Left and Right: The two walls of painting of Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Chlebnikov. Velimir Chlebnikov, 2004 (detail); steel pavilion, 300 x 330 x 689 in.; 30 paintings, oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead, and mixed media on canvas; 18 paintings, 75 x 130 in.; 12 paintings, 75 x 110 in. Courtesy of MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Hall Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

The mass and material of each of the three installations bury the visitor in strata, not only in painting above painting above painting, or Kiefer’s signature accumulation of paint and other media, but also in the layers of undulating, rusted-rebar-spiked concrete snaking eighty-two feet in Étroit Sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow Are the Vessels) (2002), and twenty lead beds arrayed in The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Révolution) (1992/2013). In Velimir Chlebnikov—based on the eponymous 18th-century Russian poet and futurist’s mathematical proposition that great naval battles occur at 317-year intervals—visitors find themselves deep in a pictorial representation of this history, and under an unsettled ocean, black, gray, white, and ochre, studded with three-dimensional replicas of naval vessels. In The Women of the Revolution, the gray beds are draped with lead sheets and arranged in two rows, facing each other. They evoke the inescapability of hospital wards, psychiatric institutions, Dickensian orphanages, and cemetery graves, alluding as well as to the shrouding of women in history. The surface of the lead is stained with the colors of mineral deposits, tracing strata even here.

The two other Kiefer works that share the Hall Art Foundation building at MASS MoCA with Velimir Chlebnikov. Left: Étroits Sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow Are the Vessels), 2002 (detail); concrete, steel, lead and earth; 60 x 960 x 110 in. Courtesy of MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Hall Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Saul Rosenfield. Right: The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Révolution), 1992/2013 (detail); lead beds: dimensions variable; photograph on lead: 138 x 174 in. Courtesy of MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Hall Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

It is difficult to extricate the experience of any of Kiefer’s artworks from either their thick, dark, heavy materiality or from their historical resonances to warfare, atrocity, and revolution. So it is strange to discover a simultaneous but completely different experience: play. The panels in Velimir Chlebnikov, for example, appear at first to document the movements and wreckage of enormous naval vessels mid-ocean. From a distance, however, many of these seascapes seem to reveal themselves as beaches or ponds, a trick of the eye that recasts the warships and submarines as models or toys propelled by the hands of children. And when viewed from above, the beds in The Women of the Revolution seem to represent not only the places where bodies might rest, but also, applying a radically different sense of scale, a landscape. The shift is unavoidable as each bed’s central cavity seems no longer to represent the imprint of a revolutionary woman’s body but instead records a desert crater, bomb site, or blasted heath. If these associations seem distant from the content of play, they are “playful” because they take the “bed” and turn it into what it is not, a landscape.

Two panels from Velimir Chlebnikov, which resemble the open ocean of naval warfare, at times seem to shift in scale to reveal a pond, cove, or estuary with model ships. Velimir Chlebnikov, 2004 (detail); steel pavilion, 300 x 330 x 689 in.; 30 paintings, oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead and mixed media on canvas; 18 paintings, 75 x 130 in.; 12 paintings, 75 x 110 in. Courtesy of MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Hall Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

This shifting of perspective and scale suggests that Kiefer is not only referring back to history but also to childhood—not only to primordial battles and human attempts to make sense of them, but also to games that start with the imagination of toddlers. From one moment to the next, my impression of the work changes: I am buried in the sense of the material, with repeating canvasses paneling a chapel-like space or repeating beds lining a ward; in another, it is my finger that moves the toy boat, my hand that tumbles a stone into a crater.

Kiefer, however, does not leave visitors to their own devices. As the exhibition brochure explains, “(W)e find a single word inscribed in one painting . . . Aphrodite, and near it, among one of the few canvases without a ship affixed, the words Hero and Leander. Aphrodite, goddess of fertility and sexual rapture, arose, according to the poet Hesiod, from the foaming sea churned up when Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, casting the severed genitalia into the ocean. Hero and Leander were lovers in Aphrodite’s court, whose secret nightly rendezvous required swimming nearly a mile each way across the treacherous Hellespont.”[1]

Two of the beds in The Women of the Revolution showing could be mistaken from above for desert or mining landscapes, shifting in scale from intimate to massive. The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Révolution), 1992/2013 (detail); lead beds: dimensions variable; photograph on lead: 138 x 174 in. Courtesy of MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Hall Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

But most people don’t know anything about Cronus or Uranus and think of Aphrodite in terms not of fertility but love. And the story of Hero and Leander, if people think about it at all, represents a tragedy of love akin to Romeo and Juliet. (Leander drowns after he gets lost and Hero kills herself by jumping into the sea.) Keifer’s visual and verbal references to Chlebnikov’s arcane mathematics, to his military history, and to the mythological sea battle between Cronus and Uranus requires the viewer to read into the panels other histories and the relationship among love, hate, and despair. None of Kiefer’s symbols, it seems, remains stable. So the upside-down gloves that adorn three of the Chlebnikov images might read as a hamsa—a sign in Islamic and Jewish lore that protects against evil—or the hand of an unseen power (a god or dictator or admiral), or the lost “hands” of battle (that is, the sailors), or the hands of children pushing toy boats. Similarly, the beds frame the women revolutionaries, whose names Kiefer has scrawled on the installation’s walls, as wounded and warded together; the orphanage-like arrangement reminds us that their histories have been abandoned.

The Kiefer works evoke many associations, some explicit such as the reference to the goddess Aphrodite (written in Greek in the image on the right), others ambiguous such as the glove hanging (in image on the left). Anslem Kiefer. Velimir Chlebnikov, 2004 (detail); Steel pavillion, 300 x 330 x 689 inches; 30 paintings, oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead and mixed media on canvas; 18 paintings, 75 x 130 inches; 12 paintings, 75 x 110 inches. Courtesy of MASS MoCA , North Adams, MA, and Hall Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Saul Rosenfield

If it is difficult to emerge from the exhibition without feeling the weight of all these layers, the works equally instill a sense of buoyancy. The works are beautiful in the way of the old wood, old stone, and weathered steel discovered in churches or tumble-down houses. Kiefer asks us to be aware of the stories he recounts: Chlebnikov’s, Jules Michelet’s 1854 study of women who played a role in the French Revolution, and the French Nobel Laureate Alexis Leger’s poetry in Étroit Sont les Vaisseaux. But the works also demand that we inhabit our bodies. Despite the writing they incorporate, Kiefer’s artworks are not apprehendable as written histories. They are legible primarily as the sensation of weight, the layer upon layer. Kiefer scrawls a Leger quotation on the wall, “Une même vague par le monde, une même vague depuis Troie, Roule sa hanche jusq’à nous” [One same wave throughout the world, one wave since Troy rolls its haunch towards us].[2] And so we feel these works as we feel—and perhaps, fear—the rolling of this wave, a commentary as much on the feeling as on the nature of history.

Anselm Kiefer is on view at MASS MoCA through 2028. This year, it closes for winter on November 2, 2014.

[1] MASS MoCA,“Anselm Kiefer,” Exhibition Brochure. North Adams, MA: Hall Art Foundation and Mass MoCA (2013), 3–4.

[2] Both the quotation and its translation are from the MASS MoCA exhibition brochure.

Detail of Academic Connections: Media Atlas, 2014, an undertaking of Professor W.J.T. Mitchell’s Theories of Media class students, in a gallery at the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

At the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, visual-culture scholar W.J.T. Mitchell and the students of his “Theories of Media” class have colonized a gallery to realize a contemporary version of German art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929). The result is what Mitchell calls a “media atlas.” Each student was invited to choose an image, describe why, and tack the image and the description to a wall covered in black fabric. Warburg sought to uncover the interconnections among forms and around themes that he observed resonating throughout history. Like Mitchell’s students, he pinned images of paintings, sculptures, buildings, and cultural ephemera, including magazines and newspaper photographs, to black panels. The resonances among the images on a particular panel might be more or less obvious, and during the utopian project (which was unfinished when he died), Warburg constantly moved images and revised relationships. As an undertaking, the Mnemosyne Atlas stands as a monument to the processes of visual association, history making, and memory,^[i] and, as Mitchell puts it, “helps frame contemporary questions about how we use and understand images.”[ii]

Installation shot of Academic Connections: Media Atlas, mixed media on three 8 x 4-foot homasote panels, totaling 96 x 144 inches, and selections from the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago. Photo: Sarah Mendelsohn. The Media Atlas is a collaborative effort of Professor W.J.T. Mitchell’s Theories of Media class; the accompanying selection of artworks were chosen by Mitchell and visiting scholar Francesco Gori.

Mitchell’s students have the option of explicitly demonstrating Warburg-like resonances among the images by stretching different colors of yarn from one image to another in order to suggest connections: “visual similarity” (red), “common technical basis” (yellow), and “historical adjacency” (blue). The resulting wall collage invites museum visitors to adopt Warburg’s openness to the processes of connection by engaging the specific examples of Mitchell’s students and the interconnection of following the yarn trails, and it displays these processes as concrete and visually compelling.

Left: Jan Tichy. History of Painting (detail), 2014, at the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo: Jan Tichy. Right: Tiffany Dome and mosaics of Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo: Saul Rosenfield.

The visual experience of Warburgian interconnection reaches an aesthetic crescendo at the Chicago Cultural Center, a Beaux Arts wonderland with two stained glass domes, two grand staircases, and enough floor, wall, and ceiling mosaics to pave a city of Roman baths. To maximize Chicago artist Jan Tichy’s History of Painting (2014), enter on Randolph Street, climb the center’s more modest staircase, view the more modest dome, and tread the more modest mosaics. History of Painting emerges on the top floor landing as the grandest mosaic of all.

Tichy has taped together 9,261 color 35mm slides from the teaching collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tichy segregates the slides by predominant hue, and the resulting three mosaic panels, each one 140 by 100 inches, pave a spectrum of color that stretches thirty feet across three windows, which gather light from an internal courtyard. Each labeled slide depicts an artwork, and the collection was once integral to art-history classes. The result is first a spectacular stained-glass window, a translucent mosaic; then a memorial to a not-so-distant pre-digital age; then an archive, visible all at once, of both art-historical icons and their lesser-known kin; and finally an atlas, like Warburg’s, of visual resonances.

Left: Jan Tichy. History of Painting, 2014; 35mm slides, tape; three panels, each 140 x 100 in. Photo: Jan Tichy. Right: detail of History of Painting, 2014. Photo: Saul Rosenfield. History of Painting is part of aroundcenter <http://www.aroundcenter.org/>, a nine-part project by Tichy at the Chicago Cultural Center, including photographic, video projection, and light sculpture installations.

From close up, the works converse across time. A random glance reveals both serendipitous formal connections, for example, between Stuart Davis’s Premiere (1957), Will Barnet’s Orange and Green Space (1958), and topical connections, for example, between Eileen Cooper’s If the Space Fits (1987) and Felix Vallotton’s Mulatto Woman (1913). The slides, rather than focusing attention on the failure of the reproductions to replicate the experience of viewing the original artworks, reconceive the experience as both sensually and intellectually stimulating, reminding the contemporary viewer of the capacity of film photography to produce sharp, clear images even when tiny, and through Tichy’s ministrations to create a work whose power resolutely resides in both its parts and their sum.

