I’m standing in front of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, or rather, as close to in front of it as I can get. A layer of museum-goers, about four-deep, squirm against each other, raising cameras the size of credit cards above their heads. I’m not entirely positive that any of them are actually looking at the painting, so much as whipping out cameras in relief at finally coming across a familiar image, versions of which are dispersed across the globe on coasters, in kistchy frames in restaurant bathrooms, and dangled from commemorative keychains. I give the nervous guard next to the painting a sympathetic smile, and head eighty years into the future.
One level down at the Museum of Modern Art, I end up squarely in the company of Pollock, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. Almost as if obligated, my eyes first turn to an imposing, gilded, seven-foot canvas bearing the unmistakable silkscreen image of Marilyn Monroe. It feels almost altar-like as I approach - it’s an image so embedded in a collective cultural consciousness that I’ve seen the starlet’s face at the bottom of bargain bins at department stores. Nearby, there’s another monumental canvas, every inch covered in manic paint drips - a Jackson Pollock. It’s equally unmistakable, though decidedly less intelligible - the profusion of line and color on the work refuse to be comprehensible in the way that Marilyn Monroe’s face is. I see a viewer staring uncertainly at the work, frozen between a look of cultural recognition and utter bafflement. He turns to his companion, smirking, and mumbles something inaudible into her ear. They walk off, enjoying a laugh at Pollock’s expense.
The contemporary art wing is decidedly different. The art seems to have slowly migrated off the walls in the decades after the the wall paintings of Pollock. A few reassuringly flat drawings and paintings dot the walls, their sizes varying dissonantly. But the work is just as easily a sprawling, haphazard jumble of found objects placed on the gallery floor with no immediately discernable intention. Two yellow Madonna figurines the size of candles sit on a pedestal. A television monitor punctuates the space with fuzzily articulated words and throaty, glottal flicks, set to a non-sequitur medley of news footage, and home video. Another monitor flickers silently, showing an expressionless woman slowly cutting holes out of pantyhose pulled over her face. At the end of a hall, the smell of curry wafts about - it’s being served as part of an installation set inside a life-sized replica of an art gallery.
After the gentle monotony of painting after painting mounted on gallery walls, contemporary art antagonizes the viewer with its jarringly different approach. Viewers who looked at the paintings of Caravaggio and Velazquez with a thoughtful air of contemplation suddenly flit about from installation to drawing to video with an air of disguised panic. To my eyes, it almost seems as if they feel cornered, grasping for some strand of intelligibility in a sea of esoteric visual and sonic stimuli. This is that “modern stuff”, so wrapped up in its own dialectics that it refuses to be accessible to any but an inner establishment of art theorists and curators, so removed from the visual vocabulary of the layman that he is reduced to listening, wide-eyed, to a museum guide go on about the tyranny of the phallic signifier. And so the layman resigns himself to incomprehension, closes his mind to a world of art that seems to refuse him.
As I watch museum-goers, I can’t help but feel that I occupy the awkward crevice between the gatekeepers of culture and the baffled masses. Certainly, semesters of art history courses and piles of art historical scholarship about “semiotics” and the “dialectic of the signifier” and psychosexual analysis have me occasionally on the side of the proverbial sniveling critic. I’ve sometimes catch myself turning up my nose at the common museum-goer, knowing that my access to any work of art on a museum wall is probably heightened by my formal training. But then, I stop myself. In an age where art continues to attempt the making of ambitious statements about the physical and philosophical reality of the world, what has caused such a breakdown in understanding between artist and viewer? Is it reasonable to expect a viewer to be a self-educated art historian, or an artist to resort to facile and populist approaches? How can we understand the creation of meaning in art - an unspoken covenant between artist and viewer - from both sides of the equation?
History provides an entry point to investigate these questions. A viewer’s relationship with a work of art is determined almost entirely by the viewer’s own context. And so, a child who is blissfully unaware of tomes of art scholarship and the practicing artist’s concern for technique parses with a work of art as he or she only knows how - viscerally, subjectively. And if it were to stay this way, perhaps things would be different. Rather, we are introduced to what the cultural gatekeepers of the Western tradition deem, not without cause, to be the masterworks of the world. Unsurprisingly, such work is overwhelmingly representational - it depicts recognizable, if stylized visions of our perceptual reality. These are portraits, landscapes, and narrative scenes of real and fictionalized life. That the overwhelming majority of artwork in the cultural pantheon of the West depicts "reality" is not a value judgment about the superiority of representation, however. It is simply a reflection of circumstance.
