Response to “Broadway Boogie Woogie”
As a class assignment, we were tasked to pick a piece from the MoMA permanent collection and react to it after absorbing it in for 45 minutes.
Here’s the assignment details:
Having visited the MoMA multiple times before, I wanted to pick a piece that intrigued me every time I visited. Amongst the many, Piet Mondrian is an artist that drew me to his work.
Join me in this exercise if you wish to, in staring at this piece for the next 45 minutes :)
The first thing that popped out to me was the box of yellow inside the box of red inside the box of blue. There is a lot of yellow, red, and blue around the painting, but the arrangement of blue, then red, then yellow in that order provided the most contrast to catch my attention. Also, it being in the upper right third of the image made it easy for my eyes to be drawn to it.
Then my eyes seemed to wonder what was present in the other 3 corner thirds of the painting. The bottom right third is empty, the bottom left third is slightly busier, but still empty at the point of the intersection itself, and the top left third is similar to the bottom left third.
Then my eyes wondered to the question of symmetry. Somehow, the bottom left and the top left thirds seemed symmetrical, less so mathematically, and more so conceptually. They both had a larger yellow box with a pale small box inside. They both had an empty pale ‘box’ at the thirds.
A question that then came to my mind was, are the ‘pale boxes’ actually meant to be boxes, or are they meant to be empty spaces. This meant questioning whether the pale boxes were meant to be seen as the background of the image on which yellow lines ran prominently, or whether there was a conceptual large yellow box at the back of the image, onto which pale boxes existed in a spotty manner. My initial reaction was to just assume that the pale ‘boxes’ were the base, and yellow lines ran across the canvas, but pondering on the concept of duality, and critical thought on ‘Ways of Seeing’ led me to, honestly, no answer — it could very easily be both and there would be no way of truly finding out.
My eyes wandered back to the red on the canvas. The red is very interestingly used, in the sense that there isn’t much of it. It almost seemed that Mondrian was very aware of the power that the color red had because of it’s contrast to the other colors used on the canvas, and used red sparingly, only to very intentionally draw attention of his audience to the spots where red is indeed used. This made me feel a little warmer in the inside, convincing myself that Mondrian was indeed an intentional, and even possibly a very smart, artist, rather than a happy go lucky fella who just drew lines and boxes and pretended that it was ‘abstract art’, without any intentionality.
That got me thinking on my own definition of a scam and art, in terms of abstract art. I believe all art is political in nature. Following that train of thought, all art must have intention. Even art pieces that intentionally break intention, intentionally do so. They are a culmination of decisions made my artists. This applies to all media of art — film, music, writing/literature, games etc. As such, this piece seemed to have very specific elements of intentionality to it that draws me to the conclusion that Mondrian was indeed making art, and wasn’t a, pardon the pun, scam artist (badum tss).
The painting over the 45 minutes started to meld together; the yellows and the pale boxes faded out, and the red spots almost danced around. To some extent, I felt like I was tripping out on the reds on the canvas. I could feel my eyes very excitedly hopping around from one red spot to another red spot. I could feel myself playing games of for example, being a frog, and pretending that anything not red was lava (funnily enough because if anything, lava’s color is closest to the red than not), and that I had to hop my very best to make it safely to the other red spots. FYI, I make a very good hoppy frog. I never died, not even once :)
Towards the end, when my mind and my eyes started to tire out, I rested on the blues. They were very calming. Even towards the last couple of moments (at this point, I couldn’t tell you if they were minutes or seconds, or even potentially decades — my phone could have malfunctioned and I could have spaced out for 10 years just staring at this piece ignoring my reality), the blues were very very therapeutic, and left me with a sense of peace and clarity. I felt like I had achieved a true sense of fulfillment, not one that I can explain in words, or even reason, but it felt real.
I was relieved when my phone rang. Shocked slightly, because it meant a couple of strangers started staring at me, but that’s okay :’). It’s New York City, weird shit happens all the time anyways; I was just glad to leave my seat feeling a lot better and calmer than when I began, and to stretch my legs.