I read the recent piece in the NYT about how no one stops and actually looks at things in museums. Pausing instead just long enough to snap a photo (increasingly with unnecessarily professional-grade cameras), the crowds breeze through the hallowed halls. Edward Winkleman touched on it, encouraging a museum-sketching flashmob sort of event. Some of the original piece struck me as a little “kids these days” in tone, but the gist of it was right on, and the fact that Michael Kimmelman, the author, began a project of sketching monuments and such struck a chord (I am not a good sketcher). He ends the piece with a charming anecdote of girls in the Louvre enjoying a lingering, non-label-reading, playful engagement with the artworks.
Also last week, I read a really lovely quotation of Diderot in an essay by Arthur Danto on Chardin: “One stops in front of a Chardin as if by instinct, just as a traveller exhausted by his trip tends to sit down, almost without knowing it, in a place that is green, quiet, well-watered, shady, and cool.” * One can imagine just how it would feel, after wandering through halls of large melodramatic history paintings in a Salon, to arrive at a picture that, almost magically, returns you to something that you know to be important, something both familiar and transformed, immediate, and treasured.
from wikimedia. Un Canard col-vert attaché à la muraille, et une bigarade. ca. 1730
So I began to think about why people go to museums and how we behave in them, and I reflected a little on some experiences I’ve had doing some slow looking and engaging with artworks. The question of why go to museums, and its over-question, “Why do we even have them,” is a (many) book-length problem, involving ideas of curiosities, conquest, world exploration, Eurocentrism, and many different philosophies about humankind’s achievements. Museums house our national and “world cultural” treasures (those that can be removed to museums, anyway), and receive support from governments and many prestigious institutions and people in order to preserve and sometimes display these things. Limiting the question to art museums, today’s visitors, and the actual visiting, what’s the point? To get cultured? To kill time? To show evidence of our taste, class, and intelligence? To actually learn? to appreciate the past, or other places/peoples, or the present?
And to the issue of the photos. I’ve seen similar behavior many times at sites of great natural beauty (or any site. This train of thought coincided with a visit to the Palace of Fine Arts in SF, where lots of tour buses went by, and lots of people took pictures without even getting off the bus). People walk to a ledge or whatever, snap a photo, and keep walking, having looked at the scenery on the three-inch LCD longer than just with their own eyes. What is the purpose of this picture – it can’t be a memento the great experience you had at that outlook over the Grand Canyon, because you hardly had an experience. In a way the action of photo-taking has a generous impulse, the idea that you could share this experience (or a facsimile) with someone else. And photo-takers must take that to heart, sort of; it’s rare for flickr, for example, to have fewer than 5,000 uploads per minute. Taking a picture is also way more convenient than, say, sketching the sculpture at hand, or composing a few lines about it. A photograph is also a way of adding something to one’s collection, as Susan Sontag wrote. I think this is especially true of self-in-front-of-something pictures (not that I don’t take those myself), that it’s an action of staking a claim by saying “I was there.” Thinking back to the Grand Canyon, though, you were there doing – what, exactly?
from flickr user Beppie K
Returning to imaginary Diderot sighing before imaginary Chardins: some artworks really do reward you for looking long and closely. You change and they change, yielding up their better treasures. Some, though, despite their evident virtuosity and probable historical significance, just don’t get that deep. For many, the experience of obligatory tourist museum visits must be like Diderot’s wandering through the halls filled with those dry, gilt-framed, nonsensical academic canvases, but without any Chardins to rest upon: nothing grabs them, even if they try they don’t recognize themselves in what they see; nothing is relevant. One may attempt, by reading a label, to get something more out of what is one the wall – and I believe labels are really valuable – but the artwork itself expresses thoughts, information, narratives, messages, as well. And these are right before you.
Some artworks pull you in towards their surfaces with detail. Like the intensely frotted surface of a Soutine still life, a surface that you feel with your eyes. Or a venerable old masterpiece like the Isenheim altarpiece, which I’ve been lucky to see, a work that has both an immense totality and a whole bunch of devastating, beautiful, and minute details. These hold you with a great deal of visual stimulation, and you respond emotionally, thinking maybe of mortality, or divinity, or whatever. Other works get you very differently, in their bigness, wholeness, and mysteriousness. I’m thinking here of Rothko canvases (many have written about their experiences viewing these, including James Elkins in a sweet book called Pictures and Tears) and such. They affect you and you’re almost not sure how. I’ve seen a couple of Jenny Saville paintings in person, and as I looked I kept walking right up to the canvas, and then away to see the whole, and then back to grasp some particular passage, and so on, for half an hour, hardly noticing that I was moving. And then I went home and looked at them in books, which was not the same at all.
