5 Scenes and a Handful of Questions

1.

Several years ago, a student in a creative writing class told me about an encounter he had had at an art gallery; he had stood for some time observing an exhibit for which he could not find a mounted label—no details on artist, title, media, or year that the piece ‘came into being’. After a short search, he realised that it really was ‘just’ an unattended pile of dust and dirt and hair alongside a resting broom. Perhaps some gallery staff member had begun the sweep unprepared for such a significant pile of visitor detritus, and had wandered off in search of a brush and dustpan.

2.

It reminds me of another scene, in Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know: curator Nancy visits the studio of a ceramics artist whose forthcoming show she will be hosting at her gallery. She and her assistant marvel at the ‘realness’ of a hamburger wrapper on the floor. ‘Oh, that wrapper is real’, the artist says. He likes to throw a few ‘real’ things into every exhibition to ‘cast a glow over the plaster objects’ and to really ‘bump it all up a notch’. Nancy then picks up a coffee mug emblazoned with the face of a cat and the words I’ve got Cat-titude. ‘This is mine’, she says. ‘You got it from the staff kitchen.’ ‘No, I made that’, he says.

3.

Another scene—this time, it’s me in 2012, wandering around the Tate. Damien Hirst’s cabinets—cigarettes, pills, gems—leave me cold. The dead animals suspended in liquids annoy me. The diamond-crusted skull makes me regret paying for a ticket.

4.

Another film, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off: the character of Cameron is absorbed by Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The young girl at the centre of the painting looks directly out of the frame, facing the viewer squarely. No other figures are facing in this same direction, with most facing the waters of the River Seine. A series of increasing close-ups alternately zoom in on Cameron’s face/eyes and those of the painted girl, the latter’s augmented fuzziness, eventually disappearing in a mash of paint colour, reflects Cameron’s own sense of self.

5.

Me again, a little further back in time. An exhibition at the Getty of paintings and sculptures by Jean-Léon Gérôme. I remember the shock of rounding a corner to come face-to-face with Truth coming from the well armed with her whip to chastise mankind. I was not in a good headspace at the time and this painting presented itself as if a mirror; as if that intake of breath might fuel the most horrible scream.

*

Five scenes that cannot, of course, speak to the capaciousness of ‘art’ as a whole, limited as they are in terms of location (‘the gallery’) and form (painting, sculpture). But I have recalled these scenes frequently over the years whenever prompted to consider ‘encounters with’ or ‘thinking about’ art. Each brings to mind the following questions:

·      What makes (an) art ‘work’?

·      What draws us (individually, collectively) to particular works of art?

·      Can art exist without an audience; without someone to experience it?

·      How might we—as artist and/or audience—understand matters of intention, reception, consensus, affect?

·      What might emerge from/through our engagement with art?

And I have often pondered how a poem might provide an ideal—open, expansive, vital—space to explore these questions, not merely ekphrastically, but philosophically, spatially, sonically, architecturally, affectively, and so on.

Happily, this issue of Rabbit exhibits the generous and multi-dimensional plains extended by poetry for grappling with these questions, too. Certainly, each of the poets in this issue contends with that final question, using poetry’s unique and multi-faceted toolkit in their efforts to do so. These poems—and additional content—prompt us to ponder what poetry can do with/for/around/about/out of/beside/after/before/at the same time as/in response to/because of/in combination, collaboration or collision with/in spite of/against/in excess of and/or as art.

I am immensely grateful to all those who contributed to the making of this issue—to Amelia, AJ, Jeanine, Chris, Tracy and the Bowen Street Press team. Special thanks go to guest poetry editors Angela Gardner and Leah Muddle—thank you both for sharing with me your ongoing and lively online dialogue on art and poetry. It is also a pleasure to be able to include a selection of collages by poet, and long-time supporter of Rabbit, Michael Farrell.