The virtues of being incomplete

I believe the best kind of art is that which engages one's imagination. This explains, I think, my interest in such archaic forms as silent film and network radio: each lacked an element, which had to be provided by its audience. And that, in turn, made the experience more personal and individual and real.

I've just breezed through 'A Man Without a Country,' the slim volume of musings issued by Kurt Vonnegut in 2005, and in it (among many recycled ideas from his earlier work) are thoughts on what Vonnegut calls "the imagination circuit." These below pertain to visual art such as paintings or drawings:

"If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it."

So I guess paintings or sculpture might fall into the same category — they require viewers to collaborate, though they're not usually trying to tell a story in the same way more narrative forms (film or radio) do.

A similar collaborative process happens with reading: we take these little marks (which I'm using right now) and run them through our minds to create pictures that appear to us, however fleetingly, in ways that only we could have imagined. They're private little epiphanies, though fueled by the shared experience of watching or listening or looking.

Regarding those "imagination circuits," Vonnegut writes that...

"...it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these imagination circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses."

Vonnegut leaves it at that, without making a judgment, though he doesn't seem to be too enthused by the situation. For me, I can't speak against today's movies and television shows, as I enjoy them as much as the next person. Rather, I wish to raise my hand and point out that older, incomplete forms did have their own unique power to communicate, and still do. That power is rooted in their very incompleteness, which requires people to use their imagination.

And I think those who have a certain kind of imagination can still get a lot from older forms. Once your imagination is engaged, it's possible to enter a meditation-like trance stage that is the launching pad for emotions that are bigger and intense and personal than if you are a mere spectator, which is what you are when everything's given to you on a silver platter, or screen.

Even when movies began being made with color and sound as a matter of course, the great directors understood the importance of not showing. Alfred Hitchcock was a master at the "less is more" school — he often did not show scenes of violence, instead leaving it up to the viewer's imagination, knowing full well that we would envision something many times more frightening that any image he could have put on the screen. Why? Because, left on our own, we can't help but fill in the blanks, so to speak, with images that resonate with us personally.

In an age of alienation, I think these kinds of collaborative art are good for the soul. They involve us and make us feel a part of something, and can tap into emotions that are more abstract and bigger. By giving up some elements, we can gain so much. Call it the new primitivism. There, I just did.

I suppose by this thinking, a "Mad Lib" qualifies as great art, as you choose words to fill in the text of a story. Could be. That's a ___________adjective idea if I ever heard one.