To Understand a Painting, You Need
a Chair
By Timothy
Hawkesworth
January 2005
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.
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