‘poem concrete’ by Varese, a piece that made me furiously angry the first few times I listened, which made me return to it again and again to discover WHY! (learned much, which I was soon using in my Friday night jams) ;o)
Anyhow, what judgement-inertia is more important to constantly challenge than our own? (Progressive to conservative is easy – just don’t change!)
Here, we have a multimedia collaborative installation if ever there was one.
Clearly, a fair proportion of it could be said to be man-made, but very few of the human contributions have escaped the further embellishments of pigeons, harsh seasons and a good deal of slush-diffused coarse road-salt.
It is, viewed large, a quite hideous building – monolithic without being in any way grand, dehumanizing crude cast concrete. But this little patch of it here struck me as quite delicious. We’ve even got clear evidence of cuneiform (or possibly runic) writing on the central panel (to give the scholars a good argument).
And then there’s the purely practical question, which gear-heads can’t help coming to – if they put up a steel barrier to keep the trucks running along this busy alley (leading to 3 huge loading docks) from scraping the concrete away from the building, why the heck did they hang a fragile-gauge pipe OUTSIDE of that clearance?
Mysteries within mysteries – bring your own frame.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