From afar, History of Painting recalls the simpler mosaics I’d already seen and foreshadows their increasing elaboration, which culminates in the Preston Bradley Hall, a 135-by-49-foot room that is tiled floor to ceiling with mother of pearl, glass, and stone, and surmounted with the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world. It is hard to maintain a position of asceticism here. At first, the hall—the whole building—seems open to characterization as the glorifying edifice of a 19th-century city asserting its stature through the pomp and circumstance of a civic palace. But the 1897 building, completed just 26 years after the Chicago fire and known as the “People’s Palace,” was in fact the first home of Chicago’s public library, and the Hall’s first use was as the library’s book-delivery room. Tichy’s panels end up resonating with Warburg’s undertaking in more ways, since the library as well as the Art Institute are each archiving institutions, and History of Painting is the archive made manifest, accessible both aesthetically and conceptually to the adventurous viewer. And like the Mnemosyne Atlas, History of Painting also scrambles the canon-defining process of art historiography.

Lilli Carré. One Second (Eucalyptus), 2013; video still. Courtesy of the Artist and Western Exhibitions, Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Finally, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, there emerges the unlikeliest Warburgian connection of all: a small show of drawings, videos, and ceramics by animator Lilli Carré. Here, what comes into view are not the resonances of diverse images but the resonances of diverse experiences of movement and stasis. At one moment, the visitor engages Carré’s icon-/dingbat-like squiggles and shapes as stationary and isolated drawings; at another, their transformation, through combination and motion, into active and integrated elements of storytelling. Drawings of vaguely vegetal shapes that resemble sectioned or whole fruits or vegetables becomes animated, transforming on the screen into the activity of a village of organisms seen through a microscope, or into a bird’s-eye view of a street scene on a planet inhabited by non-humans. Even its apparently representational title, One Second (Eucalyptus) (2013), leaves this productive confusion intact.

Lilli Carré. Installation view, The Negotiation, 2013; video still, at BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Lilli Carré, MCA Chicago. Dec 17, 2013-Apr 15, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Carré’s most elaborate work is a two-video installation, The Negotiation (2013). Each video loops at different rates, so that the combination constantly re-creates itself. As the eye takes in the action—sometimes jumping from one screen to the other as if at a tennis match, other times taking in both screens at once—the stories reconfigure themselves, unfolding in different combinations and juxtapositions, claiming different levels of attention, and inspiring different strategies of seeing. The animation turns the immobile objects Carré has drawn into activity, but the moving video never hides—or seeks to hide—each object’s origin as discrete and stationary; the visitor sees movement and stasis at the same time.

Carré’s objects, Tichy’s slides, and the media images of Mitchell’s students share a mode of operation: the juxtaposition of entities that, separate and stable at a distance, close up reveal resonances that not only expose their intersections but also put them in motion. Each of these deceptively modest installations rewards the visitor who takes the time to view and re-view, to shuffle and repeat, to fall into an extended relationship with the images.

And this is exactly how Warburg treated his atlas, as a work in process, the final years of the historian’s life spent moving images around in an activity of association and combination. What remains today of the Mnemosyne Atlas are the images of the blackboards as they stood at one moment of time, a trace of a product that was, in fact, as shifting as Carré’s videos. The gift of these exhibitions—their synchronicity—as if they had reached out to each other along Mitchell’s tri-colored yarn trails, is the revelation of the role that both intuition and intellect play not only in the composition of art—and indeed, all visual and media culture—but also in our reception of these creative and social activities. It is also the recognition that, once they are set to the music of seemingly random association, neither Mitchell’s media atlas nor Tichy’s mosaic history remain, in the act of viewing, any more still than Carré’s animations.

Academic Connections: Media Atlas is on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art through April 13, 2014.

aroundcenter (including Jan Tichy’s History of Painting) is on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through April 27, 2014.

BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Lilli Carré is on view the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through April 15, 2014.

Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. All photos from Christian Marclay: The Clock; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Everyone I know who saw Christian Marclay’s Clock raved about it. The 24-hour sequence of film clips, most with a view of a clock face, is more action-packed than I’d imagined it would be. The focus is as much on the events surrounding the passage of time as on the instruments we use to measure that passage. In this way, The Clock isn’t about clocks at all, and often is only circumstantially related to temporality. What it’s really about is film technology, the nature of story telling, nostalgia, and the absurdity of life.

First things first: you don’t need to watch all 24 hours. I say this with the arrogance of someone who saw only two hours; and I say it even though I am constitutionally drawn to finishing things I begin, even though I believe there is a qualitative difference between doing something for a little time and doing that same thing for a long time. I recognize the irrationality of my confidence in grasping Marclay’s epic after experiencing only 8 percent of it. It is also true that some people insist that one period of Clock watching—10:00 am to noon, for instance—is qualitatively different from another—4:00 to 5:30 pm; or 1:00 to 2:00 am. Such natural enthusiams are proof of Marclay’s achievement, even if they are tinged, perhaps, with nostalgia; that is, influenced by the memories and narratives we fabricate as a fortress against the passage of time. But there is a way in which every period—whether period equals segment formed from connected scenes, hour, or length of time I sat in the theater—is always the same.

Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Everyone admires Marclay’s craft. He strings together thousands and thousands of moments from cinematic history, transforming fragments into a whole or, more precisely—since few witness the complete opus—into a series of “scenes” that somehow tell a story none of them originally set out to tell. He invites the sound from one fragment to extend seamlessly into the soundscape of the next. He conjures such segues with images as well, fading not into a double exposure, at least not during my two hours—11:15 am to 1:15 pm—but into a double exposure of associations. (And he goes beyond film editing techniques such as shot-countershot to produce this illusion of continuity from one fragment to the next.) Buttressing the whole composition is the beat, beat, beat of the clock—digital, analog, mechanical (even a sundial!)—whose relentless tick-tock presence comprises not only a visual metronome but also the false sense that we are experiencing the passage of time as linear, as complete, as fully accounted for. What a delightful fictional device! On its face, the clocks prove that time exists; beneath this facade, the seconds don’t add up, revealing the artificiality of the whole overlay of minutes and hours.

But mostly what Marclay achieves is a continuous recollection not of films we remember having seen—although there is plenty of that—but of films that we feel we’ve seen, even though we haven’t, as if the whole history of film comprised our collective (sub)consciousness. You and I are there. It appears to be no accident that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gallery in which The Clock plays through June 2 is a darkened theater, evoking something of what I imagine as the hushed, almost religious, original cinema experience. The ritual begins outside the sanctuary. Here, I experience a different sort of time. That’s part of the Clock experience too, the period of waiting. People wait for hours. Many will wait longer than I will have watched (the price of redemption, I guess). Eventually, I am called and guided by one of the two ushers ministering the sanctum to one of the pre-seating, standing-room places at the back of the theater. I hug the wall for 30 minutes with a dozen other initiates. Before us spreads not only the screen but also the heads of visitors silhouetted against grainy film clips. Finally, having withstood these trials of endurance, I am called for a second time. I shiver as I follow the darkened profile of my usher down one of the two aisles, past row after row of three-seat couches, toward the promise of the epiphany.

Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, October 15–November 13, 2010; courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography; © Christian Marclay. The White Cube gallery arrangement is slightly different from the SFMOMA arrangement I describe.

Despite the revelations of The Clock, I do not rave about it the way my friends have. I rave about it differently. I am never bored, just clear that one time could pass for another. And that, dear readers, is the point. Even if 11:15 to 1:15 would be your favorite of all Marclay time periods—it certainly is mine!—eventually, I predict, you would feel a saturation, an unsettled sensation that you’ve had enough. But there is no relief, because then, compulsion forces you to continue on and on and on. Because, well, you might miss something.

Isn’t this what life is, a sequence of such promises? We stay and stay and stay in order to satisfy the desire to see what will happen next. I can’t know anything about this string of unrelated events—orphaned from the parent-films in whose embrace they had meaning and then adopted almost arbitrarily—because, even as I stand in awe of Marclay’s choices and craft, I know there are thousands of other as-good choices the artist might have fostered instead.

Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

One tick after another, The Clock proclaims, “Life is arbitrary.” Unrelated events will accrete into meaning, because we are meaning-making machines willing to mold meaning out of anything. The Clock is a film that Camus could love as Sisyphus had to love his labor, love it like a rock. This explains why The Clock is both a testament to our devotion to movie trailers—90 percent of the time, the preview is better than the film, right?—and a refutation of them. Marclay’s epic cannot, itself, be trailerized. Don’t leave, don’t even blink: you will miss something. 

Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, October 15–November 13, 2010; courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography; © Christian Marclay.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He has graduate degrees in visual and critical studies and journalism, and is a frequent contributor to DailyServing.

Left: Barbara Takenaga, "Blue Wheel," 2007. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 20 in. Right: Daniel Zeller, "Filtered Compression," 2008. Ink in colors on paper, 10 1/4 x 8 in. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is always subversive, always in conflict with mainstream European cultural and historical imperatives to populate the canvas with recognizable objects, traditionally the symbols and tropes that a particular era and place associates with authority and power, history, capital, or god. This dominant way of making and perceiving persists even though U.S. culture has been from the start, and is continually, inflected with culturally multitudinous ways of expressing and seeing. Even when it deploys forms, colors, and compositions that are culturally resonant, abstract art incites the visitor to relinquish this representational predictability and safety.

In the face of unpredictability, however, I, the viewer, am pushed toward agency. I must see in personal terms rather than in the prefabricated terms of literal depiction. Abstraction is cruel in that way. Either I trust the legitimacy of the intuitions this personal journey may inspire or I doubt the work—or, worse, myself.

The museum can be a testing ground for the subversive tactics of personal agency that abstract art both requires and invites. Untethered to the anchors of representation, I can, and maybe should, release myself from the desire to correspond my experience of the artwork both to the concrete world and to the artist’s intention for the work. In this other(worldly) dimension, I interpret the abstract in the stream-of-consciousness associative way of dreams, attributing representational appearances to my psychological projections. The “real” might materialize, but it is protected from becoming too sensical, too literal, too dominating. It is, instead, bounded by the rules of dreams, which allow the fantastic to manifest without threatening the order of things. In this dreamworld, I can, and maybe must, suspend the laws of physics that define time and space, harnessing new tools and methods—for example, the superhuman powers of flight, of shapeshifting.

The way to see abstract art is to stretch the experience beyond seeing, to perceive the artwork not as the flat modernist ideal of itself, but as a four-dimensional world unchained from the “real” four-dimensional world. To see abstract art is, then, to construct an experience more akin to that of sculptural world of artists such as Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor, or Maya Lin than to the flattened world of painting. Further, the way to hear the language of abstract art is to honor its inclinations to unsay as it simultaneously says, rather than to disrespect these inclinations by interrupting, by requiring the artwork to choose one thing that might be said and to say it finally.

Daniel Zeller, "Undefined Edge," 2003. Graphite on paper, 19 x 25 inches. Collection of Richard Green.