To understand representation, we must look at the role of art before the advent of photography. The human impulse to document and record date back to relics like the Venus of Willendorf and the Caves of Lascaux. These twenty-thousand year old artifacts speak to a psychological need to manifest ideas in a palpable, reassuringly visible reality. The desire to make tangible the abstractions of the mind as well as the realities of the world has characterized the practice of image-making for centuries. In the absence of the ability to directly capture the optical presence of a person, a narrative, or an event, man turned to the next best option - mimesis. It is not without reason that art has historically served decidedly unromantic and didactic purposes, and that the major impetus for artistic endeavor was religious patronage. From ancient Greece to early Christianity to Victorian high society, painting and sculpture were deeply concerned with creation of trompe l'oeil illusion: the semblance of flesh in marble, or a truly immersive fictive space on the canvas. Here, Biblical narratives were made accessible to the masses of the illiterate, mythical creatures and constructions were given corporeality, and wealth was flaunted in portraits cloaked in ermine, silk, and jewels painted with lifelike gleam. It also comes as no surprise that the important representational innovations of the Renaissance were primarily concerned with getting bridging the divide between our perception and our ability to reproduce it - from a deeper understanding of human anatomy to the use of linear perspective. Representation fulfilled an important psycho-social need, the same that drives us to memorialize both the grand and mundane with photography and video today.
A well-painted portrait of a sitter from centuries past still captivates the imagination today. As we suspend our disbelief and the masses of paint on a canvas cohere into the semblance of a person, we instinctively know how to relate to the painting. And yet a painting is an interpretation of an objective reality through the subjective, fallible lens of the artist’s hand. For as much as two painters may try to paint the same portrait, something is inevitably, intangibly different to each of their approaches. Individual aesthetic priorities peek through at every point in art history - the artist is always present. The underlying problems of converting a three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional space with an idiosyncratic hand came to a head with the development of photography in the mid-18th century. We say that photography is "indexical", that it is an index of the transmission of light at a particular moment in time. It is related to its original subject in the same way that a life cast or death mask is - it is, in a way, much closer to its original. As such it is a medium with “truth value”, an idea that is still the basis of photojournalism today. But for representational artists, it also presented a significant challenge to their domain of competence. The camera effortlessly delineated forms that took centuries for artists to perfect. If painting, drawing, and sculpture were to survive as mediums, they would have to reevaluate the entire premises upon which they had been historically built. Art as it was understood then had to expand its criteria and its scope of investigation.
Liberated of its social obligation to a representative reality, “art for art’s sake” was born. In concert with the unprecedented rate of social and cultural change facilitated by the industrial revolution, art kept up by dispersing outward.. And so while it is possible to generalize that Renaissance humanism was the dominant stylistic trend on the entire European continent for nearly three centuries, no such generalizations are possible now. The twentieth century saw no such hegemony of approach - with such varied ideas as Cubism with its investigation into the very problem of representation, to Pop Art’s reaction to the mass-cultural inundation of the print image, to performance art’s relocation of the creative problem into a space beyond the canvas. In a contemporary moment where our attentions are cleaved to bits by myriads of information, and technology continues to revise the script for how we relate to one another, it would be intellectually disingenuous for art to remain in a cultural backwater, limited by a definition of art as tacked up against a wall. Thus, it is not difficult to see a performative work wherein an artist merely sits in silence at a table across from a viewer, as a direct intellectual heir to the works of the Old Masters.
It is precisely because art has moved at a pace proportional to the rate at which other innovations have redefined our lives that it has become so utterly overwhelming for the average viewer. Despite the fact that a medium like performance art has been practiced for more than half a century now, we as a culture cling to the recognizable, figurative image with a perverse sentimentality. From the very beginning, we are taught that a drawing should “look” like something, and the perennial question from the doting parent of a toddler with a crayon is “what is it supposed to be?”. They’re innocent, and ultimately, probably harmless questions, but they belie a cultural attachment to an art practice that developed out of a social need that has now been fulfilled in other ways. The works of centuries past are important and rightly elevated to the stature they enjoy, but we would do well to acknowledge that they are not an ultimate expression beyond which no further innovation is possible. The typical viewer has the cultural baggage of civilization - the knowledge that certain works of art are considered especially famous, especially iconic - but has never investigated the logic behind it. We have a vague understanding that we should behold Van Gogh’s Starry Night, with special esteem. We infer that the relationship we should have with a work of art is one of passivity: we should merely stand in front of a two-dimensional rectangle and allow our minds to trick ourselves into understanding a constructed reality within those dimensions.
