Today in the car I was thinking about all the things I wanted to do this summer and how I wanted to document it. The best way I know how is to write about it, it's just my natural tendency, the way I document everything, the way my mind works best. And then I thought about how I would also love to take photos, because as much as you would like to believe you can describe something, you always leave your own mark, your own impression of it... and then I started just thinking about art in general.
Writing is a type of art that not many people give much credit. Art is essentially communication, and writing is one of the most well-recognized and appreciated forms of communication, and therefore art, even in what is considered its blandest states, such as essays or research papers. But writing is unique in that it is something appreciated over time. You can never look at a written work and see all of it at one time, it must be appreciated piece by piece, and the way you interpret it has some kind of correlation to how you feel that day, what you are wearing, and if you have eaten lunch already. Writing is unique in this way, it can be reread completely differently under different circumstances as when you had first encountered it.
Visual art, 2D and 3D, is a different type of art all together. For the most part, you see a photo or painting or sketch in its entirety and have an immediate reaction to it, only looking closer after gaining some overall perspective on the subject at hand, abstract cubism or still life. But there's still that image in your mind of that first glimpse, and when you step back from taking that closer look, you see how it fits in to that broader image, like a piece of a puzzle, the complete composition. It differs from writing because you can physically see it all at one time, there's no page-flipping to get through, no words to search for. And while the experience you have is also related to how you feel that day, what you are wearing, and if you have eaten lunch already, you can more easily take a step back and remember that initial gut sensation telling you how you felt.
Performed arts, live comedy and musicals, also have their own bubble. In some ways they resemble written work, because you can't view an entire play at one time, it's separated into acts and acts into scenes, and scenes into moments that all together, in the right order, create an impact and have their own place in the meaning of the whole piece. And no matter how hard the actors and actresses, speakers of word and comics try, they can never put on the same performance twice. Out of the three outlined "categories" of art, performance is the one most indelibly tied to the present. Not only the space changes, but the sound, the effect, and no matter how hard you try and remember a specific moment of a particular act of a certain play, after it's over, you can never relive it or experience it the same way, even if you watch it again the same week, even the same day. There's no way to replicate it, no photocopies or reprinted editions to refer to. Performance is the most transient form of art for sure, but also one of the most impactful.
There are more anomalies, film being that odd bridge between live and static art, poetry, which can also depend on the placement of words on a page and not only the words themselves, and every other form of communication: phone calls, letters, music (a beast all its own that captured my heart from so early on I couldn't possibly include it in this post without spending five hours I don't have sitting on my couch, hands glued to my laptop). But no matter the type of art, the harder you try, the more you feel.
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