Flowering Associations

Does Daniel Zeller’s Undefined Edge (2003), for example, depict a tattered garment, a landscape of lakes, a lacerated body, or an exploration of form and texture? I see (and hear) all of these, then I see one more than another, then another more than the last. I find myself made small, walking the gray landscape of the graphite drawing, approaching the lines that seem to represent thread—stitches to repair holes in the garment or to suture the lesions on the skin—as I might approach a bridge over a lake. I find myself first tiny, as if borne above this strange countryside by hot-air balloon, and then life-sized, as if entering the frame, wielding the needle to attend the damage. And all of this wandering, the collision of one allusion with another, resolves for a moment in the experience of exquisite attention. I focus on this environment—garment, body, lake—upon which I have come not as if I were seeing it at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, but despite the fact it hangs in the museum’s exhibition of abstract art, Approaching Infinity.

There may be a neurological basis for my behavior, the brain’s capacity to discern a recognizable object even, at times, from the evidence of only a few lines. Since the visual system is designed to perceive objects, particularly faces, relying on only the incomplete information the eye gathers, it would seem pointless to avoid such associations.[1] But it is equally foolish to force any single association to dominate when that association might yield to another and then another, or to actively seek allusions to the “real” when the mind has the capacity to experience form as feeling alone. The beauty of abstraction, then, is not that it invites personal associations free of the strictures within which representational art operates, but that it encourages a flowering of associations to co-exist even as they contradict, conflate, compete, diverge, even as they cancel each other out, leaving only the exuberance of bodily feeling.

Stephen Antonakos, "J #12 Berlin," 1980. Carbon pencil and colored pencil on vellum, 17 x 14 in. Collection of Richard Green.

Stephen Antonakos’s J #12 Berlin (1980) and Mark Sheinkman’s 2.29.2005 (2005), like Zeller’s Undefined Edge, are both tributes to the depth and variety of mark and effect that can be coaxed from the deceptively one-dimensional graphite. J #12 Berlin, a labor of mark making, covered with a thousand short strokes that combine and diverge, seems to record the path of a school of minnows as they flit through the water, first as one, then divided, then recombined. Or is it a memory of fur on the body of a cat that has accepted the indignity of being rubbed in many directions? Or of rocks in a river? (And even if the six red-pencil disks Antonakos deploys to dot the water–fur–river do not recede, they do not interfere with my shifting associations.) Likewise as I inhabit Sheinkman’s 2.29.2005, an effusion of white lines on gray paper, I am borne on contrails, fleeting around a space with no time to wonder where I am—a galaxy or an atom—or where I am going.

Mark Sheinkman, "2.29.2005," 2005. Graphite on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 inches. Collection of Richard Green.

In these abstract works, what might seem to be repeating patterns—one artist in the show, Alexander Gorlizki, defines himself as a “farmer of patterns”—become environments. Even Yayoi Kasuma’s Wave of Sea (2003) reveals itself as more than a pattern of black, blue, and white, more than the recurring flower petals or waves each figure resembles, once the painting invites me in. Floating above such landscapes, I enter and proceed through masses of shape, skip from one place to another, ascend, descend, immerse. My eyes do not stand aside to survey and document these contours (perhaps taking advantage of the magnifying glasses hanging in the gallery to inspect the detail). Instead, my body follows them, infiltrating the landscapes they describe and discovering their patterns repeated within myself.

Left: Yayoi Kusama, "Wave of the Sea," 2003. Acrylic on linen, 21 x 18 in. Right: Alexander Gorlizki, "Manuscript," 2007. Pigment and gold leaf on antique paper, 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

These experiences of embodiment are more customary to the experience of abstract sculpture, which is less likely to provoke the uneasy search for representational meaning that flat abstract works do. Sculptures such as Serra’s Sequence (2006) and Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2006) might arouse representational urges—a Utah slot canyon for the former; a kidney bean for the latter—but each, enveloping from inside or outside, demands physical exploration more than mental riddle-solving.

Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

I am not saying that is it impossible to enter, embodied, the frame of a representational piece. I am saying that abstract art—by the nature of its artifice—encourages entry, while representational art—by the nature of its artifice—discourages it. Unlike abstracts, representational works specify the content and scale of recognizable worlds, creating a discontinuity between the gallery and the scene—either a garment, a body, or a lake-strewn countryside, but never all three—and almost never close enough to life-size to be mistaken for the world of the gallery itself.[2]

Nor am I saying embodiment is necessary to the abstract art experience. Abstract art bestows gifts in its flattened form, the flatness of the canvas being the enduring legacy of modernism; and many of the works in Approaching Infinity, for example, Susanne Schossig’s Light Blue Field (2007), invite the eye to skitter along their surfaces, to relish pattern, color, texture, composition, and form. What I am saying is this: by recognizing the willingness of abstract art to bear the weight of my experiential inquiry—my embodied experience of it—I can open up my own internal space to the artwork’s internal space. In this process, I subvert not just the boundary between me and the artwork, but also the boundaries between abstraction and representation, between even two-dimensional artwork and three- and four-dimensional sculpture.

Left: Susanne Schossig, "Light Blue Field," 2007. Gouache on mylar, 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches. Right: Dennis McLeod, "Blue Black Swirl," 2010. Ink in colors on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

A Confusion of Dimensions

It is not always easy to enter an image, to reconceive its flatness as topography, to resist the detail, the craft that might shimmer, even as it is distanced through a magnifying glass. But the dividing line between the visual experience of flat works and the embodied experience of sculptural ones is not a natural one. Neither flat works nor sculpture demands the boundary, even if we interpret the behaviors their media—flat paper or canvas or pixels; bent steel or resin; even water—promote as directives to limit our experience of the works. If flat, non-representational artworks do not invite me into themselves using sculptural means (or, for that matter, the methods of virtual reality), it is not out of reticence. In fact, since there is no obvious portal, no pathway in steel or gateway of stone, there is no wrong way in, no wrong way out.

“No wrong way in, no wrong way out” could be, then, a call to subversive action. But where in this call is either the frank political or social message—another form of representation—of polemical art or the more embodied interventions of social practice? What is the political action that “no wrong way” incites? I struggle to avoid an either/or binary here. There is a place for works of art that state their messages, political or otherwise, unabashedly and frankly, or which seek to move us toward specific political revelations or even actions. But to dismiss abstract art as self-indulgent or insular is to miss a different set of richly political possibilities.

“No wrong way in, no wrong way out” is a call to escape the cultural biases and psychological pressures of a representation-hungry world. It is a call to defy the regime of representation that requires art, both abstract and representational, to represent something, to have a particular message rather than an ever-changing set of associations, feelings, meanings. If, as I suggest, abstract art can foster subversive acts—embodiment, contemplation, and personal interpretation—it would seem to qualify as training in the agency and imagination necessary for modern citizenship.

All the works in this essay are on display at the Crocker Art Museum’s “Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction,” through May 5, 2013.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of the Arts. Marks recently won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research for his essay, “The Site of Imaginative Contention.”

It was miraculous to me, only because I had never seen the space behind the doors. Yet, it was shameful, as if I had seen something I ought not to have seen and, worse, had relished the view. As if the question “Should I look?” had been answered by the act of looking before my mind could complete the question with “or not?”

The scene is precisely what a museum is not about: uncurated looking. It is also precisely what a museum is about: serendipitous discovery. The space behind the doors was as mundane as it was miraculous, usually hidden precisely because the space and its goings-on were judged more mundane than miraculous. My inspection of the space was unsuitable, because it was the equivalent of bringing the attention I should bring to the art to a trash can in the museum’s lobby. “Nut,” you might mutter had you seen me gazing, or “Poseur.”

The poster for “Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media at SF MoMA,” July 14 through October 8; Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It seems a coincidence that the second time I saw the space, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was also staging an exhibit on performance art—Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media. More than a coincidence, a serendipity, because when closed, the doors of the miraculous space supported the enormous welcoming poster for Stage Presence, and when opened, they revealed—what?—a tableau, a stage! And to paraphrase Chekhov’s observation—that a gun introduced into a drama must surely go off—a tableau revealed to the world must surely contain a drama, even if the plot is only in my head, even if the stage-in-waiting masquerades as a freight elevator cab.

The SFMOMA freight elevator, 4th floor landing, revealed; Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Moments before I saw the space, I had watched the video of Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome (2001), a coincidence because Fraser is both a leading performance artist and a practitioner of institutional critique. Had Fraser seen the elevator space, might she have read its normally concealed, and benighted, status as diagnostic of the state of contemporary art and art museums? In Official Welcome, Fraser embodies presenters and recipients at an art awards ceremony, but she is most famous for incarnating “Jane Castleton,” the docent-character documented in the video Museum Highlights (1989). Castleton narrates for her real-life tour group the banalities of the Philadelphia Museum—the cafeteria, a water fountain, the admissions desk—as her sibling docents might have narrated the innovations of Monet, Cézanne, Jasper Johns, or Robert Adams, also on view at the museum in 1989. Jane might, I believe, reveal SF MoMA’s freight elevator cab as “a hidden gem, a space of intrigue and metamorphosis, a room in the process of becoming, whose subjects—carpenters, electricians, preparators, among others—foster the becoming throughout the museum.” Her satire might hang on the characterization of the normally unacknowledged and undervalued efforts of exhibition creation and museum maintenance as being as magical and wondrous as art creation, itself. It might also suggest that the museum is a storytelling institution, in both senses of the word: weaving truth from a conjunction of events and characters, and fiction from the assertion of a narrative truth that, alas, is always partial.

In a sense, though, the elevator performance is an opportunity not only for institutional critique, but also for the sort of possibility inherent in the museum operation itself. So, although I might criticize the strictures of the museum—the forced march structured by signs, images, and spaces: wall plaques and labels, the sequence of numbered artworks, the route from one gallery to the next—it is also true that the museum offers endless opportunities for unexpected juxtaposition and revelation. It is easy to follow the pathway in a kind of structured trance, but not so difficult to deviate, even, and especially, accidentally.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #92, 1981; chromogenic color print; 24 x 47 15/16″ (61 x 121.9 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Fellows of Photography Fund; ©2012 Cindy Sherman.

My experience unfolded, coincidentally, on the day I viewed the Cindy Sherman retrospective, in particular the Centerfolds series, which Sherman produced in 1981. Sherman is the consummate performance artist, although that is not how she is catalogued, and, in the Centerfolds, she appears the master of the pregnant moment, each image a one-act play depicting its climax. These vulnerable moments both encode the plot and expose my own vulnerability. They also ask, coincidentally, “Should I look—or not?” Looking, it is impossible not to feel that something is violated, whether it is the privacy of Sherman’s subjects (as the wall text observes), or of Sherman (who plays the model playing the character, but with the feeling of a subject), or, most of all, my own privacy. Yet, looking seems the only option at a museum. Certainly, it seems the only option when the freight elevator doors slide open—and, even more, when someone walks on stage.

