Art Exhibition

The trip that we made up to Abiko on Tuesday was to take a look at some outdoor art a friend of ours had in an exhibition in the village. Moi, I thought that we were going to take a gander at stuff in some exhibition hall followed by a leisurely lunch but far from it. These exhibits were scattered around about a square mile of village and we would never have found anything without help - and a couple of 'lifts' - from one of the organisers and one of the artists. Another one of those moments when life seems to get out of control a bit and I did feel mildly nervous about plunging around in woods and overgrown lanes in the hot frog-croaking autumn sunshine but there you go - 'all's well that ends well'.

I sometimes feel nervous generally about looking at this kind of work. I mean, I'm not quite one of your "well yes but what is it supposed to be" brigade I hope and stuff doesn't have to be either overtly representational or even demand a level of skilful input for me to enjoy it. But at some stage I start to feel unomfortable about the "so what is art then?" kinds of question. Perhaps the two most interesting visual objects we saw during the day were a mat covered with peanuts drying and some rotting plastic laid to keep down the weeds. But neither of these was an exhibit. If it doesn't look like something, isn't an 'ouevre' and contains no message ...

Heck! But I sound a Philistine eh? I'm not really. Best not to go there. At various times in my life I loved painting and I am always looking out for textures and shapes with my camera in hand. And I really enjoyed the sort of stuff at Abiko pictured here. It's fun isn't it? So as long as nobody is trying to put an 'exchange value' or even a 'use value' on it, it doesn't matter.