Learning to love art
How often do you visit art galleries and museums? Unless you study
studio art or art history, it is quite likely that your answer will be
either 'not often' or 'almost never.' My answer is the same; unless I
have been told to visit the Met or the MoMa as part of a school
assignment, I almost never go. The major reasons why this is the case
are twofold: first, neither you nor I have the time to spare, and
second, we don't consider ourselves 'art people.' Because we don't know
the language of paintings very well, we feel that there is little
benefit for us to be hanging around art galleries. But the fact is,
there is no such thing as an art person; we are all 'art people.'
Whether or not we know the various languages of art, we resonate
emotionally with certain songs, photos and movies. We share a common
desire to both appreciate and to create art, but we often have
difficulty seeing the visions offered by paintings. We must learn how to
train our eyes to see the paintings, and to train our brains to make
sense of them.
I was recently given the opportunity to train my eyes and brain, thanks
to a school assignment asking me to fall in love with a painting, and
then describe it to someone who had never seen it before. I had already
fallen in love with a certain painting, The Harbor of Dieppe by
J.M.W. Turner, but I needed to take a second, long, look at it in order
to describe it properly. The fleet of merchant ships is majestic; tall
sails, large hulls, and cargo from faraway lands.The paints are
extremely bright; lead white, yellows, mediterranean blues, with a
smattering of blacks and browns. There is activity everywhere you look,
with lots of people coming and going, but one is never quite able to
make out their facial expressions. At the end of this assignment, I had
to ask myself "Why do I like this?" I knew I liked that painting
more than any others I'd seen at the Frick collection, but even a
second, long, look was not enough for me to find any drama in the scene,
and I'd been lead to believe that all paintings have to tell a story.
It took me awhile to realize that, in fact, there was no drama at all.
Any work of art is a form of communication, wherein the viewer attempts
to unpack the art itself, so that he might see it as its creator saw
it. This can be a difficult task, especially when it is not immediately
apparent what the point of the painting is. Mark Doty, writing in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, contemplates
the raison d'etre of still life paintings. Although he acknowledges
that they contain neither drama nor subjects that convey meaning, Doty
still finds meaning within still lives, for he believes that they
portray a particular vision.
First, a principle of attention, simply that. A faith that if we look and look we will be
surprised and we will be rewarded.
Then, a faith in the capacity of the object to carry meaning, to serve as a vessel. For
what? Ourselves, of course. I mean that the objects depicted are, ultimately, soulful, are
anything
but lifeless. Of course they have lost their particular contexts, all
the stuff of narrative, the attached human stories that would have
placed them in some specific relation to a life, but they are
nonetheless full of that life, suffused with intimacy (48).
Still
lives are paintings that lack everything we normally associate with
paintings; context, narrative, and story. Yet, according to Doty, they
are anything but lifeless; their vision is one of attention, or said
another way, of contemplation. It is this vision of contemplation that
gives these paintings both life and intimacy to their viewers. Still
lives are a way in which one may project his or her thoughts and
emotions onto the painting, without being interrupted by a story or a
subject of the painter's choosing. Because there is no context or
narrative, they reflect only the consciousness of the viewer by using
mundane objects as a focal point for meditation. If one can meditate
using still life, why can't the same be said for other paintings? They,
too, were painted out of a belief that they could carry meaning, and
operate on a 'principle of attention.' Artists are separated from their
viewers by factors of time, space and cultural differences, but their
creations are built to withstand these factors. If viewers can see a
painting's vision as its artist intended, then they can use the unique
qualities of that
vision to better understand other works by the same artist. Once
viewers can identify one artist's vision, then they will have a point of
reference when looking at the works of his contemporaries.