The centerfold pictures are not, however, just about the danger of seeing. They are also about the inevitability of framing, about the constant stage-potential of living. Which is also what the elevator cab unwittingly, magnificently, enacts when it opens its doors to reveal a Chekhovian tableau. I find myself hesitating, I resolve to gaze, and the story unfolds.

The show goes on in the SF MoMA freight elevator, 4th floor landing; Photos: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Even without characters, the set—an assemblage of a pallet, a sign stand, dollies, carts, a portable crane, ladders, wall panels, cardboard tubing, a chair—performs the hard work that all successful theater undertakes. It suspends audience disbelief, hanging it upon what seems to be our inclination to tell ourselves stories. It combines donated material—the set, the props, the characters, even the plot—with each spectator’s material—imagination, preoccupation, predilection—thereby achieving the feeling of consistency. The same consistency as a material that gets called “truth.” So, in the freight elevator named Stage Presence, there appears a Beckettian set, containing the instruments of our mundanity: a cell standing in, I guess, for life, furnished with the tools standing in, I guess, for the never-ending work of living, and inhabited by a character, an everyperson, standing in both for the “me” who watches and for the watched person who performs the work. Performs it apparently without complaint, accepting even the gaze of a photographer as if it were part of the task. As if his task were not even the task that requires the tools but the task that requires the gazer.

In 2006, at UC Berkeley’s CalPerformance presentation of the Dublin-based Gate Theater’s production of Waiting for Godot, I had the strange sensation of incredible hopefulness. Four people wait. For Godot. Who never comes. At least not today. Waiting, it seems, is just another word for living. The accidental companions of our waiting—geographic coincidences—are, it seems, all we have. The stage is all but barren, the language all but repetition, the action all but inert. Yet my subconscious recognizes this condition as the world that I inhabit, a world not only absurdly repetitious and pointless, but also familiar and comforting.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket, performed by the Gate Theater Dublin at Cal Performances, Berkeley, November 2006; courtesy of Cal Performances.

As the elevator curtain comes down, the everyperson’s eyes glance up and then forward. The quiet repose he assumes as he sits looking out seems to represent the state of peaceful coexistence with life that I suspect we all try to pull off. Yet, as the fantastical figure pasted to the elevator door swallows the man, it also swallows that illusion: we must settle, as a last resort and at least in public, for impersonating the appearance of the peaceful by staging the impassive. In any case, that’s my story.

The experience at SF MoMA was compensation for the performance that I had failed to document at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February 2012. A group of, black-clad, white-gloved perpetrators—I mean preparators!—sat at a black-robed table facing the blocked entry to a large gallery, like a panel of inquisitors facing a prisoner. Each of their movements was articulated by work lights focused precisely on their hands as they cleaned the glass of pictures for the exhibition, Robert Adams: The Place We Live. If the elevator play is Beckettian, the glass-cleaning performance was Kafkaesque. Later, wandering through a different exhibition, I came upon the backside of the future Adams show, and there under the equally dramatic light, I spied framed photographs, propped up or arrayed flat, jockeying for position. A single image had made it to the wall. The performance was complete.

It surprises me that the museum has not taken advantage of the performative possibilities of the freight elevator. Imagine this procedure: the scene is set on the third floor, props and actors gathering in place in the elevator cab; the elevator rises to the fourth floor, actors on their marks; the doors rise signaling the beginning of the action and fall signaling its end. I have imagined requesting the space for a performance piece myself. There is, though, something precious about the impromptu performance I observed that would be lost in a planned performance, something startling, improvised, not by the elevator inhabitant—his action seemed planned, repeated a dozen times before—but by me. My mother, who accompanied me, thought the elevator man was engaged in a performance piece. In any case, that’s her story.

The dénouement; Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and the effect of the aesthetic experience on self and society. He received master’s degrees in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of Art, and is the Publications and Training Manager for the Alliance Health Project of the University of California, San Francisco.

Left: Burt Glinn, Jay DeFeo working on The Rose, 1960; © 2012; photo: Burt Glinn/Magnum; Right: Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958–66; oil with wood and mica on canvas; 128 7/8 x 92 1/4 x 11 in.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley, CA, and purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation 95.170; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York, photo: Ben Blackwell

The paintings in the final gallery were all created in 1989—the year of the last big San Francisco earthquake and the year DeFeo died of lung cancer. The earthquake gave no notice of its imminence, but the intimacy of these paintings, their seeming modesty, might be interpreted to represent DeFeo’s attempt to contain the uncertainty of the time, an attempt to ground herself in an ungrounded world.[1] But for me the paintings demonstrate something very different—something that might be said to characterize all of DeFeo’s work.

DeFeo is a master of scale. Her works pack the monumentality we usually associate only with the physically enormous into immense and modest spaces alike. Dove One, which seems to present a dying dove—its eye, its breast, its ruffled wing—is also an immense landscape: a desert void, from which black, white, and gray emerge, first calmly and then with increasing frenzy. If the dove seems to be in repose in one instant, in death in another,[2] the image will not allow these conclusions to rest, for I am overtaken by motion, a roiling river of color that threatens to break into the gallery, and by enormity, as the bird transforms into landscape. All of this happens within the confines of 16 by 20 inches.

Jay DeFeo, Dove One, 1989; oil on linen; 16 x 20 in.; Collection of Dan and Claire Carlevaro; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York, photo: Ben Blackwell. All images in this article are from Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 3, 2012 through February 3, 2013; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 28 through June, 2013.

This magic is the result not only of what seems to be a patient layering of color—patience is, after all, a hallmark of The Rose, whose construction consumed DeFeo for years—but also her compositional choices. DeFeo contends with space as much as with the objects that fill it. This is an activity of all artists, but rarely do artworks demonstrate this central theme so compellingly. DeFeo demonstrates again and again her capacity to place an “object” in a void as if there were no other place in the field from which the object might emerge. She animates the background, transforming it into an actor itself and the painting into a conversation between two figures.

It’s not really necessary to reverse the chronological order of the exhibition to discover DeFeo’s capacity to engage space. But having experienced works like Dove One, Room with a View, and Last Valentine, I was primed to recognize the intimacy DeFeo conjures in much larger works like Hawk Moon No. 2, Origin, and even The Rose.  The figure in Hawk Moon No. 2 flows through the painting’s 40-square-foot space, embodying, as a friend put it, the grace of graffiti. Not all graffiti is graceful or resembles a DeFeo, but it is a characteristic of that form to place itself into spaces that it cannot claim but with which it must contend and engage. In Hawk Moon No. 2, neither figure nor background triumphs over the other. DeFeo portrays instead the arena in which the black “background” and the gray and white “foreground” challenge each other and then negotiate their claims. In fact, I am swept up as much by the inevitability of this black as I am by the poetry of the gray and white, by the ways in which the black refuses to limit itself to containing or even contending. Instead, it seems to collaborate as actor in the formation of its gray curves and the white angles.

Jay DeFeo, Hawk Moon No. 2, 1983–85; oil on canvas; 96 x 60 in.; The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York, photo: Ben Blackwell

The gray and white, like all of DeFeo’s figures, emerges from its background the way clouds materialize in the sky. The materiality of clouds—palpable, enormous, yet almost nothing—is as confusing as is their agency—powerful and compliant, predictable and arbitrary. Clouds appear as objects moving in space, rather than what they are: atmosphere, the creations of space. The dove, the smudge in Room with a View, even the heart in Last Valentine, appear neither willfully nor arbitrarily, but like a cloud, only where and when the right atmospheric conditions conspire to generate them; and each extends only to the places where these precise conditions persist.

Jay DeFeo, Room with a View, 1989; oil on linen; 20 x 16 in.; Private collection; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York; photo: Ben Blackwell; Right: Jay DeFeo, Last Valentine, 1989; oil on linen; 20 x16 in.; Private collection; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York, photo: Ben Blackwell

In Unknown Image, a drawing of the broken handle of a teacup, DeFeo defines three dimensions and in doing so builds a universe with the object at its center. The space with which DeFeo contends multiplies into these three dimensions: the space within and about the shard and its handle, the space on the paper that surrounds the figure, and also the space of the board on which DeFeo has pasted the drawing paper. The cup handle seems to both dig in and emerge from the paper and so defines a horizontal that violates the flatness of the picture. By pasting the drawing to its support and leaving the unfinished board visible, DeFeo, in effect, emphasizes the work’s flatness and verticality. The result both confuses the space and expands it in all directions, so at moments it seems as if I were looking into a cube. If The Rose is sculpture by virtue of the build-up of a ton of paint, Unknown Image is virtual sculpture because it achieves an embodied experience using only visual tools.

Jay DeFeo, Unknown Image, 1971; synthetic polymer and graphite on paper mounted on rag board; 16 1/2 x 19 1/4 in.; Private collection; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York; Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree

In The Rose, DeFeo shows us something new that paint could be: both a building-up and decaying-away material. The Rose speaks not so much to the flower deconstructed or evoked, but to the “rose window,” a place to see and through which to see,  a meditation on the act of seeing that becomes a meditation on the act of inhabiting space. All that building up and decaying away, the consequence of so much time and so much material, cannot fail but to evoke the effect of time on the experience of space. The flattened Unknown Image is not without the qualities that the furrowed Rose demonstrates: in both, DeFeo delivers space to us.

Jay DeFeo, Origin, 1956; oil on canvas; 92 x 79 3/4 in.; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; gift of Mr. and Mrs. John S. Hilson; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society, New York, photo: Sibila Savage

DeFeo marshals space as a condition, not as an emptiness inhabited by objects and beings, but as a co-habitant filled, as well, with itself. Her works share a goal, conscious or not, with that of phenomenological artists such as Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, to marshal space as their primary medium and transform it into the unavoidable experience of the art participant. Like Serra’s and Smithson’s, DeFeo’s works evince the effects of this co-habitation: her space becomes our space.[3] The viewer may not be able to explain the laws that govern object and space in DeFeo’s artwork any better than he or she is able to explain cloud formation; and I am at a loss to account for the simultaneous intimacy and monumentality. DeFeo’s masterworks of scale, technique, and most of all, space, however, account for everything. They reveal the reciprocal relationships between objects, including ourselves, and the spaces that contain them, including the universe.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of the Arts. Marks recently won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research for his essay, “The Site of Imaginative Contention.”

Part IV: Play is the thing

Can a museum nurture struggle, channeling it toward expression, rather than relieve struggle, channeling it toward resolution? It can, perhaps, if it acknowledges that the artwork, rather than its commentary, is the most able narrator, producing a text that both incubates and channels struggle. Can the museum tolerate an object naked of its label? It can if it is willing to recognize the visitor’s capacity to guide him or herself, to collaborate with the artwork to devise his or her own narrative. What might draw a person to an artwork stripped of its commentary? A museum that seeks to transform habitual museum behaviors into a playful struggle, and commentary into engaged community.

Installation Image, About Face (May 23 – February 28, 2013), Courtesy Pier 24 Photography. Image credit Tom O’Connor. Pier 24 posts no gallery text or wall labels.

