Is it weird to search for my joy within museums? Lol
Together with my lovely Nek Pa, my Anthony Karlovits, and many of my friends, we love creating Art Dialogues, as part of exploring and expressing our creativity and our feelings. We even celebrate birthdays and name days with a museum visit.
Inventing Art Dialogues
Everything started spontaneously, while playing with our iPhones some years ago. We took a video in front of an artwork, instead of a silly selfie, and boom! From then on, we just can’t stop playing, imitating, dancing, or just performing in museums, galleries, art festivals, and not only.
We call this performance an “Art Dialogue”. We select artworks that “click” with our senses and we try to translate their message through recording our movements. Our interaction with them is like a dialogue, helping us connect more with those pieces.
Many times though, we are discussing on their messages, sometimes arguing on their meaning, but this, I guess, is a constructive process.
Art Dialogues stand as a medium of exploration and experimentation of the human reactions on the stimuli that the artists leave behind on each of their creations. They are a step of demonstration that art is there to be interacted with, played with, comprehended, challenged. - Joy K.
Most importantly, art dialogues make us deeply happy, as we express our feelings through playing, dancing or performing. It’s like diving into each artist’s mind, playing with his thoughts, agreeing or not with his point of view.
Interacting with Art Connects the Past with the Present
I remember a visit to Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, together with my friend Anthony, making fun of the "The Adoration of The Calf", an artwork by Francis Picabia. The painting shows a cow with a scarf and some hands.
We did our interpretation through our Art Dialogue, and then thought that the “serious” art people would definitely banish us from the map of the art scene, when they see it.
However, when I was uploading the Art Dialogue on my site, I dived more into the painting’s story and the artist’s message. It was all about irony - the same that we felt - as he criticized the politicians of the time (back in the 1940s - i.e. Hitler) for taking the power and believing that they are Gods that should be cherished among people.
“We realised, way later, that our initial impromptu reaction to the painting was quite compatible with the message of the artist. It seems that Picabia reinterprets the hands, repeating them and stretching them out in an evocation of the Fascist salute. His interpretation transposes the political virulence of German Dadaism in occupied France!” - Joy K.
That meant that intuitively we felt what the artist wanted to portray, even without reading anything on the spot! It was then that… I realized that our performances are -indeed- constructive dialogues not only with the artworks but with the artists, too, while they stand as a connection of the past with the present.
And ta-da! Here I am now. Encouraging you to remember - during your next museum visit - to interact in your own way with the artworks or even the museum building itself, as I did at the lake of Fondation Louis Vuitton or the stairs of Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Engage with artworks, not just pass by as most people do, just for the sake of doing it (we even have an Art Dialogue of people passing by indifferent in front of artworks).
Stop in front of the artwork that catches your attention and give yourself the time to reflect on it (it’s called Slow Art).
Let yourself feel the art and then I promise, museums won’t be boring ever again!
xx
Joy K.
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P.S. Now, I’d love to hear what your thoughts on museums are or whether you believe in slow art. Share with me in the comments below or send me your #artdialogues on Instagram.