Jude Tallichet’s sculpture of ordinary objects: Life as we don’t quite know it

This essay explores how the visual world not only speaks to us passively but can also expect us to respond actively. It proposes that an installation/exhibition of sculpture, in this case Jude Tallichet’s Heat Map, which opened at Smack Mellon and closed again within days as the city went into a COVID-19-induced lockdown, can transform into a set of presumptive living visual identities in the making that ask us to respond to their invitation to visual and social conversation. The installation was not originally about COVID-19, but as the nation changed, so did its meaning. By inverting the question of how artists respond to a critical situation by asking instead how images respond to external events over time, we can begin to comprehend not just how artists make meaning with works of art but how works of art make meaning within themselves. My analytical framework leads to an acknowledgement that there are many kinds of visual culture and many kinds of artists across culture. Art is no longer for the privileged and artists are no longer their subalterns. Our conversations with the art constituting our visual culture should be as diverse and as individual today as their visual creations.