Resonance and Wonder

Cultural historian Stephen Greenblatt identifies two experiences—“resonance” and “wonder”—that can arise in the museum. Resonance—“the power of the displayed object […] to evoke in the viewer the complex dynamic cultural force from which it has emerged”[1]—reflects the meaning of an object in its time and place, the making of the object and its meaning to its maker. No longer does the object fit in my hand or appear on my wall without the sense of how it might have fit in another person’s hand or hung on another person’s wall. It is equally important, however, to conceive the object’s meaning independent of its context, which is, in a sense, the meaning Greenblatt applies to wonder: “the power . . . to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, [and] to evoke exalted attention.”[1] Wonder can tell us something too, but this something often dissolves when the museum seek to reclaims context.

To what extent is wonder a necessary condition for resonance, just as it is the necessary invitation to struggle? To what extent does wonder, itself, achieve its own sort of resonance? The museum acknowledges the social, political and art history of the object, the encrustation of the experiences that molded and patinated it. Yet it arbitrarily—if unintentionally—signals the end of that accumulation with the object’s installation in the exhibition, signing that finale with an explanatory label. Art starts as a connection beyond the artist’s self, but it—and its context—extends not only to the visitor, but to others in the visitor’s life, both in the moment and on into future. Art that inspires wonder also inspires the desire—even the demand—to share that wonder. Wonder, like resonance, also resonates. This experience, marked by the desire to share, is substantial and enduring; the nonresonant one is impermanent, even superficial. What endures is what remains dynamic—not static: insight that comes out of experience, out of a struggle to comprehend.

How to Behave in a Museum

Follow me into a typical exhibition of paintings or photographs. A large wall plaque tells the story of the exhibition, the story that motivates the curator. Hanging at eye level are the artworks, each piece equidistant from its neighbors, each attended by a small label. Some labels continue the narrative of the opening wall plaque.[2]

The momentum of the crowd in front of Paolo Veronese’s “The Wedding at Cana” (1563). Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photograph by Sonia Calzà, 2008. Image courtesy of Creative Commons/Flickr.

A line of people hugs the walls of the gallery. Its one-way momentum is relentless, ruled by some culturally determined number of seconds in front of each piece—and each label. This community standard also impels each visitor to surrender the primary viewing space to the next visitor. Even with audio-, smartphone-, or ipod-tours, technological alternatives that might free visitors from the physical label, the experience remains linearly structured and cognitively skewed. This practice of traveling sequentially, as if on a conveyor belt wending around a gallery’s perimeter, label by label, seems to derive from the expectation—concretized over generations into unconscious visitor habit—that every one of the (many) words and every one of the (too) many objects on display is worthy of attention and necessary to the exhibition’s story.

Under these conditions, bodies become nothing but vehicles of transportation. Sensation whittles down to sight, sight whittles down to information-gathering, and information-gathering whittles down to contextualizing. All of these museum practices, habits, and regulations[3] suggest that attention ought to be measured in seconds rather than minutes, the same sort of seconds I might spend skimming an article and glancing at its illustrations. Claustrophobia-inducing at worst, exhausting at best, the temptation to narrate plus the compulsion to inundate stifle both works and participants, refusing them the space to breathe; to feel, think, experience, and express. Resonance triumphs over resonating wonder, but both suffer for the victory. No wonder labels are known in the trade as “tombstones.”

“The first thing to do would be to take some away,”[4] John Cage recommended. The second thing would be to re-embody the visitor, to grant visitors the license to see what they see, follow where they are drawn, happen upon what they discover, and omit what seems extraneous. To concentrate in one place for minutes, fly over vast stretches in seconds. To play.

Installation view of “Rolywholyover A Circus” at MOCA California Plaza, September 12 through November 28, 1993, photo courtesy of MOCA.

How to Roll Wholy Over the Museum

In 1993, Cage collaborated with Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art curator Julie Lazar to create Rolywholyover   A Circus, a traveling “composition” whose conditions of creation suggest alternative ways of being in a museum. For one of the composition’s four “movements,” the “museumcircle,” 21 museums within a 30-mile radius of Los Angeles submitted lists of 10 objects they would be willing to lend MOCA. Cage used chance operations to position the works selected by lenders.[5] For another movement, the “main Circus,” which was comprised of artwork and ephemera of artists who were important to Cage, Cage and Lazar again used chance operations to position each work—including into a storage area—and determine how long it would remain in that place. Lazar notes that not every work moved every day, but in her catalog essay, she quotes Cage as exclaiming, “The basic idea . . . is that the exhibition would change so much that if you came back a second time you wouldn’t recognize it.’”[6] By doing so, Cage offered visitors the opportunity to write their own commentary, at their own pace, in their own space.

No less carefully constructed than the conveyor belt, Rolywholyover sought to conjure attentive play rather than a focused study. More precisely, it invited focus, study, even struggle, into the playground of the exhibition by letting the visitor discover his or her own pathway and by cultivating surprise as an active force in experience.

In her essay for the Rolywholyover catalog, poet and philosopher Joan Retallack explores Cage’s conception of play, which, she says, unfolds “at the moment of any disruption of habit.”[7] Retallack invokes the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who said: “Playing is an experience, always a creative experience.”[8] In an exhibition, meaning materializes in the space of play, the territory between internal fantasy and external other, during which imagination “must literally take chances, playing with the concrete hypothetical, the experimental ‘what if.’”[9] Within the protected playspace of the museum, each visitor struggles with the otherness of the artwork. But this sort of struggle is sweet, because it does not demand a particular outcome, just a satisfying one.

Installation view of “Rolywholyover A Circus” at MOCA California Plaza, September 12 through November 28, 1993, photo courtesy of MOCA.

Cage had realized what many contemporary curators don’t (or may not): that the museum’s truest self emerges as “playground”: not as an entertainment complex or an educational establishment, but as a place where visitors dynamically engage with artwork, with other visitors, with the exhibition itself.[10] As Retallack also suggests of a Cage poem, the museum can “[invite] a practice or reading that enacts a tolerance for ambiguity and a delight in complex possibility,”[11] as much with the structural language of the exhibition itself, as with the literal language of the label.

Winnicott says during psychotherapy, which he defines as “two people playing together,”[12] “the significant moment is [when] the child surprises himself or herself,”[13] not when the therapist interprets the child’s activity, an act that results in the child’s “indoctrination” or “compliance.” Although curators do not wield the power of psychotherapists, the museum—with its art historical, aesthetic, and other contextual interpretations—risks producing such acquiescence. It wields authority both as commentator, whose disembodied words hang in parity with artworks, and as cartographer, whose mapped pathways overdetermine movement. Here, the experience of indoctrination and compliance replaces play and surprise—a “playing together” with the artworks—substituting them with the ensnarement of the visitor in, as Winnicott puts it, “the creativity of someone else.”[14]

The Incubator

But the stakes are even higher. According to Winnicott, play “is always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived . . . This area of playing is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual.”[15] This is much like the experience of an artwork that induces wonder, which like play, knows that it is a subjective experience that nonetheless provokes the desire to assert claims of a shared reality, of the make-believe world of play or, as aesthetic philosopher Immanuel Kant suggests, the unprovable claim of the universal truth of the subjective aesthetic judgment.[16] This desire to claim as shared what is not shared, and to state it out loud to others, however, creates a space of possibility. It is a space in which my passionate assertion, confronted by your skepticism, opens up not only a space between us—how can it be that you don’t agree with what feels to me to be self-evident?—but also a space about us, a container for a conversation in which no conclusion can ever be either right or wrong.

What would this conversation look like, sound like, feel like? Like another sort of Rolywholyover. Not a chance-determined curation, but a crowd-determined commentary.[17] Not a conversation with the disembodied authority of the label, but a facilitated conversation that frames the artwork as what it is (an experience) and viewership as what it is (an engagement with a community of other viewers, including curators). The product of such crowd-determined commentary is as much the crowd as it is the commentary.

Imagine the gallery at the end of an exhibition occupied by three computers and a projector, many comfortable chairs, maybe even a couple of final artworks. A museum curator sits at one computer typing. In real time, the projector flashes blocks of this extemporaneous exhibition commentary onto the wall. The curator invites visitors to read the projected commentary, engage in a conversation about the commentary or the exhibition, or use another computer to enter their own commentary, which is then projected beneath the curator’s. The curator stops composing when visitors type. Other visitors watch, chat with the commentators or each other, read a transcript of all the commentary on the third computer, or browse reference materials: the catalog and floor plan, and related books. Some visitors write comments on large post-its and stick them to the wall. The curator, overhearing conversations, might even prompt these postings, encouraging people to “solicit assent”[18] and, in doing so, discover dissent, even friction. Freed from labels and wall plaques when they proceeded through the exhibition the first time, visitors are able to re-enter and re-visit the exhibition after having experienced the commentary in this gallery, this “incubator.” Those with an unquenchable thirst for pre-viewing commentary can visit this room first.

Installation view of the “museumcircle” in “Rolywholyover   A Circus” at MOCA California Plaza, September 12 through November 28, 1993, photo courtesy of MOCA.

I am not suggesting something completely new: docents routinely encourage conversation, some museums include hardcopy or digital “guestbooks,” and others provide post-its. What I am suggesting is that the visitor and the exhibition are both best served when the commentary the visitor first encounters is not the label or the wall plaque but her or his own language, and when visitors have the opportunity to share that language with others toward the production of commentary.

Each week, the curator posts commentary summaries—including the curator’s own contribution—both on the exhibition’s web page and on the gallery wall. The museum might also compile a searchable, downloadable PDF of the proceedings, including all the comments and an overview of the process, prefacing it with a synthesis of some of the more compelling ideas.[19] But the value of the undertaking is not in this document. Rather, it is in a structure that separates the experience from the language about the experience. It is in a space where this language is not only found but also made. It is, last, about a collaboration between artwork-in-action and the lives of engaged visitors.

Installation Image, About Face (May 23 – February 28, 2013), Courtesy Pier 24 Photography. Image credit Tom O’Connor. Pier 24 posts no gallery text or wall labels.

[Conclusion]

John Cage once asked the composer Virgil Thomson “Which solution I should choose?” for a “quandary” he faced. Cage said Thomson replied, “We define ourselves . . . by making our own decisions.”[20] The choices we make are unique; they tell us—as much as they tell others—who we are. They are us. This, it would seem to me, is the enterprise that museums should prioritize: the building of selves. Not only selves constructed using the knowledge of art historical or political or social context, but selves that emerge from the process of choosing, engaging, interpreting, and interacting. Selves that emerge from wonder first, then resonance, and arriving finally at a resonating wonder.

If, as I said many Parts ago, the museum is both the kindest and the cruelest parent, it can also be Winnicott’s “responsible person.”[21] It is the invisible force that protects the playspace but avoids entering into the play, the caregiver that does not instill compliance but nurtures the resilience to engage in the productive struggle with uncertainty, with ambiguity, with play. In fact, the role of protector of the space is consistent with the traditional role of curators as guardians of their collections. The problem is not the curator, whose collection-building, caretaking, and interpretive functions are crucial, but the incursion of commentary—wall plaque and label—into the space of engagement.