For me, “The Harbor of Dieppe” was
both a focal point for meditation, and an exercise in vision. The
memories and feelings it evokes are powerful, from my senior trip to
Paris, where I finally returned to the birthplace of my ancestors, to my
second date with my girlfriend, where we went to the Frick collection
and I first saw “Dieppe”. Remembering
these events helped put the last two years of my life in context, as I
had previously been struggling with making sense of it all. Turner’s
vision in this work is similar to that of his contemporaries, including
Gustave Courbet’s “The Stone breakers” and Theodore Gericault’s “The
Raft of the Medusa,” in that they all use brighter palates than one sees
in Baroque paintings. However, Turner’s painting differs in that it is
almost unnaturally bright in comparison to the others, and, because it
uses less lines and shadows, is more ‘fluid’ than both Courbet’s and
Gericault’s works.
The ability to identify commonalities and differences between artists
is an essential skill that, like a muscle, must be trained in order to
work properly. Categorization is a fundamental aspect of humanity, and
once you perfect it in one discipline, you can learn more quickly how to
do it in others. But If staring at paintings can aid this process, why
don’t more people do it? Perhaps they feel that they do not know enough
about the medium, and at the risk of not understanding a work, of not
'getting' it, they prefer to stick to the films and photos they are
familiar/comfortable with. Jeannette Winterson, a journalist and science
fiction writer, was an example of someone with this mindset; she had
little interest in the visual arts because of her background in
literature. This changed when she stumbled across an oil painting in
Amsterdam that so moved her that she fled to a nearby bookshop, sat
down, and wept. When she realized that her distress was due to
ignorance, Winterson resolved to educate herself, reading every art
critic from John Ruskin to Michael Levey, and focusing her visual
education on modern painters. Although this did not turn her into an art
expert, she succeeded in her goal to change her emotional connection to
art. She writes:
I still know far far less about pictures than I do about books and this will not change. What has changed is my way of seeing I am learning how to look atpictures. What has changed is my capacity of feeling. Art opens the heart.
(46-7)
Winterson’s
area of expertise was always books, and she knew that. Her aim was not
to gain encyclopedic knowledge of famous paintings, but rather to change
how she looked at pictures - any and all pictures - to better ‘open the
heart.’ But surely her heart was as open as anyone else’s. It can’t be
that ignorance of art could actually hurt us in any way... could it?
Winterson affirms that, in fact, it does:
In
the west, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or
by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double
advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy
patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to
what is happening now. By making islands of separation out of the
unbreakable chain of human creativity, we are able to set up false
comparisons, false expectations, all the while lamenting that the music,
poetry, painting, prose, performance art of Now, fails to live up to
the art of Then, which is why, we say, it does not affect us. In fact,
we are no more moved by a past we are busy inventing, than by a present
we are busy denying. If you love a Cezanne, you can love a Hockney, can
love a Boyd, can love a Rao. If you love a Cezanne rather than lip-service it.
(51)
Comparing
works of the past with works of the present is not a valid reason not
to explore modern art. If one truly loves impressionist painters, who
are currently the gold standard for Canon art, one has the capacity to
love modern painters like Pollock or Warhol. This is not to say that one
has to force themselves to like a specific painting or artist, but to
understand the present, one must attune themselves to the art that is
being made now.
The problem is that much of the difficulty of getting people to like
art, any art, is because most people have had little to no prior
exposure. Given that Winterson’s case is the exception, rather than the
rule, how might we lure the layman into art galleries and museums?
Perhaps
the key lies in showing people that appreciating art is a matter of
attention, rather than formal education. The commonality between
Winterson (pre- 'awakening') and others who are apprehensive about art
is the knowledge that, like any form of love, falling in love with art
takes time. This is why people will often say they 'have no time for
art'; the time commitment prevents novices from fully appreciating a
Titian, a Rembrandt, or a Van Gogh. Even those who take the time to
visit an art gallery or a museum feel that they don't spend enough time
to justify the excursion. As Winterson explains, it is not entirely
their fault.
Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The
public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There
are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, definite, independent,
each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if... if... it were
possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and guards and the low
lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the
thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the
viewer... Is the painting authority? Does the guide-book tell us that it
is part of The Canon? If Yes, then half of the viewers will admire it
on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle (47)."
