The "Imaginorium: The gymnasia certain works of art provide for our imagination.
So why do I make such a fuss about this empty picture? It has no beauty that makes the heart flutter or the hands tremble. Why stop and give so much attention to one snap? Forgive me for spending so much of your time here, but I'll wager, we'll all learn something worthwhile by lingering here to reflect on what this humble photograph might represent as a form of art to us.
I ask your indulgence at this point. I'll go further. This is not picture for documenting a crime or getting insurance paid up! None of that! This documentation serves the intelligence of the photographer and is then physically engraved in the pictures he will print. That's what art is:
The work done, to externalize in a physical form a concept. This so we can receive patterns, shapes or rhythms in stimuli for immediate evoking of passion or else agreeable musing at another time and place of our choosing. In effect, the display of each form of art is an instance of a performance. In this, the intent of the artist dominates the feelings and thoughts induced.
Some works are so different. The other form requires the viewer to actually enter the world created by the artist bringing along what the person imagines are important, fascinating or interesting. Once so engaged, the participant can exercise thoughts and feelings. We can go much further. Sometimes we might even test our imperatives, "givens" and ways of imagining what things might have been, might really be or what they could become. In effect we re-calibrate significance and relevance, that's how powerful art might be.
Excuse my impetuousness in daring to define art, but that's now my ad hoc working definition. It will no doubt change tomorrow.
Here, art serves not an emotive fountain or a dossier of facts. Uniquely, this photograph of a lonely, boring, void country road presents something entirely different. It's a space for us, a place I call "The Imaginorium", a "gymnasium of the mind. This is a form of art where we must bring our own people, fancies, fears and imperatives. The artists intent is for us to entertain ourselves! We are, in fact, the dancers in the empty arena in the gymnasia of our minds!
This work is important for this gift to us, the creation of time between the seconds of a clock, where we find freedom to imagine with far less constraints than in our real world around us, with so much trivial, seductive and threatening information cascading towards us.
In that provision, this simple scene, so ordinary perhaps by first glance, transcends it's class and is, indeed art. Is it "Fine Art"? Well if it is considered worthy of buying for someone's collection in private or a museum, then yes, I guess it is!
Asher