“If you work with chance operations,” Cage said, you are shifting “from the responsibility to choose . . . to the responsibility to ask.”[22] The enormous responsibility of the museum, then, is less to convey visitors along a single pathway of a pre-determined narrative than to create a playspace shot through with infinite and complex lines of flight along which we might propel by choice, toward that tentative state we call selfhood.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of Art. Marks recently won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research for his essay, “The Site of Imaginative Contention.”

Part III: Struggling Toward Wonder

Imagine entering a store, not quite a museum store, but a store that echoes the theme of an exhibition. All its objects are “International Orange,” the official color of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and, as such, they commemorate the edifice’s 75th anniversary. You browse. You watch international orange bounce around the room. When an item strikes you aesthetically, you enjoy the resonance between its color, the store’s massing of color, and its expression of the theme of the show, all of which animate each object in a way that would not have happened had it sat alone.

The Commemorative Store at the International Orange exhibition, organized by the FOR-SITE Foundation at Fort Point in San Francisco, May 25 to October 28, 2012.

By “aesthetically,” I mean something very specific. I mean what Immanuel Kant meant by the word. For Kant, an aesthetic experience occurs only when, among other things, I am “disinterested,” meaning that I have no practical stake in the object’s existence, no desire for it beyond “its mere contemplation.”[1] In the not-quite-a-museum store, I engage in a Kantian aesthetic experience: I view the objects as if their sole purpose were for me to behold them. Until, that is, the moment when I think about buying one. Which happens, since it is, after all, a store.

Imagine approaching the clerk. “How much is this?” you say, handing over a piece of International Orange-colored Heath Pottery. The clerk says, “It’s not for sale.” “Oh,” you think, “It’s the floor model.” You ask the clerk, “Do you have any more in the back?” The clerk explains, “Nothing in the store is for sale.”

The store clerk at the International Orange exhibition’s Commemorative Store.

In this moment of disappointment, the store offers two things simultaneously: first, another shift, this time from a commercial, an “interested,” mindset back to the “disinterested” aesthetic experience that had, perhaps, dominated your visit to the International Orange exhibition; and, second, the integration of commentary about an artwork—the clerk’s narration in this case—into the artwork itself.[2] But had you not asked, “How much is this?” you would never have realized that the space was not a store, but a facsimile of a store, a work of artist Stephanie Syjuco entitled The International Orange Commemorative Store (A Proposition) (2012).[3]

Not a One-Liner

Sly commentary, a hypothetical wall plaque, might reduce the experience to a one-liner—a joke—by offering a prompt to engage in the “right” way: “Enter; Browse; Ask to Purchase Something; See What Happens.” The more traditional label, mounted on a stand inside the store, risks undermining the piece’s multiple levels of experience—aesthetic, psychological, political—not by offering such an instruction, but by providing an explication of the concept behind the work, by dissecting the joke before telling it. Both types of label make “getting it” into an intellectual exercise that inoculates against the revelation that the emotional experience delivers. You don’t even have to be there. Like a joke, one version of the Proposition—a store in which nothing can be bought—can be recounted anywhere, as long as you get the timing right. It’s as if you heard the joke and thought, “Oh, yeah. That’s cool.”

Stephanie Syjuco, "The International Orange Commemorative Store (A Proposition)," 2012. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, courtesy of the artist. The artwork was commissioned by the FOR-SITE Foundation for International Orange, 2012.

But that is not Syjuco’s Proposition; that’s merely the idea behind her Proposition. Syjuco’s Proposition is a bodily experience, a feeling as well as the thoughts that attend it. The mind ricochets between disinterest and interest, from the object’s beauty to the desire to purchase it, from frustration at the object’s unattainability to engagement, even wonder, as the Commemorative Store achieves the rare state for a conceptual art object: its punch—not punch line—is visceral as well as intellectual. Instead of evoking the comforting resolution of “Oh yeah,” it proposes the threatening irresolution of “Oh no!” I was heartened when the Commemorative Store’s clerk told me that many people overlooked the otherwise well-written label. Perhaps this is because we already know how to use a store, a factor that may have been part of Syjuco’s calculation. In fact, her Proposition may reset the terms of conventional exhibition behavior. “Read label; view object” gets trumped by the conventional shopping behavior of “browse item; read label.” But not for long.[4]

Syjuco’s Proposition, like John Cage’s visual art, benefits from not-knowing before knowing. Even Joan Retallack’s plea regarding the implications of Cage’s chance-determined process—“But how would one notice any of this . . . if one knew nothing about how and why you have worked the way you do?”—must recede in the space of the Commemorative Store.[5] Or, at least, it must pause to allow the visceral impact of the work to float before it breaks upon the floor of explanation.

John Cage, "Déreau 22," 1982; one in a series of 38 engravings with drypoint, aquatint, and photoetching; 14 x 18 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press. Cage used chance operations to compose "Déreau," displayed at Crown Point in 2012 in honor of the 100th anniversary of Cage’s birth.

Against Interpretation, For Love Letters

“Interpretation . . . presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy,” Susan Sontag declared in 1964. “Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought to be too precious to repudiate, by revamping it.”[6] Commentary, even when it focuses on contemporary artworks, similarly presupposes a discrepancy and, similarly, seeks to resolve it: the work seems unstable without support, yet it cannot be discarded.

Sontag’s “interpretation” protects the artist from being misunderstood, from repudiation or anachronism, just as curator and critic Simon Sheikh’s “mediation”—the museum’s imposition of commentary to ensure the “right way of seeing”—protects the visitor from misunderstanding, from seeing incorrectly.[7] In this way, commentary—the label, the plaque, the artist statement—becomes what artist Joseph Grigely calls an “exhibition prosthetic.” Like a body prosthetic, the label becomes or seeks to become “part of the art—not merely an extension of it.”[8] The fear of misunderstanding that results in exhibition prostheses, however, assumes that the artwork, itself, cannot speak clearly enough or that the visitor is without tools to comprehend its language. Or it presumes that the artwork that needs translation for a particular visitor is nonetheless worthy of that visitor’s attention. I am baffled not that an artwork might benefit from such prostheses, but by the evolution of an experience—the visual art-viewing one—from one whose nature would seem to be its capacity to speak without words into one that depends on prosthetic words.[9]

Julie Mehretu, "Stadia I," 2004; painting; 107 x 140 x 2-3/4 inches; courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Just as Syjuco’s Proposition does not need appended words—and may be undone by them—Julie Mehretu’s painting needs not even the intimation of its title, Stadia I, to compel. The label’s text ensures that we don’t “misunderstand” the work, even though both the artist, whom the label quotes, and the curator who quotes her may “misunderstand” the true impact of the piece. In its effect, however, the label corrects neither you nor me if we feel at odds with its words. For example, if the visual dynamism of the painting’s vortex of energy does not coalesce for me as a “stadium”—much less as a reflection of the “nationalist reactionary energy” and “corporate language” of the stadium ecosystem—then the label contributes little to my experience. Does the curator fear that the image will not reliably articulate the correct interpretation? The label corrects the painting’s assertions of itself as a parent might correct a child’s make-believe. It silences the painting’s own narrative, replacing it with Mehretu’s words.

It’s hard to fault Mehretu or the label writer. We live at a time when art is not trusted to stand for itself, which suggests a problem far broader than any individual artist, curator, or institution. All of these actors, however, have the power to pioneer alternatives. Perhaps, for example, the artist statement, which is mandatory today and from which the curator may have borrowed Mehretu’s quotation, ought to be reconceived as a creative enterprise. Instead of recounting original intentions or documenting process or framing a single meaning, the artist statement might imagine a range of alternative meanings for the artwork,  in this way explicitly taking responsibility for meanings that extend beyond the conscious intention that inspired the work. Another alternative, of course, is silence, always a salutary approach: the artist’s resistance to speak over the voice of the artwork.

Can we reinsert into the artistic process its essential communicative possibility? The agent provocateurs, the Raqs Media Collective, suggest that the artist prepares “a letter to a lover [that the artist] did not know they have, in a language that they do not understand.” The message can be only as legible as the language that binds this particular artist to a particular visitor. That is, the “letter,” even encoding “love,” is variably communicative, serendipitously legible:

The point is not to render all things and ourselves transparent and legible, but to insist on the interpretative worth of margins of error, of accidents and serendipity, of uncanny resonances and speculative layering, of doubt and ambiguity [beyond] the dead habit of certainty.[10]

Which brings us to struggle.

Nancy Marks, untitled, 2008; photoetching; 5 x 9-1/4 inches; courtesy of the artist; collection of Kathy Barr.

The Struggle to Not Understand

Architectural and art historian Laura Hollengreen wisely observes that labels can help “museum visitors build their visual and interpretive skills, training eye, body, and mind, and making the pleasure of the aesthetic comprehensible, that is, contemplatable.”[11] Might museums engage in the opposite task: nurturing the experience of, the capacity to, engage with what remains—and will remain—incomprehensible? It is a radical idea to suggest that not-understanding may be a viable option, because it may mean that some visitors will pass by or “miss the point” of a particular artwork.

It is not easy to contemplate the incomprehensible, and I don’t want to romanticize difficulty or suggest that for art to be “good”, it must be “hard.” Yet, when exhibition commentary prepackages the answers to questions of meaning, historical narrative, or context, its effect is not limited to making the work accessible. It also short-circuits the process of struggle, which however frustrating, can lead to a more expansive relationship with the artwork. It’s like the struggle of learning a foreign language, the process that must transpire before I internalize the syntax and sound of that language. Or like the struggle of reading a novel, of reading and rereading, of understanding and misunderstanding, of knowing and losing that knowing. A summary of Joyce’s Ulysses would not deliver the same intuitive understanding of the text, the integrated, if not perfect, understanding that results from struggling with it, from developing a relationship to it. In the end, the point of Ulysses—the point of all art, perhaps—is to understand the novel as only “I” can, only by reading the words as they are read by me, without allegiance to how they are written by Joyce.

A love letter worth the struggle, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The meaning that comes out of that struggle might be different from what the curatorial or the art historical narrative prioritizes and embeds within commentary. But it is the sort of meaning that I might seek to protect safely under my shirt—a love letter next to my heart—instead of the type of meaning I might carelessly stuff into my pocket only to lose it as I rush from the gallery. This is what John Cage meant by “tourist attitude,” the proposition to “act as though you’ve never been there before.”[12] It is a proposition, like Syjuco’s Proposition, to be without maps and narratives, to struggle to find a way, and, in getting lost and getting found, to discover a meaning that reverberates for a lifetime.

A curator’s restraint creates the conditions for such revelations, cultivating our patience and attention and granting us a permission to weave comprehension first from the cognitive and emotional material we bring into the museum and only later from the material that the museum contributes.[13] What sort of commentary, what sort of museum structure, would enable me to see the works of artists like Syjuco, Mehretu, and Cage as only an individual “I” can see them? What sort of restraint on the part of a curator would cultivate patience in me, a capacity to tolerate all the confusions that any of us—any tourist—brings to our individual acts of way-finding: of perception and conception?

