I'm taking a supremely lousy class called "A Critical Approach to Art," in which we learn absolutely nothing about art criticism and instead learn how to waste three hours every Thursday night. Just to give you an idea of what this class is like... it's one of the required senior seminars for my major, which means that everyone in it is a senior, which means that we've all been in school for four years or more. On the second day of class, our teacher took us over to the library to teach us that that's where books are, and that books have information in them. Also, you can check books out of the library. If only someone had told me this sooner, my years and years of formal education might have been easier.

Anyway, a few weeks ago we had class at the art museum, where we read a poem entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Our assignment was then to choose one artwork in the museum and sit in front of it for an hour and a half and write thirteen things about it, like the poem. I chose a work by Kate Shepherd entitled "'As the hart panteth after the water brooks,' Black Floor and Dark Yellow Walls" (which I don't have a picture of, but you can see some of her other work here which gives a pretty good idea of what this one was like).

So in the interest of being educational every now and then, here is what I wrote. I hope this sparks an involved discussion about art theory and contemporary work and the current state of art field, or that people will post pictures they have drawn of things talking that shouldn't.



I
O Black Floor
and Dark Yellow Walls
What an ugly interior design scheme
If I lived there
I would shoot myself

II
Big Yellow Square
Why are you so big
Why are you so yellow
What if you were small
and red
Would you be a ladybug?

What then?

III
"Enamel on panel," says the placard.
Why not "Panel under enamel"?
What makes enamel so special?

IV
The Dark Yellow Walls
are actually pretty Green
Either Kate Shepherd is colorblind
or a Liar

V
Why is this painting so big
Why not make it smaller
Would that have been so hard, Katie?

VI
The qualities of color
and planar variation
give the piece an illusion of depth.
It beckons the viewer to walk into the room.
However, the guards stop me.
They are earning their pay.

VII
The hart panteth,
the water brooks.
Then the hart brooks
while the water panteth.
Kate Shepherd watches
and later makes this painting.

VIII
If instead the Yellow Walls
were rocketships
and the Black Floor
a river of magma
and the hart pantething were
a series of explosions,
this piece might not be so boring

IX
Lines on the Black Floor
Merely a decorative design?
Or perhaps they represent
the unspoken dreams
of a thousand crying children

X
This painting was plotted
with an architectural computer program
Which is basically cheating
Unless Kate Shepherd is part computer herself
like her brain, or her hands

XI
There are eight distict panels
one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight.
Eight panels.
Ah ha ha ha ha ha.

XII
Where would you even find
a piece of Plexiglass this big?
Maybe she had to special order it
or something

XIII
People stop to look at
the circle of hands
or the floor of army men
Nobody stops to look at the Black Floor
or the Yellow Walls
Kate Shepherd probably feels awful about this

Note: Since I still had a lot of time left, I wrote extras. Then, when I was done with that, I spent a good deal of time writing the lyrics to "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" from memory, which I have not included, since I'm sure you all know them already.


XIV
Reflected in the plexiglass
I see the ghost of another, better artwork
Why not just stick up a big mirror
and claim as your own the reflections?
Seems to me like a pretty easy way
to make money

XV
There is an awful lot of empty wall
around this painting
Is this a statement on how, ultimately,
we are born alone and we die alone?
Or an inefficient use of gallery space?

XVI
This painting is boring
More boring than "Group of Chairs,"
which itself is pretty boring.

XVII
If you stand on your head
the Black Floor becomes a Black Ceiling
The Walls are still Walls, though
Also since there is no floor you'd probably be
walking around on exposed pipes