30 May 2011

Outside the frames

The danger about believing in art is believing only in art. It is fatal to forget that the way of art is to take a piece of life and show it to you for the first time, or in ways you have not yet seen it and therefore as if for the first time. Whether effecting comfort or disturbance, we wholly welcome the best of art's re/presentations. But outside the frames of a photograph, the length of the reel, beyond the bounds of a book, the happily ever after, even after the end, there is much life left to be endured.

The noises of your house-mates, the job you're not proud of and the little money it makes, the new diseases your body has to fight, the long hours, days and months of doing nothing and going nowhere. In art, these are masterfully used to point at somethings else, of importance; outside art, they are nothing but what they are.

Even in the most dystopian literature is the intention to care. Someone bothered to gather ugliness and arrange it in ways you can comprehend.

'Life is measured not by the number of breaths we take...', I believe that. And I believe that when we say 'nothing is happening', we mean life is happening.

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