For an artist, to turn one’s back on beauty means to abandon the force that drew one into art to begin with. Regardless of current practice, it is the rare artist that didn’t start doing art as a child, delighting in figuring out form and developing a sense of visual problem-solving. Instinctively, children recognize beauty. ‘Is it good?’ they ask, knowing very well that parents always say Yes, but also wanting the validation that they have solved a visual problem. There is an inherent strife in art that has nothing to do with concept, and that is the problem and pursuit of representing some sort of beauty. For an artist, it is the intrigue of beauty that is chased, else the art loses spark and becomes academic, confronting problems that have already been solved.

In a finished art-piece, beauty is the visual magnetism that encourages a prolonged encounter with the work. Beauty doesn’t necessarily manifest in visual pleasure, but it is always visually compelling. Beauty continues working on the viewer after they have paused to consider the work, worming its way into the brain, tweaking this or that emotion and starting concepts ripening. Beauty is what makes a piece of art intriguing, and as such is the most important element in a work of art. If the artist can’t hook her audience, then they will have no reason to linger in front of a piece and, in terms of public consumption, the art is useless.

Critics say beauty is irrelevant, that what matters is the conceptual power of the art piece. But, I would argue that our definition of art has changed throughout the years and that our definition of beauty should change as well. If we can admit that there is an inherent difference between art works, and that some art is more intriguing than others, than perhaps we can define that indeterminate magnetism as beauty. As such, beauty remains the most important quality in a work of art. I stand by beauty.

The physical world has become pixels, widely available on the Internet but difficult to access corporally. Previously sublime natural wonders have lost their power in the face of camera lenses; now, they are recorded rather than seen, reduced to small jpegs that fly into the wilds of the Internet. The Internet links the world together digitally, to the detriment of physical interaction and first-hand emotional experiences. Edward Hopper died well before the Internet was invented, but his paintings explored the phenomenon of numerous bodies occupying the same space physically, but never mentally.

His paintings never condemn his characters, but rather present them in a matter-of-fact manner that is quietly disconcerting. Rather than becoming dated, his painting’s relevance has grown in tandem with technology and its isolating pervasiveness.

Our lives are stories that we tell ourselves, narratives that influence our daily decisions. These stories can be collective, where we seek to fit ourselves into a community and model ourselves after communal values. Or, these tales can focus on the individual and the individual’s ever-changing opinion. Digital technology becomes dangerous when it hands the individual all the tools to become solipsistic. Small, pocket-sized computers have made it so that one need never be away from the Internet. In response to this ability to receive constant information, websites have increasingly appeared that dispense information in short single-sentence bursts. Those who have such technology at their fingertips find themselves widely, but not deeply, informed. This need for constant, quick information has seeped into a group of social-networking sites, in which the individual has the ability to contact their friends with one-sentence updates that appear on a collective update feed. Thus, there is a constant shaping of individual narrative through written language. The constant interconnectivity and knowledge of public presentation has cultivated a collection of individually obsessed people.

Perhaps there has always been an impulse to distance oneself from the world. It isn’t safe to interact with what one doesn’t know, therefore it is better not to make contact with strangers. But, technology has made it so that this disconnect is complete. One is able to walk with headphones, or to talk on the phone, and completely disregard public space and the small accompanying interactions. There is a disconnect between the digital world and the physical world, and the digital world commands more cognizant attention. Thus, there are spaces filled with people with nobody interacting with one another. Through their ipod, cell phone, or computer, a complete disengagement is possible.

In this regard, Edward Hopper painted contemporary society long before it was contemporary. As a painter, he was divided in his interests. His discontentment with city life often led him to the countryside, both of which he painted. His portraits of city-dwellers are the more powerful of his images, and the more pertinent to this discussion. In these, he had an almost standard way of depicting people. They occupy a shared space, but are completely uninterested in one-another. His figures are often described as lonely, but truly they are more solitary. He creates invisible barriers between the figures, so that they are involved in their individual worlds and unengaged with the physical world in front of them. They are often empty-handed, but one can seamlessly insert an ipod and thus transform them into contemporary images.

Hopper claimed to have been uninterested in the people in his images. Instead, he expressed a love for the light playing off of various surfaces. This could, perhaps, account for his unemotional, and perhaps cynical, depiction of everyday life. People are accessories to his landscapes, but the mood of his landscapes provide a pregnant environment for his characters to exist in, adding to the hermitic feeling they exude. The solitary nature of his figures is the essential quality that carries them from the 20s to the present. What Hopper, perhaps accidentally, tapped into when he was painting has grown more potent with age. What was solitary in the 30s has grown isolated contemporarily.

