W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #vikmuniz, #jonathanborofsky, #twonails 

I think of talent in photography and elsewhere and wonder about greatness.  How does someone achieve that?  How do you go from good to great?

In the late 1970s I stumbled upon someone’s conjecture that we gesture differently from one hand to the other, that our right hand (assuming we’re right handed) speaks our conscious mind, and our left hand our unconscious: intellect versus instinct.  This proved to be a litmus test of sorts for looking at people’s behavior.  

There was a bone chilling State of the Union address in which President Jimmy Carter kept his left hand pinned to the desk by his right hand, while he spoke, leading me to think he was wanting desperately to tell the truth but he was being political instead.  

Similarly I never liked Brian Dennehy’s acting because he only gestured with his right hand.  It was as if he was a stroke victim.  It indicated to me that he had no connection to his unconscious, that he was completely disconnected from any real feeling.  

There was studio visit in a gallery with the artist Jonathan Borofsky, whose work wasn’t immediately familiar to me, but he proved to be unforgettable.  The show was a retrospective of sorts, but it struck me as a group show with a number of different unrelated artists on view.  There were however little photo copied hand drawn “dream books” floating around that I were sly and charming.

When he spoke, he was exhilaratingly lively and, in particular, his left side and right sides were fully engaged and in balance, like some mad Shiva talking about art.  I had never seem someone so fully evolved.  I asked what the role of the “dream books” was, and he put both hands to his temples and flung open his arms as if to say “all of this, meaning  his art work, is my unconscious, manifest.”  It was mind blowing to me.  A real “AH HA!”.  Thrilling.

All of this leads me to a presentation by the photo-based artist, Vik Muniz for whom I have infinite respect.  He is endlessly curious and capable and, yes, he speaks with both hands articulately and in tandem.  He talks about the sublime and the relationship between thinking and feeling, describing an artist.  Not only does he gesture with both hands, he thinks and feels deeply.  He is the real deal: a great artist.

Art is combination of craft and feeling.  It is one thing to make something very well, but it another to make it and load it with one’s personal and unique emotions.   Muniz likes the word sublime.  We can learn something by looking at sublime as a verb, to change a solid into a vapor, to evanesce.  Muniz is sublime.  There is alchemy in genius.

Even in one of his earliest pieces, “Two Nails”, a composition shows a sheet of paper hanging from two nails, one real, the other a photograph.*1  It is so simple and uncanny.  Genius.

Legendary photographer Dorothea Lange said that “to be a really good photographer, you go in over your head, not just up to your neck.” *2  

*1 vikmuniz.net

*2 Source TBD

©2021

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