I wasn't sure if this was a piece of art or a garbage dump or a thrift swap. Its proximity to other art lent a deliberateness to the heap that lends itself to some avant-garde artist. But the haphazardness and the few people actually rifling through the assortment left me questioning.
A few days ago we went to visit the Stadsbiblioteket (Public Library) by Asplund and a curious thing caught my eye. The rain and wind blew some leaves (or flower petals?) around and clumped around this unfortunate bicycle:
Rather than immediately dismiss the bicycle as trash and unusable, I thought the way the leaves threatened to swallow the bike whole to be beautiful in its drama.
Who's to say what's art and what isn't? This question isn't original, I know, but I haven't been able to satisfactorily answer it for myself. The answer is more like a constant pursuit of discovery, about what others deem "art" and reconciling that with my own tastes and preferences.
The Modern Art Museum in Stockholm had a feature exhibit of paintings by Ed Ruscha. He's not a name I was familiar with before the exhibit, but here's an example of his work. He does other things, but the largest body of his work is a phrase or sentence on top of a landscape or splotches of color:
I tried to understand it, and the others like it. I tried to switch words or letters around, looking for any hidden patterns in the letters and their positions in relation to each other and the image behind them. The search was fruitless and I wound up frustrated, not at myself but at the works on the wall. They were not art to me. To me, they were merely paint on a canvas, and that does not guarantee art.
The bicycle in the wet leaves above was more moving and stirred my senses to a much greater degree. Resisting the urge to encase it in a plexi-glass box, I had to admire it for what it was: a spontaneous accumulation of wet leaves and a lonely bicycle. I like it better that way: unassuming speaks to me more than a frame.
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