Technology is a beast that we have yet to truly wrestle. No adults have yet been brought forth that have had the Internet their entire lives. But, even in its relatively adolescent stage, it has altered the armature of existence. Through this, Hopper has transcended time and provided us with a mirror of contemporary society; a reflection of socially disengaged and interiorly obsessed individuals. Whether or not this mood will shift into a useful online community is yet to be seen; what exists right now is something in-between. The digital community remains, for now, a self-obsessed and loathsome environment, but yet it hold enough appeal for everyday interactions to be sacrificed. Hopper’s paintings can function as both reflection and warning, of sorts. They caution us through their un-emotional images to balance the line carefully.

Mr. Wall has had a long career as a photographer, but also as an art-historian, writer, critic, and philosopher. His thoughts have been insurmountably important to the understanding of contemporary photography in relation to the rest of the fine arts. My original attraction was to his early work, in which he would directly reference historical paintings and interpret them into contemporary settings. The intellectual prowess involved was magnetic. As I matured, I found those unappealing and heavy-handed, preferring more understated color works such as The Flooded Grave. As I recognized the importance of emotive response in my own work, I began to respond to his black and white images which had previously seemed sub-par. Mr. Wall has been a constant influence in my work, which is why it was terrible to enter the gallery, stand in front of his art and feel decidedly indifferent.

The first two rooms meandered in intention, feeling unresolved. All the images were done in Mr. Wall’s near-documentary style, but their underlying ambitions struck wide. Emotionally distant, the pieces ranged from near-theatrical with House Search to strict neo-realism with Moving A Carbonator. Others, such as Knife Throwing, fell somewhere in between these two images, but failed to bridge their differences. His most successful pieces concentrated on unsustainable in-between actions. Polishing, from 1998, depicts a man in an awkward position, polishing his shoe. The viewer feels the man’s discomfort, recognizes that in a moment, he will be awkwardly twisting out of his uncomfortable stance. There is an immediate physical response to the image that convinces the viewer to consider it for a few moments longer. But most of his images avoid this tension, instead catching people mid-stride or mid-bite; capturing one moment of an act that by its nature will be immediately repeated.

Jeff Wall, Marian Goodman Gallery, September 22-October 30, 2009

Graphite becomes sentient in its imperfection. A pencil traces over paper, giving way to fibers in the surface. It changes over the short time it takes to draw the line; becoming blunt, shifting tone. In these ever-evolving lines, the artist is preserved. Mood and personality are contained in the weight and the brevity of the mark. Ree Morton’s drawings are no exception, and her pencil sketches at the Drawing Center hand us the keystone to understanding her work.

The first room in the Drawing Center is devoted to Morton’s drawings. Small in scale and sparse in content, the line becomes monumental in importance. Morton is quoted saying that, “three ideas interest me almost equally: structure, geometric shapes, modular repetitions, grids; light which can glow and be reflected, be absorbed; and surface which, in the case of the drawings, means integrating the quality of the paper with the marks made on it.” Morton’s pencil work explores these three themes extensively. Each sketch takes a singular motif and examines it by means of opposing forces. Light duels with dark, empty space wrestles with occupied. The pencil with its subtle intricacies is an expressive force itself and an intriguing tension arises from the these three instruments converging. Simple patterns flit across pages and feel, somehow, voyeuristic in nature. They describe the psyche of the artist uncomfortably well, but yet remain indefinite in their terminology.

As you enter the second room, pencils are ditched for blunt crayons. A line of large drawings pull from an ancient botanical treatise and reference, so the informative text claims, grand human themes such as life and death. But the works are inaccessible, the meaning impossibly concealed behind unappealing wax lines. The room is almost entirely devoted to the botanical project and would be a complete disappointment if not for her final sculpture, Devil Chaser. In this she incorporates the themes she had been exploring in her crayon pieces but ditches crayons and takes up wire. Her lines feel similar to the lines in her pencil drawings, more personal. They coax the viewer into the piece and with organic-looking draping give enough texture to convince one to linger. The viewer is able to experience an intuitive understanding and connection with the piece that is impossible with the crayon-drawings.

The show continues with varying degrees of success, worth seeing for the odd moment when Morton takes a line and skillfully makes it express more than itself. In this, she speaks in a universal tongue. As she said, “the mental pictures are always changing. You can’t make them concrete. There is no frame of reference, story line, or location.” They become timeless.

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World, The Drawing Center in New York, October 2009