Dark matters don’t lend themselves to nosegay piety. I sniff something of my allergy to vestments and gospels in Sonny Rollins’s tolerance, at 89, for honoring the elusive there where it lies. He has, by his words, shunned the laughing gas expelled by preachers, and blown rapture out his horn, instead, for many a year.
‘Happy’ is not the word… but I am the most content I’ve ever been. I have most things figured out.
And this is going to sound funny, but my highest place musically was not about playing for a crowd. I played a couple of concerts early on where I was out in the open in the afternoon. I was able to look up in the sky, and I felt a communication; I felt that I was part of something. Not the crowd. Something bigger.
(David Marchese, “The Jazz Icon Sonny Rollins Knows Life Is a Solo Trip,” NYTimes, 2-21-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
Is Art Complex?
“Great art is, by definition, complex…”
(David Zwirner, “Art Is How We Justify Our Existence,” 5-22-20)
Says who?* A thing, by definition, doesn’t define itself; its definition is a human construct — like art itself.
Religions are complex. Christianity, for example, embosoms a Trinity, an angelology with a ninefold celestial hierarchy, and persons called vaticanologists.
Is “Las Meninas” complex, or is it virtuosic — an exemplar of radical skill in the service of simplicity? Great art has a directness that can feel so massive it forces us to shift into a lower gear to pull it.
Zwirner bounces back insightfully at the end of his essay. He mentions how, during the lockdown, he has contacted many artists in their studios.
… I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was interrupting them. They had more important things to do than talk to me. They were making art.
*David Zwirner is an art dealer with galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
(c) 2020 JMN