An answer lies with Kant, not simply the power he attributes to the disinterested—but engaged—aesthetic experience, but also in his radical claim of subjective universality. For Kant, the aesthetic experience inspires the paradoxical assertion that it is universally valid even though it recognizes that it can defend this claim with nothing more than subjective evidence. This is a power that leads to the possibility of engagement not just with the art in an exhibit but also among people who visit it. It is a power that lays the foundation for building commentary from community (including museum staff)—a political act—as well as community from commentary—a social one.

***

Part II: Writing on Water

Famous for using chance operations to compose both musical scores and visual art, John Cage’s goal was not to manifest a “gratuitous” randomness,[1] but to put “the intention of the mind . . . out of operation.”[2] For Cage, non-intention was not unintentional: “If you work with chance operations, you’re basically shifting—from the responsibility to choose . . . to the responsibility to ask.”[3] Cage was influenced by the “whispered truths,” three principle tenets from one school of Zen Buddhism, including, “[Y]our action should be as though you were writing on water. . . . In other words, not to make an impression.”[4] Simple as the principles are, they signal the fundamental endlessness, evanescence, and wholeness that we camouflage with our attempts to limit, preserve, and distinguish experience.

Left: John Cage, Eninka 28, 1986; one in a series of 50 smoked and branded prints on gampi paper chine colle; 25 x 19 inches. Right: John Cage, Without Horizon 33, 1992; one in a series of 57 unique aquatints with etching and drypoint on smoked paper, 7-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches. Both published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco; courtesy of Crown Point Press.

“Writing on water,” whose activity is visible but whose product is not, suggests a method of commentary that acts as a medium rather a mediation—present but silent—and that almost invisibly carries the visitor through the exhibit. If afterward, the personal revelations of a visitor’s experience have obscured the visitor’s memory of the commentary, “commentary on water” will have achieved its goal of making no impression.

The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible

I come upon The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible III (Nickel/Neusilber), Sigmar Polke’s 1988 painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In my mind I see an image, but it’s really a feeling and it’s really in my gut: the expansion of the painting beyond its boundaries. Standing outside of it, I feel suddenly upon it, inside it, traveling through it. All of this happens before I come to the painting’s label.

Sigmar Polke, The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible III (Nickel/Neusilber) (1988), painting, nickel and artificial resin on canvas, 157-1/2 in. x 118-1/8 in. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Labels tell me what I might expect to “discover” in the artwork: Polke’s painting is a homage to American Indian culture, evoking both the sense of support, of strength, and the invisibility, the unknowableness, honored in its source proverb; and the image is changeable, its chemical process evolving, thus, time-altering. The language is clear and gentle,[5] but would I have felt as transported had I first read the label, whose words risk displacing—or, worse, standing in for—my experience? This is how the modern art museum has taught visitors to engage art—to frame experience with interpretation—but is the experience of art truly about the words that prepare the visitor for it? If a large part of what a person knows derives from the gifts of knowledgeable others, the part most likely to stick comes from—to paraphrase Cage—the questions that each of us asks during an entirely personal quest, and the answers each discovers during that quest.[6]

Knowing is, in some ways, the destruction of what lies outside of what gets known. When I feel the feeling of knowing something, it is because my mind has eliminated alternative interpretations of that something. The danger of exhibition commentary is that it creates a domain of knowledge that precedes and limits the experience that follows. After reading a wall plaque, I face the risk that my experience of an exhibition or artwork will unwittingly take this interpretation not only as a starting point, but also as a boundary. If “art is primarily about . . . the heightening and transformation of our perceptions,”[7] a boundary, even when it encapsulates insight, threatens to limit the whole enterprise. It’s not, however, that I can simply not-know. Knowing comes unbidden, manifesting when diverse experience—feelings, thoughts—coalesces to form a single meaningful entity. But museums can resist the impulse to frontload experience, to rush the visitor—via commentary—toward that moment of knowing.

Caring as Seeing

Philosopher Martin Heidegger used the word “care” to signify, among other things, the attention that a person gives to the world. When I “care,” it means that a phenomenon has come into consciousness; and when I don’t, it means the phenomenon, as material as it is, is as good as imperceptible. Of the hundreds of perceptible objects that exist on the street I walk down or in a room as I enter, I engage—“care” about—only the ones that circumstance, desire, and intention, conspire to reveal to me. Do labels—the one adorning Polke’s Spirits or, nearby, chaperoning Julie Mehretu’s Stadia I (2004)—risk making me care about, in this case, literally see, the language, the commentary, more than the object? Or, at least, do they risk making me see the curator’s conception of the object rather than my own?

Julie Mehretu, Stadia I (2004), painting, 107 in. x 140 in. x 2-3/4 in.; courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Mehretu’s Stadia I—with its shifts in scale and frenzy of shape, whipping curves and stretching triangles—leaves me breathless. In the label’s text, Mehretu asserts that the painting reflects both the “nationalist reactionary energy” and “corporate language” of the stadium ecosystem. Indeed, the energy of the piece demonstrates the power of the stadium’s games to inhabit me, to make me part of the nationalist, corporate culture at which Mehretu aims. It is possible, however, to read Mehretu’s work without understanding these associations, to see it, stripped of even the commentary of its title, simply as an expression of dynamism. Does the label act to “correct” my experience—establishing the artist as the authority on her work—or does it set up a dissonance between me and the artwork, causing me to abandon the work or to engage in a dialogue with the label rather than the painting?

If Jonathan Franzen is right that one of the great fiction writing skills—particularly in the hands of a novelist like Edith Wharton—is to make me root for the most unsympathetic of characters,[8] and if I am right that labels can function similarly to help me root for the character of the artist’s work that might otherwise baffle or alarm me, my experience with Mehretu’s Stadia I suggests the reverse. It is not the artist’s work that disrupts, thus requiring the redemption of the label’s story of the artist’s intention, but the label that disrupts the artwork. Does the artist know the work better than I, as this label implies? Only if you believe Stadia I is merely an “illustration” of Mehretu’s intention or the curator’s interpretation. But if the work occupies its own “center,” to use the word Cage uses when he describes the relationship between “illustration” and “accompaniment,” the label’s narrative is best deployed at a distance—another place in the museum—where I might still benefit from Mehretu’s insight but not before benefiting from my own.[9]

RolywholyUnKnowing

Installation view of Rolywholyover A Circus at MOCA California Plaza, September 12-November 28, 1993, photo courtesy of MOCA, in the space in which visitors could consult reference materials.

This is precisely what Cage did in his own prodigious curatorial undertaking, Rolywholyover   A Circus. No labels interpreted or identified the works, but visitors could consult a map for identifying information. They could also consult “reference books by and about Cage, his interests and about the work of his contemporaries.”[10] Many of the works were rotated in and out during the exhibition’s run, so the returning visitor could not count on knowing anything about the show except its premise. Rolywholyover was Cage’s antidote to the “stultifying” structure of museum exhibitions, a word he conceived as synonymous with French composer Erik Satie’s “paralysis. “Satie said, experience is a form of paralysis. So, if you know how to do something, you paralyze yourself.”[11]

A spread from the gallery guide of Rolywholyover A Circus at MOCA California Plaza, September 12-November 28, 1993, photo courtesy of MOCA.

Many museum visitors, particularly in modern art museums, however, want the support that the Polke and Mehretu labels provide, want the museum to help them see by answering questions like the ones Gail Gregg lists in a 2010 ARTnews article: “Have I looked enough?” “How did the artist make this?” “Is this really art?”[12] Questions like these occur naturally. Labels can provide answers, but they can be responsive to the particular form of my curiosity only by accident.

If museums have, with the best of intentions, taught us to value these answers more than our own, can museums unteach this lesson? According to Julie Lazar, the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art with whom Cage worked to develop Rolywholyover   A Circus, visitors “felt comfortable not knowing, not understanding everything,” noting that a “spirit of generosity permeated every component of [the exhibition].”[13] And museums as diverse as Houston’s Menil Collection, Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, and San Francisco’s Pier 24 Photography minimize labels or post no commentary.[14] What else might they do?

At the de Young Museum’s The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, curators projected the faces and recorded words of actual people—including Gaultier, himself—onto mannequins wearing the designer’s clothing, achieving an integration of both commentary and spectacle into the show. Photos: Andrew Fox/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Many museums have turned to new technologies—everything from audio tours to touch screens—both to increase opportunities for commentary and to allow visitors to individualize its type, amount, and timing. Yet this development continues to foster a dependence upon a knowledge that comes from outside, from museum educators. The recent Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit[15] included mannequins with the video-projected faces of real people, wearing the designer’s fashions and convincingly spouting commentary. This approach succeeded in seamlessly weaving commentary into the fabric of the show, but its most significant achievement was to turn commentary into a spectacle that risked overshadowing the clothing it was intended to highlight.

Commentary on Water

Can museums use technology to make commentary absent? Might the simple sentences about The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible III or Stadia I, for example, be written without ink, appearing only when I choose to press a button? Would this transform the process of commentary into a conscious act of seeking rather than an automatic one of being served? Imagine a label that seeks to write itself upon water. It would include less and less of a knowledgeable curator’s interpretation, leaving only the conditions of the artist’s materials and process. Even this little summary, however, might transport me out of the experience of the work and into the experience of the words. Reading the Polke label a month after seeing the work, I appreciated the artist’s activity and ideas, and the evocation of “primordial landscapes and intergalactic space,” which resonated with my experience of the image as infinite and engulfing. But, by evading the label at the time, I avoided being derailed by the task of integrating interpretation, protecting instead the not-knowing that was paramount to my process of discovery.

What might commentary be if it were no longer tied to its former necessity? Julie Lazar suggests an answer in her description of Cage’s musical circuses: “In a Cage circus, events take place simultaneously within a single space and audience members come and go randomly. There isn’t a specific beginning, middle or end—if you can’t hear or see everything in the room, that’s okay, you can at least see and hear something of interest.”[16] The same could be said of exhibition commentary. It is better for commentary to multiply questions rather than limit them by offering answers.[17] Among the many motivations that drive us toward commentary, there is a sort of fear, a fear not simply of not-knowing, but of misunderstanding. There is no fear in Cage’s artworld—at least none of the sort whose security comes in the blanket of a label—because there is no misunderstanding. That too is a whispered truth. Does the struggle, in and of itself, to comprehend, versus the compulsion to understand, suggest a possible solution?

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and the effect of the aesthetic experience on self and society. He received master’s degrees in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of Art, and is the Publications and Training Manager for the Alliance Health Project of the University of California, San Francisco. Part III of this series is upcoming.

Part I: If the Walls Would Not Speak

The museum is the kindest parent, ushering me to the brink, toward moments of wonder and awe, insight and revelation. But almost at once, it is the cruelest parent, jerking me back, repossessing the very experience it had allowed me to glimpse. Although it is laudable for museums to exalt the goal of “activating” the visitor, of nurturing visitor engagement and visitor choice, the structure of museums turns the visit into a battle for control and unearths a central tension of museum practice. On the one hand is the archeological experience of a cultural object, which claims the object as an illustration within a narrative to tell the visitor something about the context of the object, its meaning for others; on the other hand is the aesthetic experience of an art object, during which the object escapes its historical–cultural context, illustrating nothing except the visitor and telling the visitor something about the self.

