Can art go beyond mere beauty or pleasure to share new understandings? What kinds of understandings can it share? Can its expressions help us better discern the meanings of our lives?
Graf believes that the taking ‘of Other’ perspectives is built into the architecture of the human experience. It is part of our artistic impulse and is vital for growth and learning. Order and disorder, love and hate, beauty and dread, us and them—both views are necessary for gaining a more profound sense of the world. Everything that occurs, everything we see, and everything we feel is reflected in this ‘Other,’ which is deeper and more enduring than any solitary immutable view.
In this way, art should never merely offer us what we demand to see. It should help us expand our capacity for pleasure or pain to discover what we haven’t realized is there—things that are yet to be seen as valuable. Its ‘sacred duty’ is to enrage, soothe, or bond, guiding us into the mysterious, the reverential, and the yet-to-be-known. In short, it is the embodiment of reflection and all that connects us to the otherness of this world.
It’s an approach that forms the roots of Michael Graf’s practice and the works ‘of Other’ that follow.
