Growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the seventies and eighties I knew I wanted to be an artist. I didn’t really know what it meant or what it entailed. I had some vague notions based on comically off-based caricatures from television and movies. I read comics avidly. I recognized all the major comic artists and could identify them in just a few lines or compositional quirks. It wasn’t until I had a great art teacher in high school that I encountered “real art”. Mrs. Byron suggested that my friends and I go to the Yale Art Gallery to look at the collection. New Haven is a thirty minute drive from Bridgeport. To me New Haven was a marker on the way to family get togethers in New Hampshire. I remember the tunnel on the Merritt Parkway and The Sleeping Giant, a hill that is said to resemble its namesake. As a kid, I imagined real giants so New Haven remained a home to giants. Yale University had less impression on me. Working class kids have different signifiers they pay attention to. Aside from the odd trip to New York City to go to the Natural History Museum, I had never been in a museum.
At the time, as I mentioned in a previous essay, I had recently discovered the French Impressionists. In that milieu I found Vincent Van Gogh. Along with Walt Whitman and Jim Morrison I had the stalwart companionship of moody teens everywhere. There was one painting in particular that really got me. The Night Cafe with its livid glowing bar lights contained all the pulsing, nocturnal discomfort and loneliness I felt. I would study it in cheap reproduction. Once I had a drivers license, my friends and I would go often to the Yale Art Museum. It was free. New Haven felt like a big city to me. As budding sophisticates we would buy espresso at the Atticus Cafe and browse crisp, new, thick-spined editions of Penguin classics. It was a world I didn’t really understand but knew I wanted to inhabit.
My first love was the medieval section. My memories (which have been altered since returning as an adult) was of a mead hall. It transported me into a medieval dreamtime that I’m sure would make actual medieval scholars cringe. It did the trick for me by providing many sturdy bricks for my imaginal world. Generally, I liked to wander around the Neo-classical section with its overwrought Roman deities. It combined my two favorite sensibilities: superhero comics and Shakespeare which I’d just discovered in English class. I realize that this is all standard issue high school stuff; remembering the first blush of cultural love and so on.
One day, I was wandering around the museum with no real aim. I made my way to the modernist section. I turned a corner. There it was in the flesh: The Night Cafe. As naive and simplistic as it sounds, I had never considered what it meant to encounter a work of art in person. The physicality and presence of art was secondary to just the image-ness of the picture. I remember thinking, “This is the actual canvas and paint that he painted.” There are reams of doctoral theses about presence and aura in artworks and whether they are real or not. None of that matters. I was shaken down to my socks. My bones were tingling. The best way that I can describe the experience is that a temple bell went off in my chest with its great, deep reverberations. I grew up Catholic and went to a Catholic high school. I never felt anything in mass that compared to this. I knew right then and there what I wanted to do with my life.
Whenever I approach an artwork, I hope for that same unmitigated joy to wash over me. It gets harder as you get older. I have a lot of experience now, I’ve seen lots and lots of art. My critique trained brain has layers of biases stemming from deep professional knowledge. Beginner’s mind is a conscious effort. I still love not only the physical presence of the artwork, but the whole context in which I experience it: the creak of a parquet floor, the faint odor of a medium, the events of the day that led up to my encounter.
Jump ahead twenty-something years. I am in New York with my family. My daughter is about three years old. I had been teaching at an art school for just a few years. Artists who live in secondary cities like Portland tend to have a bit of an inferiority complex and look to cultural power centers like New York for approval. I was doubly insecure since I don’t have an MFA. We were in town for a project I was doing with the choreographer and dancer Lawrence Goldhuber, funnily enough called Sleeping Giant which did have call backs to my early memories of New Haven. The big show that season was the Urs Fischer exhibition at the New Museum in the Bowery. I was excited to have bragging rights that I saw it in person.
A funny thing happened as we moved up the floors of the exhibition. I saw a lot of clever jokes, perfectly ironic fabrication and lots of art world winks. Everything was right on the nose. As I moved through I began to write the Artforum review in my head. I was an avid reader of the magazine at the time. I wanted to be in the know. I tried sometimes to imitate the tortured, theory-laden patois of the regular writers to no avail. At some point I decoded the density of the writing and found it wanting. This show would be a rousing success. It would be discussed using all the verbal armaments that emerged from the Frankfurt School. My daughter liked the motion activated tongue that popped out of the wall. It made her laugh.
