Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Debate/Art: On Jake, MOMA and abstraction

Oh, no! I’ve got to stay up late tonight to register for Big Jake? I’ve got to wait on line dressed up as Boba Fett? I remember when you used to register for tournaments by fax. Hell, I remember when you used to register for tournaments by mail. Now you have to like them on Facebook, tweet them to all your followers, drink their special Kool-Aid, and still you have to stay up until midnight.

Some things don’t excite me like they used to. I just wasn’t made for these times.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned yesterday, on Saturday we trundled over to the Museum of Modern Art, which was CP’s choice of cultural venue for the trip. Fine by me. For all practical purposes MOMA was the place where I first discovered art, back when I was in high school. I didn’t know anything, and I had it in my head that if I was going to go look at art, it ought to be modern, me being a modern sort of guy at heart. So, MOMA it was. Walking through it now, I can still recall the effect things like “Starry Night” and the Monet water lilies had on me originally. Imagine never having seen them before. When you do see them, they immediately punch you in the stomach. The combination of beauty and inherent meaning and life and depth are overwhelming.

All of which is hard to appreciate when the place is packed to the gills. Your hit parade of modern artists, the Van Goghs and Rousseaus and Monets and Cezannes—the galleries with these guys were fairly wall to wall with people. Which wouldn’t bother me too much but I can’t for the life of me figure out why half of them are taking photographs of the paintings. A photograph of a painting is like a sculpture of a novel. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s certainly not anything but a capturing of the image in your camera, with terrible lighting. What in God’s name is the point? For twenty bucks you can buy a catalog, with good printing, or for fifty bucks, an art book with superb printing, if you want a record of what you saw. But there are people walking through photographing literally every picture they pass. It’s hard enough to appreciate art in a crowded environment. So instead you take a picture of it and go look at it on your iPhone later? What am I missing here? Is that the definition of a modern-day visit to the art museum?

As one progresses through time at the MOMA, getting away from the early 20th Century, one finds fewer people and more opportunity to look at things. And it is extremely important, if you have any interest in art whatsoever, which as far as I am concerned is roughly equivalent to having an interest in breathing, to put yourself in a position to see art in person. One can talk all day about understanding art, and there is no question that there are certain facts about a given work that might enhance your appreciation, but at some level, just looking at it (or in the case of music, listening to it, or in the case of writing, reading it) is the primary action. Take the Monet water lilies. You don’t have to know squat to appreciate the colors and composition. You barely even have to know they’re water lilies. They’re pretty, and everything flows from that. As a matter of fact, an awful lot of art is pretty, i.e., an attempt to capture some sort of beauty, and you don’t need someone to tell you whether you find something beautiful. As art moves away from that, however, there is an intellectual aspect to it, but still, if the art doesn’t affect you on its own level, absent the intellectual aspect, it’s pretty jejune. A work of art could be trying to impress upon you the horrors of war, for instance; that work is unlikely to be pretty in the normal sense of the word, but it can still affect you, and therefore still be art. Come to think of it, the only thing that can’t be art is something that doesn’t affect you, or at least if something doesn’t affect you, it fails as art.

Every visit to a museum reaps new benefits. I have to admit that this time, for no reason I can explain, I was very much drawn to an awful lot of abstract works. I’ve noticed this lately, that the more abstract work I see, the more I start to appreciate it. And not because of any intellectual improvement of my appreciation mechanism. I have just started to like looking at non-representational, even minimalist works. Go figure. It’s not that I can’t explain it, but I don’t have to. The works appeal to me at a non-intellectual level. That’s art.

Then again, there is some art that only has an intellectual function, like Duchamp’s bicycle wheel. As far as I’m concerned, this may be the most important piece in the whole museum, because it redefines art as what artists call art. (And it predates his “Fountain” by a few years.) It’s more than about ready-mades. It’s about what art can and can't be. The Impressionists had been saying for years that just because their art didn’t fit what the art world insisted art must be didn’t make their work not art, but at the same time, their art, however much it wasn’t the art of the time, had most of the trappings of what was expected of art, i.e., representation, clarity, attempts at beauty (even if the first viewers felt that the beauty was not achieved). But when you throw down a bicycle wheel and call it art because you’re an artist, and the only reason it is art is because you say it is, that’s huge. It clarifies abstraction (which it didn’t completely predate; plenty of pre-20th century art is bordering on, or past, abstraction). Once you know that the rules are what artists claim the rules to be, you can appreciate, or not, literally anything.

So, now I can look at abstract expressionists and wish I had that on my wall, without thinking oh, I could do that. I couldn’t. I couldn’t paint an all-white canvas, at least not well. More to the point, I didn’t. Some artist did. That’s what makes it art.

In our group Saturday, JV was probably the biggest abstraction fan. It probably goes with his essential inner scientist. As I say, I find myself changing in that direction. Not any inner scientist, of course, but just my inner appreciator. It’s getting more appreciative. I like that.

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