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Every semester or so, there's a poster sale at the university. Hundreds of posters on cardboard back boards are taped together three high and stood accordion style throughout the student union building.
It's totally random assortment, I suspect, and it's an interesting effect on its own. Prints of famous paintings and charcoal sketches are tossed together with movie posters and three foot cartoons of marijuana leaves and directions for mixing drinks and inspirational quotes. The Mona Lisa smiles down upon a display of underwater photography. A stretched, stylized Michael Jordan slams a basketball through a hoop, and beside him Michaelangelo's Adam reaches eternally for his creator, forever falling just short. A pixelated image of Homer Simpson smiles from the top of a gold foil map of Middle Earth.
Homer's a collage. The huge pixels are really tiny, tiny screenshots of his show, fed through a computer program that maps for colour. It's a fair enough metaphor for what the poster display *isn't*. The hundreds of coloured rectangles are arranged in no particular order at all, and although some of them are interesting in themselves, the impression from a distance is exactly what you might predict. There isn't one.
But sometimes, a few of the posters will seem to interact with each other. A photograph of a man stepping off the edge of the earth aligns with a pencil drawing of a blues bar, a seat waiting for him. A rock climber hangs perilously over Hieronymus Bosch's vision of Hell; he has motivational things about Risk to say in neat, italic font.
And then there was this edge. (The topmost reads, If today was perfect, there would be no need for tomorrow.)
It just *hit* me, somehow. The effect of these three stacked together seemed much greater than any alone.
Other people hesitated around me as well, stopping for a second glance, and I thought that maybe they were seeing what I was. We were sharing a moment, outside of the bustle of a thousand people eating and shopping and rushing to class, slipping between the cardboard alleys.
I stood there and stared for a couple minutes, thinking to myself, This must be what it feels like to experience *art*.
Later, it occurred to me that they might just have been considering buying one of the posters.
It's totally random assortment, I suspect, and it's an interesting effect on its own. Prints of famous paintings and charcoal sketches are tossed together with movie posters and three foot cartoons of marijuana leaves and directions for mixing drinks and inspirational quotes. The Mona Lisa smiles down upon a display of underwater photography. A stretched, stylized Michael Jordan slams a basketball through a hoop, and beside him Michaelangelo's Adam reaches eternally for his creator, forever falling just short. A pixelated image of Homer Simpson smiles from the top of a gold foil map of Middle Earth.
Homer's a collage. The huge pixels are really tiny, tiny screenshots of his show, fed through a computer program that maps for colour. It's a fair enough metaphor for what the poster display *isn't*. The hundreds of coloured rectangles are arranged in no particular order at all, and although some of them are interesting in themselves, the impression from a distance is exactly what you might predict. There isn't one.
But sometimes, a few of the posters will seem to interact with each other. A photograph of a man stepping off the edge of the earth aligns with a pencil drawing of a blues bar, a seat waiting for him. A rock climber hangs perilously over Hieronymus Bosch's vision of Hell; he has motivational things about Risk to say in neat, italic font.
And then there was this edge. (The topmost reads, If today was perfect, there would be no need for tomorrow.)
It just *hit* me, somehow. The effect of these three stacked together seemed much greater than any alone.
Other people hesitated around me as well, stopping for a second glance, and I thought that maybe they were seeing what I was. We were sharing a moment, outside of the bustle of a thousand people eating and shopping and rushing to class, slipping between the cardboard alleys.
I stood there and stared for a couple minutes, thinking to myself, This must be what it feels like to experience *art*.
Later, it occurred to me that they might just have been considering buying one of the posters.
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