Lawren Harris

Something I wrote elsewhere today:

....We went today after a few false starts to the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) to see the Lawren Harris exhibit, entitled The Idea Of North--title appropriated from Glenn Gould--curated by Steve Martin, who spoke so sympathetically and knowingly about Harris in a looping video as part of the exhibit. 

What can I tell you? 

I was underwhelmed and under-evoked. 

Only a few of the paintings moved me even as I thought the exhibit was curated extremely well in that I learned a fair bit about Harris, the father of the Group of Seven, and in that Martin imposed a tightly coherent framework on the art. 

In seeing the exhibit I felt the same gap that I felt when I saw the most disappointing Basquiat exhibit at the AGO about a year ago, the gap, that is to say,  between high falutin art talk--full of words like "iconic," "explore," "investigate," "spiritual," "metaphysical," "experience," "intersection," "tension'" "inner," "reconcile," "landscape as an idea," don't even get me started on conceptual art talk, and on and on--and the actual works' lack of punch, crudeness and lack of inner coherence. 

These are fine words; and literary criticism, which I know more about, certainly has its share. But they tend to the fatuous and maddeningly pretentious when what they're applied to seems not stand up either technically or evocatively. Then, they tend to reify, i.e. make a non existent mountain out of nothing or maybe a few pebbles.

But, but, but, and now I likely show my low visual art IQ, but, but, here's some text from Harris on display that I found revelatory:

...If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on campus with painting so that when finished it contains the experience...

This insight opens up conscious worlds for me, making plain and clear a formative idea, a first principle of visual art, that had never formed itself plainly and clearly in my own mind. It moves me from a static understanding of a static relation between artist and subject to a clearer and deeper understanding of the objective and subjective reciprocal dynamism in that relation, between, that is to say, the "out there," the world as it is, and the "in here," our thoughts, feelings, intuitions, generally, our experience of the out there, as transforming each other and finding some resolution or even irresolution in the work itself...