Today, May 11, is the anniversary of the birth of painter Salvador Domènec Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol — better known to most of us as Salvador Dalí. Had he lived, he would be 108 years old today, an accomplishment that he might have celebrated in some way involving camels, scuba gear, an IBM Selectric typewriter, and oregano.
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A friend recently pointed out a DVD of a new performance of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and observed that she generally did not enjoy such “highbrow” entertainment, even though the star of that particular staging was an actor she adored. If Shakespeare could hear such sentiments, I think he would be both flattered and very, very surprised.
There are no hard and fast rules about what is “highbrow” and what isn’t: like pornography, we all generally know it when we see it. Shakespeare, opera, live theater generally, and movies with subtitles are highbrow; professional wrestling, monster truck rallies, the NFL, and fireworks are not. At different times, however, the guidelines have been very different.
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Despite two decades behind a computer (I’m old enough to remember Photoshop 1.0!) I still enjoy getting my hands dirty whenever I can with the kinds of art that don’t involve a mouse and a keyboard.
A big part of the appeal for me of non-digital art is the chemistry of it all: the paints and pigments, chalks and charcoals, glues and glazes. I do a lot of collage and assemblage1, not so much because I feel that I can express myself better with glue and wire than with paint, but because I get to play around with so many different types of stuff.
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On the Mexican 200-peso note, in place of the usual frock-coated revolutionary leaders and be-feathered Aztec potentates, is a portrait of a woman, wearing the cowl of a nun.
She’s an attractive woman, but with a gaze that’s steady, even stern: she doesn’t look patient, or particularly warm, but her face is decorating a piece of currency, so you have to think she might be someone worth knowing.
That woman is Sor Juana, Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun, and one of the greatest minds of the 17th century.
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I do a lot of photography, but like many people with artistic pretensions I also enjoy working with other media from time to time.
I suppose my favorite plastic medium is assemblage, pulling together odds and ends to make a whole that is (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts — a useful way, incidentally, to use up the bits of rusty metal and torn cardboard and odd pieces of broken glass that accumulate in my “stuff I might need someday” box out on the porch. I enjoy the purely mechanical aspect of attaching one thing to another, in ways that were never intended by the original manufacturer, to achieve an effect, or make a statement.
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