Cornelia Parker's Anti-Mass 2005. from flickr user marshall astor
Recently I had a wonderfully intense few moments of slow looking with a piece in SF’s deYoung Museum. Anti-Mass, by UK conceptual artist Cornelia Parker, is made from bits of charred wood from a Southern church destroyed by arson. I was a little familiar with the artist’s work from back when I subscribed to art magazines, and it wasn’t even the first time I’d seen this piece in particular. It and some of other well-known works are made of the blown-apart bits of some structure, suspended in the air in the dimensions of a cube, as if the explosion were somehow paused and made orderly. This time I was drawn to it, both because it is so evocative – of violence, of the fear of terrorism, of death, of rebirth from death – and because the form itself, the unsolid cube of irregular, beautifully black bits of wood, is so beautiful and mysterious. As with the Saville paintings, I wanted to get close and then far, first touch it with my eyes and then see its whole (its location in the gallery sucks for this, sadly). It didn’t last long, but it was sort of sublime.
I didn’t take a picture; I remember it, though, really well. I do think that long looking is wonderful, but I’m not inclined to think that speed-appreciation by the masses is a sign of crisis. I speed-appreciate a lot of things, and dedicate myself to a few, the ones that matter most to me. I don’t think the blame belongs on the masses of philistines tromping through the Louvre; perhaps they are getting out of it what they wanted, really, and they go on to devote their attention to things that matter more to them. Perhaps the things that will really move them have not been made yet, or at least put into museums.
* Arthur C. Danto, “Chardin,” in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life. Columbia University Press (2005), 39.
Scene from The Magic Flute with design and projection by Kentridge. Image from nytimes.com
I’ve had my second visit to William Kentridge’s somewhat giant retrospective “Five Themes” at SFMOMA. Both grandiose and unassuming, comic and sublime, it’s all opera and processions and grand theater that always come back to drawing, slow and messy charcoal drawing. I’ll cover two of the five themes here.
Stills from the studio films. Image from artnet.com
I loved the way he went about visualizing himself in the studio (a series of short films dedicated to early filmmaker George Méliès), in the act of creation, with a mixture of gravitas, nostalgia, and silliness, using the visual jokes of early animation and silent film. The tape runs in reverse, and the artist plucks pages out of the air, catches books floating up from the ground, even repairs (and becomes) a torn charcoal self-portrait. In another, a coffee cup “jumps” out of the artist’s reach as he tries to pour into it. The coffee pot becomes a spaceship, landing the artist on a hostile planet. He asks us to play along with his grainy, gently slapstick humor, these unsophisticated, humble attempts to represent the creative process. It’s as if he says, “Look, I really don’t know how else to do this, so I’m just going to try, ok?” This is how we are: ambitious, imaginative, but always fumbling.
Related to previous long post, Art Fag City takes a look at The Collector’s Guide to Emerging Art Photography. It’s an “invite only” biannual publication, which makes the name of its publisher seem quite ironic. While AFC highlights the possible consequences of the book for artist-dealer relations, I thought the post’s quick assessment of what makes art photography is pretty funny, and I was sort of heartened by the evidence that even people who decide this stuff for a LIVING don’t quite know what to make of it, either.
So, I went to the SFMOMA this weekend, saw selections from their collection, the really fun “Art of Participation” show, and the works of four photographers, assembled under the title “Face of our Time.” (This is sort of a lead-in to a longer piece I’m working on about Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), which I just read all the way through finally, and Regarding the Pain of Others, (2003) which I just reread.
As much as Sontag exhausted me, I realized again in viewing these beautifully framed pieces how much her books changed the way I experience photographs (and thus, the world?), not to mention influenced many of the things I think about, in general and related to my artwork, about suffering, ethics, news, and responsibility. Mainly I thought about this fuzziness that arises in a few areas when we see photographs in museums, and Susan and all her judgmental temper and élan was fresh on my mind.
from sfmoma.org
The featured photographers, Yto Barrada (b. 1971), Guy Tillim (b. 1962), Judith Joy Ross (b. 1946), and Leo Rubinfien (b. 1954), are “aligned” (according to the museum’s website) “for their shared interest in making pictures about the current condition of our world.” Okay, I think we can agree that all photographs are of current conditions; what the writer seems to be getting at is a kind of political bent in the works. In two out of four cases, this is a stretch. The website blurb, and the blurbs in the exhibition galleries, are trumping up the critical, political content of the works. (They also commit an easily avoidable sin, which is to refer to the “changing Africa“ that the South African Tillim is exposing—when in fact the photographs were taken in two countries, the DR Congo and Malawi.)
link to a particularly awesome edition of BibliOdyssey, a really nerdy and interesting blog:
The Miyako Nenju Gyoji Gajo (Picture Album of Annual Festivals in the Miyako)
Photos of 1928 paintings on silk.
