“The Waning of Justice” by Charles Atlas at Columbus College of Art and Design

Approaching contemporary art, I look for an interpretation, a way to “give meaning” to it. I think I know when to stop rationalizing, because there are works that yield nothing that words can explain. Such art transports us through feeling or sensation with minimal appeal to our verbal understanding. Some of the art that affects me most deeply – that is in fact most meaningful to me – is of this kind.

I think what did The decline of justice So disconcerting to me was that the installation is littered with interpretation markers: number grids, words related to projected seascapes, a countdown clockand, of course, your title. Then there is the huge contrast of the final element, the incredibly costumed and wigged Lady Bunny gesturing, shaking, adjusting her wig, completely without self-awareness as she sings disco with spirited instrumental backing. "You They are the only." And how do you believe this: She is singing to you.

The Atlas produces all of these common markers of verbal and rational meaning, but outside of a context that supports intellectual interpretation. They are superimposed on tropical sunsets; numbers line up to float in a vast, dark space; words are massive but transparent – insubstantial – at the same time. They are juxtaposed with the atmospheric, with the contrast between the fiery red and the yellow of the sun setting over the ocean; the symbolism of the sunset intensified by the time on the clock; through the empty black space of the room. O sensations the work delivered is in fact the subject; the words, numbers, grids are secondary to the feeling generated by the atmosphere that Atlas visually creates. As the clock expires and the sun sets, Lady Bunny performs in the smaller room, deeply artificial and wonderfully positive in her emphatic, multi-costume performance. It's a change of mood, to say the least.

Carlos Atlas,The Decline of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound. Introducing Lady Bunny.Courtesy of Espaço Arte Contemporânea.

The decline of justice it makes sense in the same way that humor makes sense. The combination of natural beauty, numerical grids on a black background, the ticking of the clock and the elegiac mood invoked by the implicit relationships between the sunset and all the other elements reminded me of usual experiences like reading Sunday Times. Isn't this how my world feels, the combination of daily countdowns, the anxiety of all the misunderstood numbers that constrain me, my fleeting perceptions of beauty, my sense of a world in decay? Although none of the individual aspects of this installation strike me as having exceptional significance, the experience affects me as an expanded experience of the Zeitgeist. But with hope added in the form of art. Art of the most brazen and self-confident kind, asserting the viewer just like the artist.

What an incredible work of art. I'm glad I stayed to think about it. The thought I put into it reminded me that the rational exists in a world that is not. If I remember this, I can use this relationship to my advantage.

Maybe that's why people pass by galleries like this, though. I can appreciate the desire to escape. Yes, it's time-consuming work to think of something as strange as The Decline of Justice. Almost everyone is discouraged by what is foreign to their experience. But that doesn't make it desirable to avoid new experiences, especially experiences in the safe zones of art. Where better to exercise your mind and imagination, solve puzzles, make connections with the minds of artists who experience and respond to the same world we live in?

America has become a place where people are willing to believe that what we don't recognize is strange and therefore threatening; that is in opposition to us or harmful to us. This is the national attitude toward other people, other cultural practices, and even freedom of expression. Contemporary art offers a path to joyful surprises, new ideas, and enhanced experiences of the world we occupy every day. He reminds us how to observe closely, how to neutralize our distrust of the strange or alien, and identify with—and therefore love—what we invest time and attention with.

Nothing external makes us stay or go when it comes to artistic experiences. We like what we know, but what we know often sets times and points of view very far apart at the time we learn them. Even our static ideas of beauty are nostalgic and can make us lament a world in which we condemn ourselves to ignore new sources and expressions of beauty.

Atlas The decline of justice is, like many haunting new works, an art that gives those willing to consider it a receptivity to expanded ideas of beauty and how to retain them, both in the gallery, reading the market report, about nature, meaning, indifference, and absurdity. .