Breaking the ice with an art museum.
Useful context to carry to an art museum to appreciate the creation and curation of its art
Over the years my visit to art museums has been accompanied by friends who have little to no background in art. I often find them roaming aimlessly in museum corridors with the canvas refusing to speak to them. Sometimes the two manage to strike up a conversation but other times they fail. Surely there must be a way for a lay person to enjoy themselves in an art museum without feeling like they’ve paid for tickets to a movie they don’t understand the language of?
If I look at the counterparts of an art museum, let’s say a science museum, we know it carries exhibits that deal with concepts of science. When I go to a history museum I know that the artefacts displayed there are of historical significance, but when I go to an art museum it is there because it is… art? But what is art? Why is something art and something not? How does one explain to a layman why that thing sitting in an art museum is art without walking them through a lecture on art history? While I closely hold the thought that art lives in the individual’s interpretation, that explanation doesn’t seem enough. Without some valuable context, it is not easy to wholly appreciate the creation and curation of art. Context, which should be effortlessly communicable without requiring someone to flip through history books.
I have to confess, I am an interaction designer by profession and a lesson in art history may have popped into my lectures now and then. But I still grapple with the same pain of stepping into an art museum and feeling overwhelmed. Many museum visits later, I’ve tried to capture that context in some of my thoughts below. This hopefully lets you start a conversation with the canvas even if it doesn’t always break the ice with you.
Please read them as part of my very personal interpretation and viewpoint, painted with broad brushstrokes.
1. Celebrating the craft
Some artworks represent the highest altitude of skill and craftsmanship mastered by the people of that time. They could have other attributes that make them worthy of artistic celebration, but for the most part, they are a testament to human artistry and competence in the flesh. They show the best use or at least a pivotal one of the grammar of painting (tools, methods, materials, composition etc.) of that time.
If you saw this painting in real life it would appear more lifelike and alive than the objects and people around you. That is one of the apogees of Renaissance art. Prior to them, medieval art often relied on stylized and symbolic imagery over accurate representations of the world. During the Renaissance, however, artists focused heavily on studying human anatomy, perspective and light. They are one of the first instances of human beings, being able to capture the world around them so realistically.
Jackson Pollock didn’t use a brush to paint in its traditional sense, no. He poured paint straight from a can or along a stick onto large canvases lying down on the floor. This bold signature method of painting, which later went on to be called the ‘drip technique’, was completely unheard of before. The artist used it intentionally to express the irrationality and vulnerability of human nature in his work, which he successfully did. His fluid style of painting allowed him to create dynamic and expressive compositions that resonated with people for its energy, movement, and raw emotions. He revolutionized experimenting with techniques to create dynamic artworks and is remembered as one of the most innovative of the century, inspiring many other artists to follow suit.
Technology is widely accepted as a tool, and medium to create art today but that wasn’t so until the early ’70s and ’80s. April Grieman was one of the first designers or ‘transmedia artist’ as she likes to call herself, to embrace computers as a design tool. Apart from mending and bending type, grid, and layout to create new a new wave of postmodernist designs that dominated the late 80s and 90's, her graphic design work was symbolic of a paradigm shift of embracing computer technology to create art which was earlier only dominated by print, pen and paper.
2. Being a historical artefact
Some artworks are iconic for being historical artefacts themselves. Beyond being celebrated for their high craft, they also stand as emblems of history. In fact, they might as well find their place in a history museum.
The Athenaeum Portrait is an unfinished painting by Gilbert Stuart of President George Washington. The painting does not just adorn the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but you can find the same picture being modelled on the 1 dollar US bill. The artwork represents more than an unfinished painting, it is the source of iconography that resides in the pockets and wallets of many people around the world.
Another one of my favourite examples is this Untitled artwork which hosts a collection of portraits taken in photo booths across carnivals and fairs spanning across Midwest and southern states of America. Who took these and why remains unknown, but today it resides in one of the finest museums of the world today, forming what can be called an accidental composite portrait of America.
3. Representing the consciousness of an era
Nothing better represents the human consciousness and zeitgeist of a time better than its art. The art of an era demonstrates the ability of the human brain at that time to think a certain way, whether it was their ability to simplify forms, abstract figures, translate their consciousness to the canvas or simply subvert the meaning of objects. It also captures the common sentiment of the people at that time and all the things that mattered to them — folklore, divinity, nobility, wealth, conflict, peace or simply love.
The painting below isn’t significant only because one might find it beautiful. It is so because, in a time where only carefully contoured realistic paintings of historical subjects, and religious themes were considered valuable, paintings like these shook such ideas to their core by introducing visible, loose brushstrokes of still lives and outdoors that were captured at the moment. Hence it is more than just a beautiful painting of a woman and a parasol, it is a sharp response to years of closely guarded notions of what was considered worthy of art. It represents the shift to a new form of expression that celebrated colour, light and fleeting beauty of everyday life in its very moment.