On Saturday, I visited Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’s exhibition transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix. I really enjoyed the show, comprised of photographs, several video works, sculpture, painting, and a little bit of installation. I submit that the name is pretty lame, especially since only one of the sixteen artists had (it seemed to me) a serious interaction with East Asia’s world-famous pop culture. In fact, the largest concentration of bubble gum in the place was the little reading nook, the walls of which exhibition organizers had papered with Korean movie posters and magazine pages.
Far and away the star of the show was The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006) by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê and collaborators, a three-channel video that is not just art but pretty good journalism, in the sense that it reports a very specific concrete story with a growing awareness of that story’s larger significance, its semi-poetic standing in for much larger (in this case, global and historical) shifts and tides. Lê is better known for eerie woven photographic images (like these from P.P.O.W. Gallery) of Eastern temple iconography and the like interwoven (literally) with old black-and-white portraits, frequently those of doomed Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge era. Needless to say, they speak to the inexorable pull of difficult national (global?) memories and to the desire to reconfigure and shed new light on these memories. The Farmers and the Helicopters, one of the artist’s first forays into video, consists of original, historical, and Hollywood footage of helicopters in Vietnam, with segments of interviews with residents of a village, old and young, about their feelings about helicopters. Some of the farmers are building a helicopter to use to help them in their work; it becomes an issue of national pride, that they can build and have what others have, and the importance of rewriting the symbol of the Vietnam War is not lost. I loved it. Read more and see some pictures here.
smARThistory.org is delightful. It seems like a great example of people (in this case, professors) responding creatively to technology, to their students, and to the material, and being truly internety by staying away from closed/proprietary content. I would love it if this (or any) site provided a comparable resource for African, Asian, “non-Western” art. OR SOMETHING.
The editors of Janson’s History of Art, unsure of where to put the African and Asian sections once they could no longer credibly be called primitive, eventually just took them out altogether. Now apparently the classic is subtitled “The Western Tradition,” just to be honest. (I had Gardner’s myself.)
I was able to find some educators’ resources on the web from The Museum for African Art and some pretty good content and links from the Met. There is also the clunky and unattractive but thorough Heilbrunn Timeline with its “thematic essays.” Still, these are clearly not the same thing as a survey/introduction to the arts of these regions.
Thinking about educational materials reminds me of a small battle for political correctness I fought with one of the art ed. professors at my university. The art ed. majors taught k-12 art classes on the weekends, with a big exhibition in our art building at the end of each term. One semester, the kindergartners had made (and presumably learned about) “AFRICAN MONSTER MASKS.” I contacted the lady in charge just to say I thought that while I appreciated the effort, the terminology was not so good; she sent me a pretty angry response and said she would take it to the chair of the department, my advisor AND AN AFRICAN. FROM AFRICA.
*okay, I guess the servers somewhere weigh something and probably cancel out whatever environmental savings from not printing and shipping the book.
Over at Museum 2.0, Elizabeth Merritt articulates in a guest post what I’ve been trying to say about the good that could/must come out of this painful economic period — how it sucks but will surely make things better by forcing us to evaluate what matters and to try new things — not just for art but for everything. To eliminate the inflated, the fluffy, the pointlessly hip…then my optimism gets lost as I express my disillusionment with the current cultural landscape as I see it. Merritt says it in an urgent, positive, much less jerk-face way:
“But everything now points to a profound shift in the economic, demographic, political, social and technological environment in which we operate. I think we need to encourage museums to be more opportunistic—try lots of new things with relatively small investment of resources, knowing that most of them will fail and learning from those that succeed. Maybe we need to encourage experimental start-up museums to try entirely new ways of operating, accepting that many of them might close if their approaches don’t work out.”
Certainly we’ve all got change on the brain these days. I want so much to see our cultural institutions change for the better, to take risks, show passion, and become even better places for user-directed learning and creativity. In general, I think people see that the kind of change and innovation Merritt alludes to are seriously necessary in all sectors. It’s an opportunity for creativity to thrive in new arenas.
