The General Aesthetic of Oakdale – Chapter 1

Descriptions of Oakdale are typically cast in a pall of the mundane. Fitted neatly into the amorphous category of ‘natural,’ the physical environment that characterizes this place is what is unique to it. Long, rolling and sometimes verdant but mostly beautifully and subtly golden brown pastures encircled by distant fences and miniature four-legged animals belie the uncultivated view that there isn’t much to appreciate here.

So too, the sky illuminates the place at night in a way no street light can, drawing our gaze upward, revealing the moon and a blanket of patched stars and constellations, a canopy of light redolent of the sacred. This is the physical environment of Oakdale, but there is yet more.

The built and constructed environment deserves as much attention, with cowboy boots, hats, saddles, spurs and so many other objects decorating the town, with varying degrees of ostentation. Some proudly wear encrusted, adorned, and sculpted versions of these western accoutrements, sometimes even insignia-d. The local economy generates interest in such artifacts as relevant targets of artistic investment and interest.

People ‘need’ (to a degree) collaborate with animate and inanimate objects in order to complete their productive projects in order to remain participants in the strictures and pressures of the political economy and to maintain a spot in the tradition and history of this place. Continuing the family line is also of high priority, as it is part and parcel of their place in the community, implicated in a process of resisting incorporation into non-native, non-local ventures that comforts the people who live there, as they think on what distinguishes Oakdale, aside from its convenience as a stop on the way to Yosemite.

Art and political economy are interrelated in important ways here, explaining the emphasis on certain kinds of artifacts and rebutting the claim that there isn’t anything aesthetically redeeming here. There are just different objects, different practices, and often ones foreign to novice spectators, the exact kind that are prone to ill-informed speculative judgments that render a place ill-equipped to satisfy their sense of taste or judgement

Aesthetic appreciation, as much as any other activity requires time and focus, attention and effort for attuning oneself to the rhythms of a particular world, their relevant details and what makes them significant. It is about a disposition as much as it is about an object being shiny or beautiful or melodious that makes them noteworthy.

Art objects are defined as such (and further defined as worthy of interest) by certain community-proclaimed authorities, but once we realize that we can all be authorities on these items to some degree on these subjects, then we will be entering a new stage of re-creating this world in the image of ourselves but all of ourselves, including the environment and the flora and fauna that inhabit it, who, like each of us, plays as much of a role in recreating certain parts of it as we do. We should treat experts as authorities, but we should also maintain confidence in our own abilities, as these are real and present in ways that are not readily nor appropriately jettison or scraped.

 (there are so many details that each of one of us focuses on that others fail to appreciate, and it is the successive appreciation by new and different people and communities of this place (and others) that discloses and selects different aspects of the environment, of the social and nonsocial world, that really determines what we produce and leave to the generations that succeed us, our ways of making intelligible the world, describing and reconstituting it)