Given these narrow parameters, it’s no wonder that something like a Jackson Pollock painting is still baffling. Stripped of an external visual referent, the viewer is left without the only device he instinctively understands as a criteria for art - resemblance. Snide remarks about “my five year old” being able to do that follow, along with quick dismissal. And certainly, the paint drips running across that canvas aren’t a bravado show of the narrow skill set involved in creating resemblance. But they require a genius of their own - for the end product is the result of a tension between the arbitrariness of the paint drips and the exertion of control through action. Even more confounding to the viewer is the work of art that refuses even to stay on the canvas. Bafflement turns into anger and outrage upon viewing works of performance art. The medium seems like sacrilege against the high altar of aestheticized easel painting, rather than its logical heir. Getting comfortable with this work takes time. In the scope of the history of human creation, new genres of art are still in their infancy, as are the social and cultural changes that spurred it on. We all continue to adapt to both, in real time. And in no way is a comprehensive understanding of art history necessary to reap the benefits of modern art - an acknowledgment of how far we’ve come as a species in the past two centuries will easily suffice. If we accept that art was never as narrowly defined as we are used to thinking, we’ve already come a long way in allowing the viewer to participate more fully in the creation of meaning.
Has art forever departed from the reassuring solace of resemblance? In the age of high resolution imaging, a photorealist painter must come up with a justification for choosing such an antiquated method of execution. And yet, I do not doubt that representation is here to stay for many centuries to come. While this is indeed the era of 4K YouTube and high resolution phone cameras, it is also the age of photographic non-materiality. For digital imaging has moved photography out of the darkroom and into suites of editing software. Facebook and Instagram feeds flood with arrangements of pixels that have never been anything other than ones and zeros, while we have unlearned our inherent trust of the photographic image as a physical reality, thanks to the airbrush. As our lives move increasingly into the simulated and surrogate reality of the computer, we cling to the corporeal and manifestly real with nostalgia. It is not merely that Instagram encourages its user to use vintage filters to intentionally obscure the clinical clarity of modern imaging equipment, but that its very format is reminiscent of the Polaroid. For the very same reasons, the physical reality of a painting as material lovingly smeared across canvas, and sculpture painstakingly hewn out of molecules of matter, are imbued with new significance. Many of the illustrators and fine artists of my generation first learned to paint on a plastic slab with a motion-detecting pen in Adobe Photoshop, but have returned to the palette and easel. Modern figuration and representation have not stagnated, but have paved new conceptual frontiers informed by the changing role of the image in modern life. Despite being more immediately intelligible to the viewer by virtue of its traditional form, it is no less ambitious in its interrogation of the creative impulse.
And what of the contemporary artist, whose options are now more open than ever before? As artistic investigation is no longer circumscribed by a societal need for tangible images and narratives, the end goal of the creative process is no longer clearly defined. And yet, whatever an artist seeks to express or investigate, her or she still operates on the assumption that meaning will be ultimately shared with audiences through common experiences. Be it a photographic portrait, or a political performance piece, the artist must still rely on the expectation that the viewer implicitly understands the artist’s own cultural and temporal context. Whether we are looking at an ancient Greek sculpture or experiencing a multimedia installation of light, video, and sculpture, here is no denying that knowing hard historical facts about the circumstances under which the work was produced will enrich the experience. The artist must understand that it is the viewer’s choice whether to invest the time and mental space to assimilate such information into the experience of the work. As such, the artist’s responsibility is to negotiate between creating something that is accessible to a select group of people in space and time and to evoke a visceral response even in the absence of any context. The artist would struggle in vain to make something completely divested of their consciousness, or their relationship to their own place in time. They also cannot help expressing something that is essential in a larger sense. It helps to know, but is in some ways besides the point that the Mona Lisa was the Florentine Lisa del Giocondo, wife of a sixteenth century silk merchant. It is her enigma, her ability to hold the viewer’s gaze, that captures our attentions. A work of art need not stand on its own, for it is always bolstered by context, but the best work projects an expressive power that holds the viewer captive in their own subjective response to it.
Perhaps the best thing a viewer can do is to simply not be afraid to feel in the face of a work of art. Ingrained in most of us is a sense of how art “should” be, a narrow definition that grips us in a stranglehold of incomprehension when faced with anything other than what we expect. It is what causes myriads of viewers to stand, blighted by an overpowering sense of “should”, in front of a painting as exquisite as Starry Night without so much as looking at the lyrical beauty of Van Gogh’s hand. The viewer must reclaim confidence in the legitimacy of their own subjective, visceral response to a work of art - even, or perhaps, especially, if that response is one of confusion, disgust, or hatred. It is especially those feelings that are worth honoring, confronting and analyzing. For art’s expressive potential reaches far beyond the ability to create both mild pleasantries and transcendent beauty - it shocks and titillates and repulses in order to force us to face uncomfortable truths and the reality of our own prejudice.
So, the next time you stand in front of a work of art, remember to indulge in the subjectivity of your response. Remember and acknowledge your own frame of reference. Honor that your experience of the work cannot be invalidated by judgments of critics or cultural gatekeepers or peers, or anyone at all. It’s the beginning of a dialogue between you and the previously inscrutable work of art before you. You’ll find that all art - even that weird modern stuff - speaks after all.