Everything Changes I love crossing paths with a piece by Tony Berlant because I love looking at things that make me see that there is more to reality than immediately meets the eye. Tony’s works do that more regularly and effectively than just about anything else out there. Without missing a beat, or making a big deal about their quietly mind-blowing accomplishments, his multilayered arrangements of line, shape, space, and color lead me along a path of discovery that leaves me face-to-face with some of the best stuff life has to offer: what lies just beyond the horizon of what we can see on our own. That’s where the imagination enters the picture, along with all of those inklings, intuitions, and impossible-to-pin-down notions that come to us from somewhere else than our rational minds, and the logical processes they follow. Before I take even a few steps, metaphorically, in the direction pointed by one of Tony’s splintered pictures of many different things—some recognizable and others just beyond the grasp of consciousness—the path, which he has suggested by repeating certain elements or colors or symbols in his composition, comes to a fork. This compels me to decide which way to go—whether I should keep scanning the composition for more of the elements I had been finding or leave that growing path in the dust and start to follow a different set of elements. “You can’t experience everything all at once,” Tony’s swirling constellation of familiar and unfamiliar images seems to say, “Pick one path and get on with it. Life is filled with many decisions, why should art be any different?” Opportunity cost is built into the art. So is the cleareyed pragmatism and no-nonsense realism of knowing that you can’t have everything, and that decisions—even seemingly little ones—have consequences. Pie-in-the-sky idealism, so often a part of the popular tendency to romanticize art—and sugarcoat our experience of it—gets tossed by the wayside in Tony’s rigorously unsentimental—yet profoundly optimistic—pieces of participatory composition building. So, for all sorts of reasons, I take what I think will be the scenic route, following the path I imagine will take me past the most eye-opening vistas: curious gems for my eyes to delight in, wondrous textures for my senses to get lost in, and unexpected shifts in scale for my body to experience physically, not to mention changes in temperature, mood, and atmosphere—none of which 1
I had foreseen when I started, and all of which allow me to dive deeper into a world that is as resplendent and stimulating as the real one—and a whole lot more beautiful, its contrasts sharper, its palette more saturated, and its variations more wide-ranging, nuanced, and subtle. I give my eyes free rein, put purposefulness in the backseat, and let the new set of elements I am following form whatever path they may form, leading my eyes across and around the picture-plane in a way that makes me see more than before, embedded details popping forward and off-the-beaten path highlights leaping to me. Then, real quick, I come to another fork in the road. Tony’s piece seems to shout, gleefully and generously, “Gotchya! Again. Just when you started to sense a rhythm, to find a sensible pattern in the optical high jinx of my overlapping and intersecting and crisscrossing compositions, you have to decide which way to go: whether you’re going to ride along the path you’ve been following, or, whether you’re going to abandon that path and take off in a different direction, following a different set of visual cues and, perhaps, discovering something else—or getting lost. Whether it turns out to be better or worse, a gain or a loss, is the chance you have to take.” What is certain, in Tony’s art, is that you can’t do both. At least not right now. Patience and immediate gratification bump up against each other. If you’ve ever been of two minds about something, you know what this predicament, which Tony has so carefully engineered, feels like. You also know that it’s not the end of the road.