On the first Friday of every month, the city of Denver puts on a free public event in the art district on Santa Fe Avenue. On these Friday nights from 6-9 pm, the general public can walk up and down the 5 blocks, visiting any of the numerous art galleries along the strip. Last Friday, I had the pleasure of experiencing this art walk for myself and I was amazed at what a great event the city of Denver puts on. However it wasn’t actually the art that stood out for me, it was the actual event, the art walk that I was impressed by. In fact, I found the artwork and the art walk to be two very different things.
While the art was truly amazing and the pieces themselves were clearly made by very talented artists, it was too hard for me to define a certain exigence or purpose for a lot of the pieces. One piece especially got me thinking about this idea. The work wasn’t any beautiful scenery or careful portrait. It was merely a compilation of splattered paint on a massive 12-foot canvas. Sure, one could argue that a piece like this was to go against the norm, or to show a shift from traditional paintings, but those ideas have been around for decades. It came to me while staring at this piece, that while this was an amazing piece of artwork, it really had no true purpose besides visual appeal.
There was no certain exigence or specific reason it had been created, nor was there a defined call to change it was trying to send out. Keeping this in mind, I continued on to at least a dozen other galleries and while some had slight messages behind them, I failed to come up with solid reasoning as to what changes the artists wanted through their pieces. To me they just served as eye candy with price tags on them. The same process was difficult for me in defining an audience. With so many different interpretations surrounding these abstract pieces, its easy for audiences to be torn apart in analyzing a painting too much.
After reflecting on the event as a whole though, I realized how different the art walk was than the art itself. The city of Denver puts on this free event for more than just visual appeal. The monthly art walks are to bring a city of 600,000 people together into a tightly knit community who can come together for once and appreciate something simple in life. Throughout the course of my night, I saw people ranging from babies, to grandparents, and from the wealthiest of wealthy to homeless. (Of course the homeless were probably just there for the free food, but still there was quite the variety). I found that there was a defined exigence to change the scattered city of Denver and bring together a community who can recognize the value of art at its finest. Its audience is the city of Denver and specifically those lacking a central theme in their life. Art can be very powerful and by presenting a free public art walk, it not only gives the artists satisfaction, but it provides contentment for the people as well.
The term Maxwell’s Demon represents the idea of an ancient experiment preformed by James Clerk Maxwell to defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics and to show that while all things die, there will always be something to keep it alive. This thought can be applied to the idea of “artwork vs. art walk”. While the artwork often has no one exigence or purpose, it is the central theme for an art walk. Even though the two are in essence opposites (art is visually appealing with no call to change and an art walk builds a community to appreciate a common premise) they support each other perfectly and combine for an event not to be missed.
To parallel this idea, I chose the theme of the yin yang. The yin yang symbolizes two opposite ideas (represented by black and white) and shows that while they are still completely different, they support each other nonetheless. For a more artistic representation of this, I chose the idea of the art walk to be the background of the white portion in the yin yang and the idea of artwork to be the white circle in the black background (an abstract piece of art too). Instead of digitally editing this picture with a program, I chose a different representation and cut out the pieces myself for a more artsy effect, similar to that of the art I saw on Friday night. Even though the two are complete opposites when it comes to their exigence and their purpose, without the one, the other would be nothing. Just as the yin needs the yang, artwork needs an art walk to achieve its full effect.
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