Some of out favorite things
In her lecture, Merel Mirage spoke about her experience of being surprisingly moved by poem that she heard in Chinese, a language that she did not understand. She went on to explore her response to the poem in a project that is still up on the web after more than a decade. (Think back to when the first visual browsers were being released and Yahoo was a start-up).
This inspired our seminar to speak about art that had elicited a surprisingly strong reaction from us. I was recently surprised by my own response to the Lucien Freud painting ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.’ It made me cry. Surprisingly, I was not alone: two other women were crying with me. I had never seen a painting that made me cry before, even though I had seen paintings that awed me, surprised me or made me laugh.
This is the painting that made me cry:
March 30th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Reading your post, the phrase ‘being moved by a language not understood’ somehow immediately made me think of one of my all time favorite films, Orson Welle’s interpretation of Kafka’s novel, The Trial - in my opinion a great masterpiece which puts in pictures the unexplainable and some of the absurdities of reality …