It
is an endless barrage of distractions, says Winterson, that keeps us
from truly seeing a painting, from knowledge of its purchase price to
whether or not it is part of The Canon. If we are going to spend any
time at all looking at paintings, we had better be prepared to focus on
the images that catch our eye. All of the background noise, the
curators, the other viewers, and the guide books, must be tuned out so
that our paintings
may be the sole recipient of our attention. But to spend time with an
artwork does not imply that you have to pursue a Ph.D in studio art or
art criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it means that to approach
art, as a novice, requires self-education outside of any classroom.
Looking at different paintings, and learning how to see them, is a good
place to start. Reading about different art movements and the artists
that contributed to them is another. The extent to which one will pursue
this education is up to the individual, but to those who complain that
they don’t have time to pursue it, “the time, like the money, can be
found (48).” If one is serious about learning how to appreciate art,
they will make time for it and come up with the money to pay for it.
The
only prerequisite to learning is approaching the material with an open
mind. But Going about anything with an open mind is easier said than
done. Art can often
appear to require an expert's knowledge to understand, and although
asking an expert about an artist or an art movement may yield the
desired information, it does little to further one’s understanding of
the big picture. The dilemma shared by consumers, tourists, and
sightseers is that they all use - are exposed to things - without
understanding them. Walker Percy explores this theme in his essay “The
Loss of the Creature”, arguing
that there are two broadly-defined types of people; experts, who reign
sovereign over a particular realm of knowledge, and consumers, who have
no access to that knowledge other than through use, and the use of a
thing does not equal
ownership. Experts can be scientists, literary or art critics,
engineers or businessmen; they all enjoy exclusivity by merit of the
specialization of their trade. According to Percy, the result of this
specialization is the total, voluntary, surrender of sovereignty over
everything but one’s own domain of knowledge.
This
loss of sovereignty is not a marginal process, as might appear from my
example of estranged sightseers. It is a generalized surrender of the
horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of
the horizon is thought to lie (5).
According
to Percy, specialization causes people to have the incorrect mindset
that they should, or perhaps even must, surrender their sovereignty over
parts of their lives. This means that, for many people, the effort of
exposing oneself to art and trying to appreciate it is futile; they
believe that the major ‘questions’ posed by art have already been
answered, and that the unresolved questions are the sole responsibility
of people within the ‘art world.’ Again, we come back to this notion
that there is such a thing as an ‘art world’, or a ‘science world’, or a
‘literature world.’ Specialization is important, yes, and it is often
necessary to advance further discoveries in fields, such as biology and
chemistry, that have reached maturation. However, the fact that experts
exist does not exclude the layman from participating; if anything, the
layman who delves into an unfamiliar topic may gain a new perspective on
what he already knows. Like Jeannette Winterson, the layman who does
this will then be able to create something entirely new.
Walker Percy offers a solution to the issue of people surrendering
their sovereignty, as a way of enabling them to regain control of their
lives. He calls the solution ‘recovery’, and it applies whenever someone
is forced to approach something completely unfamiliar to them.
According to Percy, recovery is necessary in education because the
nature of formal learning causes most students to passively absorb their
lessons, rather than actively engaging with them. By doing so, these
students have surrendered their sovereignty over their education. Percy
outlines three general avenues to recovery; first by ordeal, wherein a
student seizes the lesson by force, second by learning from a “great
man” who can make even the most uninterested student passionate about
their field, and third by catastrophe - by exploding a bomb, which will
make a student truly ‘see’ their lesson for the first time.
But
since neither of these methods of recovering... is pedagogically
feasible-perhaps the great man even less so than the Bomb-I wish to
propose the following educational technique which should prove equally
effective for Harvard and Shreveport High School. I propose that English
poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular
intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and
biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting
boards (7).
The
great man is an expert within his field, so willing and able to teach
others that whomever he shares his knowledge with, he also imparts his
passion for the subject to them. The Bomb is an accidental recovery;
when a bomb goes off in the biology laboratory, then the student may see
the dogfish in its entirety for the first time. The dogfish is no
longer a specimen, but an individual being, belonging in its own unique
habitat rather than on the dissecting tray in a lab. Because the bomb
and the great man are both (usually) impractical, the alternative is a
different type of ‘shock’; having students walk into their classes
expecting one thing, and experiencing another. By doing so, the lesson
is taken out of its package; learning about the anatomy of a dogfish is
no longer confined to the domain of “science”, and Shakespeare’s sonnets
are no longer relegated to the realm of “literature.”
