To Understand a Painting,
You Need a Chair
Imagine John Clease bounding onto the stage at the Old Stratford
just as Brutus is sinking the knife into Julius Caesar .“Stay
in your seats! This is not a murder. Brutus is only sticking a
plastic thing under Julius Caesar’s arm. Yes don’t
be alarmed, this is not, I repeat not a murder.” This is
what Rene Magritte did to painting with his famous piece, “Ce
n’est pas un pipe.” Since then, propelled by Warhol
and Duchamp, a large portion of the art community have taken this
line of mischief to where many would claim that contemporary art
is now just a matter of philosophy and theory of art and visuality.
The old experiential core of painting is apparently no longer
needed – no longer relevant. The mischief is now serious
business, filling libraries and art magazines. It is the main
pillar of the art establishment.
When curators hang paintings with a heavy thematic
construct, when they post large “educational” explanations
beside a painting, or when they sell you audio-tapes to listen
to while you look at paintings, they undermine the relationship
between the viewer and the painting. Painting communicates through
the power of unnamed substances. It creates a silence inside us
in which the imagination has room to travel. A viewer in front
of a painting is in a position to have a full-bodied meditation
– to be transported and expanded. Philip Guston talked about
“reeling with meanings” in front of paintings. The
moment needs silence, possibly a chair, some good lighting and
a frame that doesn’t distract. Keep the writing for the
catalogue or the book – give painting its due.
This is a matter of respect for the artist and the
viewer. There is plenty to say about painting, to study, and to
write, but first we need to look and taste the painting, letting
it warm us and transport us. Art education has to be built around
the viewer’s personal experience of the painting. It is
about filling out that experience and making the viewer hungry
for more. Let people go to the paintings they like, and spend
time with them. The first job of art education is teaching people
to relax and breathe and to just hang out in front of a painting,
teaching them to be open to whatever the painting may do with
them. After the viewer has established a personal foothold, then
it is time to inform and to explore the experiences he or she
is having. If the enterprise of art education and art study is
not based on this private reverie, it has lost its relationship
with the very core of what it is teaching and studying. The enterprise
becomes self-referential and a mutation of its original function.
It is like replacing the wedding feast with a dissertation on
nutrition and the process of digestion.
This disconnection from the original experience
of painting not only affects how art is shown and taught, it undermines
the practice and foundations of the whole field. The disembodied
theory-based writing that now dominates the field is spawning
an art scene of a theory-based art. This community is colored
by irony and weariness. The focus of the art produced is to critique
and reexamine what already exists. It does not do first hand research
outside its own theoretic concerns. It does not draw from, or
investigate further, nature and the world around us. It is not
about life and it does not seek to expand or explore our experiences
as human beings. It is at its core reductive and reactionary.
It dissipates the viewer’s experience and negates the artist’s
creative possibilities. It is not that we don’t need philosophy
and theory of art. It is that the pages of unreadable convoluted
discourse that emanates from the art magazines and Art History
departments is more about power and position. The art being barely
relevant makes the critic, curator or the art historian, indispensable.
The big exhibition is centered on the theoretical constructs of
the curator, the art merely goes to illustrate the theory that
fills the catalogue and dictates the hanging and the selection
of the show. This is painting in the service of theory, or more
correctly, in the service of careerism. I recently visited our
local ICA, which was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary.
The director rose to thank the curators and their assistant’s
who had made these twenty-five years such a success. Then she
stumbled and added sheepishly “Oh yes and the artists.”
Novalis said “Philosophy is really homesickness.
It is the urge to be at home everywhere.” The lasting power
of philosophy is tied to longing: a longing to understand our
relationship with the enormous, indifferent energy of the universe.
Its rigor and vitality come from the impossibility of its quest
and from its commitment to encounter reality. In this it has much
in common with painting. They can be good bedfellows. For this
collaboration to work however the philosopher would have to see
paintings for what they are: living records of encounters with
reality: evidence from archaeological digs down into our communal
psyche. The physical energy of creativity alive in painting is
a fact of nature – empirical evidence to be examined. The
philosopher’s personal experience of painting is no less
valuable than his or her personal experience of the universe –
just more evidence. The best art theory has been written from
this perspective in that it acknowledges both the physical nature
of creativity, and the expansive possibilities that are at its
core. I think of the work of John Berger. It is writing that is
poignant and expansive, full of surprise and vitality while always
mindful of the mysterious. It is grounded in the world although
it searches out the intangible. It is also very readable.