This is also why you find artworks where there is flat iron with pin tacks on it, the collage of a French actress's head mixed with a wooden dance mask from Cameroon, and a performative art called ‘Karawane’ where the narrator dressed up in metals and cardboard recites nonsensical syllables resembling no known language. It doesn’t make sense because it isn’t supposed to. Very much so like the world didn’t make sense for the Dadaists in the 1910s. When wars, plague and poverty dominated the work after the first world war came to an end, everything made a lot less sense to the people who lived in it. Naturally, their art represented this. The whole intent of Dadaist art was to reject the reason and aesthetics of modernism, the very values of Western culture and art which they believed led to the outbreak of the war in the first place.
The lack of sense in Man Ray’s Cadeau, was, in his words, “designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify, inspire reflection, but not to arouse admiration for any technical excellence usually sought or valued in objects classified as works of art.” Hannah Hoch’s collage attempts to examine the complex facets of modern feminism by coalescing the head of a movie star, with the fine cutlery of a domestic goddess and the mask of an indigenous other. The nonsensical words in Karawane were supposed to reference the ineffectiveness of European powers to prevent world war I through rational diplomatic discussions, his obscure costume was further supposed to distance itself from its audience by appearing foreign and exotic.
4. When the art lies in its thought
An artist named Adrian Piper has a set of honey jars storing her hair, nails and skin collected all the way from December 1, 1985, sitting in MoMA’s in her work titled ‘What will remain of me’. This ongoing artwork will be concluded by housing her cremated remains in the same place. Kader Attia’s artwork is a 4:30 min video of sugar cubes stacked on top of a silver platter being covered with motor oil causing it to dissolve, playing on a CRT TV at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Why is any of that significant? Why it is called art? As the writer and poet Van Dyke best said, it’s the thought that counts.
Adrian Piper aims to challenge race-based assumptions and prejudices through her practice. Through ‘What will remain of me’, Piper insists on a place for black women in the museum, but, in an act that is as literal as it is ironic, she does this by supplying her actual body rather than simply an artwork about the issue.
Kader Attia’s ‘Oil and Sugar’ illustrates the inadvertent impact of commodities oil and sugar on the world. The extraction, trading and processing of these substances have driven imperial expansion, geopolitical power struggle, environmental devastation, enslavement and displacement across the globe.
Art has always been associated with being an object of beauty, but these forms of contemporary art push it to be an object of thought and speculation. Some of them also go beyond the realm of the canvas or sculpture to emphasize the thought processes and methods of production as the value of the work, with the intention of raising questions about the human condition and the socio-political world it occupies.
5. High emotional quotient
Yes, these are the kind of work that perhaps requires the least amount of context for you to enjoy. Those that are truly created to consume you without reading much into them. This could be really any artwork that stirs your soul and for any godforsaken reason. But some artworks were created by the artists purely for that intention, to make you feel things. At least this was the point of many abstract expressionist artworks. In an essay written in 1948 Barnett Newmann said — ‘Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘’life’’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings’. Feelings that the artists felt themselves and decided to pour into their works. Grand in size, rich in colours, and commanding the space they reside in and the people around them, they are meant to produce a contemplative, emotional or meditational response in the viewer.
Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions….If you…are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.”
In his attempts to depict an unsentimental New York, Edward Hopper went on to create beautiful depictions of urban loneliness and solitude which stir many sentiments of despair or shared comfort even amongst its most modern viewers. It is impossible to look at his artworks and not feel the colossus of the city weighing on you along with the quiet or painful alienation of his subjects. Hopper’s paintings were composed to have a semblance of cinematic movie stills, but eventually went on to inspire countless movie shots even today.
6. Story of the art or the artist itself
Stories can move mountains. Stories are all around us, in the news, in religious texts, in music, in art. It comes as no surprise then that one of the things used to establish the legitimacy of an artwork is indeed the story of the artwork itself. It’s provenance. It’s the story of its source — where it originated from, how it travelled many hands, homes and sometimes hounds to be where it is today. That very story sometimes is what piques a deep interest in an artwork. There is no better artwork to illustrate than the glorious Mona Lisa itself.
What catapulted the mysterious portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci to immortal fame was an unprecedented burglary in 1913. Images of the painting were splashed across international newspapers making her a household painting that people then eagerly anticipated to see.
Van Gogh’s paintings are some of the most vivid works of art I’ve personally laid my eyes on, I remember when I first saw them, they looked so brilliant in colour and texture it seemed like the canvas was on fire. However, every time you see his work, it is never disassociated with the story of his painful death, the memory of an artist so tormented by the sound of his chaotic mind that he decided to chop his own ears off.
On 27 July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest in possibly a similar wheat field that he had been painting or a local barn. In the wheatfield and the barn painted by him in the last few weeks of his life, he wrote to his brother Theo, that he deliberately tried to express sadness and extreme loneliness in the painting. It is impossible to look at this painting and not think about how the chaotic flock of birds in the sky against the dark sky depict an unnerving melancholy that the artist himself felt.