This
may be feasible in the context of art education. Rather than being
placed in its usual ‘packaging’ (to use a term of Percy’s) of an art
history classroom, a museum or a gallery, a painting may be displayed in
a mathematics class as a study in geometry, or perhaps fractals or
integration. It may also be displayed in a history class, as an
illustration of the zeitgeist of the era being taught, or even in a
chemistry class - with the focus of the lesson being on the chemical
composition of the various paints and varnishes used. Presenting a
painting out of context is perhaps the best way to show an otherwise
uninterested student - or layman - how to fall in love with it. If the
layman experiences the painting in a language he understands, he will be
encouraged to investigate it further.
This proposal, to encourage an intellectual awakening in the masses,
would be a massive project indeed. However, the project is necessary;
many of us, due to the consumer culture we live in, have been lead to
believe that satisfaction comes from what we consume. These people can
be controlled by their spending habits, from what they eat to what they
wear, and even to whom they vote for. This is the warning given by
Walker Percy in the last paragraphs of “The Loss of the Creature”; that refusing to educate oneself leads to mental enslavement.
The
layman will be seduced as long as he regards beings as consumer items
to be experienced rather than prizes to be won, and as long as he waives
his sovereign rights as a person and accepts his role of consumer as
the highest estate to which the layman can aspire
…
the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is
something one struggles for. But unless he also struggles for himself,
unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what
the planners think he is (cite).
One’s
humanity comes from his mastery, his sovereignty, over his domain.
Therefore, anything that removes his sovereignty also removes his
humanity. This is why consumerism is so dangerous; it takes away the
personhood, the uniqueness, inherent in all people, and homogenizes
them. Intellectualism, over multiple disciplines, is the only way to
combat this force. If this is the case, how can one turn the layman into
an intellectual? One approach is through art; art is accessible to
anyone and everyone, regardless of culture, religion, ethnicity or
personal history. The desire to create and experience art is a drive
that exists in all humans, and by encouraging it, one may help others to
recover their individuality. Their individuality is expressed not only
in how they
approach art (from the perspectives of sculpture, painting, literature
or music, to name a few), but also in what their approach entails. There
is a niche for everyone within the domain of art, and it begs to be
filled.
I
experienced this encouragement when I was asked to research my
painting. I had been given a chance to answer some lingering questions,
among them being the origins of Turner's unique painting style (it is
rather unlike Gericault, eschewing lines, forms and chiaroscuro), and
the reason(s) why "Dieppe" was painted. I learned that Turner was not
just an oil painter; his main artistic focus was watercolors, and he
painted four times as many watercolor paintings than oil paintings. I
also learned where Turner learned how to make daylight shine on the
water in a photorealistic manner; he borrowed the technique from
17th-century painter Claude Lorrain, whom he emulated in his early
career. Although my research did not fully explain the painting, it did
give me a better sense of the continuity between past and present in
paintings.
Just
as I have hobbies and interests in video games, music, and reading
scientific journals, I can take time to find a few more paintings like Dieppe. I
can visit them wherever they are housed, spend the afternoon with them,
and have a silent conversation with them whenever time permits. I may
look them up on Wikipedia, or look in Modern Painters to
see if Ruskin has anything to say about them, but I do not need formal
classes - much less a career in art - in order to appreciate them. As to
how one may best learn about art, to quote Winterson's ex-boyfriend, it
is the same as learning about wine:
"Drink it (56)."
Works Cited:
Doty, Mark. Still life with oysters and lemon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Print.
Percy, Walker. "The Loss of the Creature." www.udel.edu. University of Delaware , n.d. Web. 5 Mar. 2013. <www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/loss_creature.pdf>.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art objects: essays on ecstasy and effrontery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf :, 1996. Print.