Our creativity is a natural part of us, and the
work we do as artists, is full of possibility. Robert Frost said
“there are still sounds that live in the cavern of the mouth
that have not yet been brought to book.” There are forms
that have not yet been brought to painting. It has not all been
done before. All the great artists of history knew this, and felt
the pathos of the shortness of life. Scientists, who study nature,
are awed by the complexities, scale, and shear beauty of the universe
in which we live. It is clear we are only glimpsing a fraction
of what is out there and what is inside us. The Arts, at their
best, have sought to offer us experience of this sense of possibility.
“Moments of extension and hope,” according to Seamus
Heaney. The comic richness of James Joyce’s Ulysses takes
us out further than any writer before; the twist of the poem catches
us by surprise, or the choppy slash of De Kooning’s brushstroke
turns us and extends us in ways we could not expect. There is
exhilaration and excitement in these moments. The art historical
and curatorial fields need to encompass this possibility, this
openness. This would mean they would have to return to the humble
roll of individual viewer, open to new experience. They would
have to stop the fast rotations of their theoretic constructs,
and just sit silently in front of a painting. When the heart opens,
or when a walk by the ocean quiets us, theory falls away. We just
are. This space is at the heart of where painting comes from and
how it works. The critical analysis and theoretic exploration
have to start from here. Painting is personal and intimate –
we follow Rembrandt’s finger through the paint, right there,
right now. If the critic is not present and receptive, he or she
is in no position to comment on the work.
The viewer of art is offered a holistic experience.
He or she is taken out for a ride, engaged through the senses
and propelled by the imagination feeding on the medium of the
art form. The poets talk about making a temple of the inner ear
for sound to echo down through the psyche. Painting goes onto
our stomach. It is always palpable physical presence. More than
any other art form it speaks directly to the body. It offers us
the chance to return to our personal experience of the world,
as experienced through our bodies, as a central part of our exploration
of what it means to be human. It is a place where our learning
and our nature get to coexist.
James Joyce wrote, “There is no limit to creativity
except consciousness. *” Our creativity has propelled human
evolution. It is our one great resource. The real tragedy of the
human race may be currently unfolding as we wallow in denial,
playing theoretical head games, at a time when we are destroying
the very resources that enable our survival on the planet. It
is a time when the arts that foster our creativity and keep us
grounded in our corporal experience of the world are most needed.
Seamus Heaney, when he received the Nobel Prize, credited poetry
for having a restorative effect between the mind’s center
and its circumference. He was referring to the flow between the
conscious analytical mind, and the broader embodied mind. It is
here in these old archaic practices of art making that we have
the opportunity to return to the reality of our embodied experiences
of the world, to the center of our public discourse. At this moment,
in this culture, this is a radical and revolutionary concept.
It was Foucault, the French radical who suggested that to understand
a painting you need a chair. It is here, seated silently before
a painting, honoring our personal response, that we assert the
truth of our own experience. In this we challenge the commercial
and political discourses that are dedicated to separating us from
that reality. Simon Wiel wrote from Paris, as the Nazi armies
approached, that the failure of the democracies in the face of
Fascism was due to a failure of intellectual and spiritual rigor.
It was perhaps an overstatement to blame the fall of France on
the Surrealists or for us now to blame the rise of fundamentalism
both here and abroad, on the deconstructionists. However it is
clear that some intellectual constructs foster creativity and
investigation of the world around us, while others hinder it.
This may well be a reasonable and practical measure of their value.
It is time to sit, look at the paintings, and reevaluate.
*By “consciousness” I take him to mean
what we now call the analytical mind.
©2003-2005,TimothyHawkesworth.com
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Norristown Arts Building - 619 West Washington Street - Norristown, PA 19401
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