Art Consciousness

Joan Stolz recently gave an art gallery talk as part of the High Noon lecture series connected with the faculty exhibit in the Parkland College Art Gallery through September 21. Her comments on the nature of influence and borrowing from other artists and moments in culture were particularly interesting.

T.S Eliot's "The Wasteland" depicts a modern wasteland combining many levels of literary allusion with multiple voices of ordinary, exterior overheard voices and voices within the individual wandering solitarily through the world. Eliot's original title for the poem was "He do the police in different voices," which has a curious postmodern or contemporary rap feel to it. In some cases, the use of reference to other works is used to point to continuity in the human experience.

In altering pictures, or reinterpreting or reimagining pieces like some in Stolz's collection, the attempt is a combination of homage and a comic ownership of human experiences. We give a nod to the shared experience through the ages, but put our own comic twist on it.

As a Joyce scholar, I realized that much of the research related to music centered on Joyce's use of allusion as a narrative tool. In part this was in keeping with the modern tendency to see the world in a moment of crisis and collusion at the same time. My own focus was on the way in which Joyce framed or reimagined allusions to music in his texts. Instead of focusing on the original and looking for similarities, I concentrated on the new staging of the piece. Who was performing it and for what audience? Joyce draws attention to the cultural moment within his works, but he also connects the present and the past.

Joan Stolz's commentary on her own paintings reminded me of this restaging, with the same ironic twists, the same sense of fun. Stolz shows us an image which we recognize as familiar. If we pay a little closer attention, it may make us reconsider what we thought we knew.