We crossed Manhattan to go to the Met to meet some friends whose kids are the same age. Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid was on loan from the Netherlands. It was the center of a small show with other Vermeers and some of his contemporaries. I wasn’t particularly excited about Dutch painters at the time. It was there so I went. It was a box to check. So, I wasn’t prepared for how luminous it is in person. As with the Van Gogh (I know, I know you’re thinking I have a Dutch thing going) a temple bell went off in my chest. The physical experience of the painting grabbed hold of me. I bought the catalog but no reproduction could capture what I experienced bodily. The unnameable color of the wall behind the milkmaid is fugitive. It cannot be captured.
It seems I am suggesting that this transcendence, and I happily use that word with no apology, is limited to Old Master and Blue Chip paintings. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a bodily experience of image. I had a similar sensation when I was in Los Angeles and saw an exhibition of Thomas J. Price’s gargantuan sculptures of everyday people. I’ve had it with Mimbres pots and original comic book pages. It is a function of having your body encounter something in all its true scale and materiality. To see the subtle bumps of a painted slip on a buff colored pot or stand beside a massive figure you enter into physical communion with that work.
I know that museums have many problems. They are repositories of the hyper-wealthy, they tell skewed histories based on the power dynamics of market and race, they have questionable ethics with objects from diverse cultures. All of that is very true. However, I don’t know how a kid from Bridgeport would have encountered art if not for that free admission to the Yale Art Gallery. Often we talk about the democratizing of something. Mostly what that boils down to is privatization and marketing schemes. We tend to mix up the bloated art market with the experience of art. Often they are inextricable but not always.
One of my biggest criticisms of climate activists attacking art in the name of political action is that it misses the point. They are using false equivalents and very faulty arguments. Yes, the art market especially for “masterworks” and blue chip artists hyperventilates with speculation. And yes, in this selfie obsessed Instagram framed time most people don’t look at art. They pose in front of it and check it off lists. It’s great to see festive, joyous crowds gathering around artworks. The activists confuse celebrity and market metrics with real value. What they miss is that the resource the ultra wealthy horde is contemplative space. Museums for all their problems are sometimes one of the few places someone with little means can go to have an experience where they can hear the temple bell. These are not romanticisms or tin-eared elitist beliefs.
Looking at art needn’t be prohibitive to the uninitiated. Many people don’t like this analogy and it is imperfect. So here goes: I know very little about soccer. I’ve been to some games. It’s fun. I get caught up in the excitement. I know very little about the sport. My experience is superficial. I don’t follow the narrative of the season, or analyze the technical aspects of the match I don’t know the history of the various clubs. If I wanted to I could. I could become a superfan. I could get season tickets, follow all the ups and downs of the season and read the histories. Similarly, anyone can approach art in the same way. You don’t need a degree, just patience, curiosity and a capacity to be fully present. I happened to be very open to it. I still am. I’m an art superfan. I read as much as I can and look at lots and lots of art.
This brings up a wrinkle. Travel to famous works is a hindrance for those who don’t have the means. Ninety-nine percent of all artwork anyone consumes anymore is via online platforms and in reproduction. I know many more artworks than I have actually encountered in person. I have been very fortunate in my life to be able to travel and visit museums, installations and galleries. I made it my priority ever since that first visit. Instagram and other online platforms are fine for advertising, but those sites put a literal frame around everything by homogenizing scale and composition. You don’t behold art on Instagram. You glance. You like. You move on. Work on sites like that tend to be square, catchy and gimmicky. It has its uses.
How does one access the physical experience of an artwork if you are remote or broke or otherwise outside of the power system? Find regional museums and support them. Find free museums nearby. If you do have an opportunity to travel to a place with a good museum go on off hours and seek connection not an exhaustive survey. Better to have a meaningful rapport with a few works than a social butterfly’s fleeting cocktail party whirlwind (although that could be a good time too). The main thing is to find the work. Sit down. Spend some time with it. Say hello. Listen for the bell.
In the next two parts of this essay I will look at sacred art and profane markets and art as a portal to the ineffable.