It is an old tension, and it would be unreasonable to expect that it might have been resolved by now. It is, simply put, not for resolving. This vigorous state of irresolution, however, has not been matched by an equally unsettled set of museum practices. Although much has been written about exhibition commentary and structure, and new technology has inspired new formats of presenting information, museum methods have remained remarkably fixed in their philosophy: to marshal language toward interpretation. This article is the first in a series of essays, a polemic, a tribute, a sensation: a quest to enter into this churning tranquility. I am not a curator, nor am I a museum director faced with the demands of a dozen constituencies. I am simply a traveler, a visitor, a child of the museum who is beginning to feel cheated out his inheritance, out of the wonder that is—or should be—the legacy of the museum.

John Cage, Déreau 22, 1982; one in a series of 38 engravings with drypoint, aquatint, and photoetching; 14 x 18 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press. Dereau and all the other works in this article were on display during John Cage, a retrospective exhibit at Crown Point Press, which ran from February 3 through March 31, 2012 in honor of the 100th anniversary of Cage’s birth.

With or Without

“We can get along with education, or without it,” the pioneering composer and artist John Cage said nine months before he died in August 1992. Cage was responding to poet and scholar Joan Retallack’s question, “Knowing the extent to which [your work] is a result of chance operations teaches me something about seeing, and about the radical contingency of events in our world. . . . But how would one notice any of this . . . if one knew nothing about how and why you have worked the way you do?”[1] Retallack means how would one know that Cage applied the system of “chance operations” for which he was famous, as a tool to marshal “indeterminacy,” to put “the intention of the mind . . . out of operation”[2] during his creative process? How would one know that the composition of both his musical works and the prints he produced at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press over the last 15 years of his life, by reflecting this “radical contingency,” reveal something about the nature of world? Retallack said of Cage’s Where R=Ryoanji print series (1991):

“I was seeing them as I was trained to see “abstract” drawings, looking for elements of balance and design. Then I remembered that they were tracings of chance comings together. . . . At that moment of remembering, or realization, everything changed. I was no longer seeing “design”—something heavy and portentous; I was seeing the lightness, the grace and fragility of chance—how wonderful that that had come together in that way. But also how close it was to not happening at all. I would not have had this experience without knowing how you work. It was the conceptual context, that I took on, that opened up that way of seeing. And it seems to me that it is that context, of knowing the chance procedures, that keeps those traces from solidifying. . . . Keeps them from losing the motion that’s in them as events that have just grazed this piece of paper. It’s as though at any moment they could glance off again, fly apart.”[3]

John Cage, Where R=Ryoanji: (R3), 1983; drypoint; 7 x 21 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press. This is not the image to which Retallack refers when she says “I was seeing the lightness, the grace and fragility of chance,” but it is an image from the same series. According to Crown Point Press founder Kathan Brown, Cage “would start by asking as many questions as he could think of about the circumstances of the work,” for example, questions about number of objects, colors, types of line, methods.

In a museum dominated by narrative, “knowing” is often framed as the province of language. For Retallack, and indeed for most museum curators and educators, the context of an exhibit—the recitation that places the work and the artist within the art historical, sociopolitical, psychobiographical and other frameworks—is crucial to the visitor’s experience of the work. The structure of this recitation is not merely the “talk”—the wall plaques and labels that ornament the artworks, the audio guides and brochures that narrate the exhibit, the docent tours that explore it—but also the “walk”—the sequencing that governs the procession, as if on a conveyor belt, from one label—and its artwork—to another, one gallery in order to the next. On the 100th anniversary of Cage’s birthday—September 5, 1912—it makes sense to ask why this tendency is so prevalent and what structures allow it to manifest as such a jekyllhydian parent.

Despite the fact that Retallack is right—Cage’s work does resonate differently when I understand his process—“knowing” also disrupts my engagement. An artwork without label would seem to be if not mute, then at least reticent, but to what extent does the commentary of a label or a wall plaque arrest experience before it has a chance to develop? Just as the silence of Cage’s piano during his iconic composition 4’33” (1952)—nary a note is played—reveals the ambient sound of the world as music, the silence of the absent label—which seems to be an emptiness—reveals the sound of an artwork that words might obscure.

John Cage, Eninka 28, 1986; one in a series of 50 smoked and branded prints on gampi paper chine colle; 25 x 19 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press.

A Label By Any Other Name . . .

If Cage demurs to Retallack, “We can get along with education, or without it,” his formulation of “tourist attitude” suggests where his heart lies: “without it.” He’d prefer to be without either the talk of a guidebook or the walk of a map. Cage defines “tourist attitude” as the proposition to “act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it.”[4] Even if you do know something, Cage says, things will be different from what you’ve read, or even from your past experiences of the artwork, because the conditions of viewing, and being, are different now from what they were then. For Cage, then, wall text, and even the sequencing of an exhibit, seems to be too much information. This is less an offense—since, he says, it “will do”—than a lost opportunity to engage what gets scuttled in the frenzy of activity: the serendipity of wandering and, in response to unforeseen encounters, wondering. In fact, Cage, never settling for the predictability that wall text and sequence enforce, curated two exhibits that used chance operations to identify, place, and frequently rotate works during each exhibit’s run.[5]

Jonathan Franzen offers perhaps the most graceful counterargument to Cage’s tourist attitude. Writing about Edith Wharton’s capacity to evoke compassion for the most unsympathetic characters, characters “we wouldn’t like in real life,” he observes: “[T]he alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or dislike of ‘bad’ people into sympathy is desire.” Once an author gives a character a “powerful desire,” Franzen suggests, “I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own.”[6]

John Cage, Global Village 1, 1989; aquatint on two sheets of brown smoked paper; 38-1/2 x 26-1/2 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press.

Could it be that wall commentary, often far less compelling than a Wharton novel, nonetheless narrates that particular characteristic within the life of a particular artist that might make that artist’s intention palpable enough that I, the visitor, might magically embrace the artist’s desire as my own? I root for the artist, even if, as Franzen says of many a Wharton heroine, the character of his or her work might otherwise baffle or alarm me. It’s not that I relinquish my judgment but that I suspend it, at least for long enough to view the work through the artist’s—or, at least, the curator’s evocation of the artist’s—loving eyes.

Or is the power of some artwork so embedded in history or theory that, unaided by commentary, the visitor might overlook the works because they seem meaningless or intimidating? For architectural and art historian Laura Hollengreen, commentary is not a supplement to (or an enrichment of) the experience, as Retallack seems to suggest, but a crucial component of it.[7] Commentary, for Hollengreen, frontloads meaning—symbolism in Dutch art or indeterminacy in John Cage’s work—and builds confidence in order to seed an experience that might otherwise fail to develop.

John Cage, 75 Stones, 1989; Color spit bite aquatint with sugar lift aquatint on smoked paper; 54 x 41 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press.

Does Franzen’s seduction or Hollengreen’s education suspend or produce the very agency that many museums say they are seeking to activate in me? Once again, I find myself with an ambivalent parent, on the one hand encouraging me toward a Cagean tour of the world, and, on the other, seeking to shelter me from danger—the danger of misunderstanding the work or condemning the artist—by ensuring that I never stray far from home.

Narrative of Self; Narrative of Other

For a given curator, the process of exhibition making may be a joyful sharing, a labor of intimacy with, if not love, of the material. As curator and critic Simon Sheikh recounts, however, the museum’s historical roots gather nourishment from the language not only of “cultivation,” but also “corrective vision.” Sheikh says, “the right way of seeing . . . was offered as narrative pleasure, giving the spectator access to the viewpoints of power—indeed, empowering them by infusing them with knowledge while situating them within the grand narrative of the nation state and Western civilization,” an enterprise that continues “through to today’s multi-facetted and mediated art institutions with their confluence of spectacle and education, national history and multicultural internationalism.”[8]

John Cage, Without Horizon 33, 1992; one in a series of 57 unique aquatints with etching and drypoint on smoked paper, 7-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press.

Curator and artist Paul O’Neill refers to exhibitions, particularly group exhibitions, simply as “ideological texts.”[9] There is nothing wrong with thinking of an exhibition as an art historical, sociocultural, or political essay, in which the artworks function as illustrations of the essay’s theme. But then the exhibition is not about the visitor’s relationship to the artworks; it is about his or her relationship to the theme and its underlying objectives. At one point in their conversation, Cage and Retallack parse the difference between an “illustration” and an “accompaniment,” a distinction that applies equally to the book they were talking about and to an exhibition. “[I]llustration means that the center exists in another place,” Cage says. “So an illustration is not at the center, but is about the center. Whereas with accompaniment, each one is at its own center.”[10] Is the commentary of the label illustrating the artwork, the ostensible center of the exhibition? Or is the artwork illustrating the commentary, and is the center of the exhibition really the story that the curator seeks to narrate? Which lands us back at the (false) dichotomy of the aesthetic versus the archeological.

Cage allows for one other possibility: the two—artwork and narrative—may accompany one another, each maintaining its own centrality. Many museum experiences may, in fact, unfold this way, if only accidentally. If it is wise for museums to ensure “multiple interpretive voices”—the juxtaposition of narratives so that they undo their own narrative making—what might an exhibition do or be to sustain the aesthetic—the narrative of self—as central, along with the archeological—the narrative of other? Stay tuned.

John Cage, HV2 25B, 1992; one in a series of 25 aquatints; 12 x 14 inches; published by Crown Point Press, San Francisco. Courtesy of Crown Point Press.

It was miraculous to me, only because I had never seen the space behind the doors. Yet, it was shameful, as if I had seen something I ought not to have seen and, worse, had relished the view. As if the question “Should I look?” had been answered by the act of looking before my mind could complete the question with “or not?”

The scene is precisely what a museum is not about: uncurated looking. It is also precisely what a museum is about: serendipitous discovery. The space behind the doors was as mundane as it was miraculous, usually hidden precisely because the space and its goings-on were judged more mundane than miraculous. My inspection of the space was unsuitable, because it was the equivalent of bringing the attention I should bring to the art to a trash can in the museum’s lobby. “Nut,” you might mutter had you seen me gazing, or “Poseur.”

The poster for “Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media at SF MoMA,” July 14 through October 8; Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It seems a coincidence that the second time I saw the space, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was also staging an exhibit on performance art—Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media. More than a coincidence, a serendipity, because when closed, the doors of the miraculous space supported the enormous welcoming poster for Stage Presence, and when opened, they revealed—what?—a tableau, a stage! And to paraphrase Chekhov’s observation—that a gun introduced into a drama must surely go off—a tableau revealed to the world must surely contain a drama, even if the plot is only in my head, even if the stage-in-waiting masquerades as a freight elevator cab.

The SFMOMA freight elevator, 4th floor landing, revealed; Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Moments before I saw the space, I had watched the video of Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome (2001), a coincidence because Fraser is both a leading performance artist and a practitioner of institutional critique. Had Fraser seen the elevator space, might she have read its normally concealed, and benighted, status as diagnostic of the state of contemporary art and art museums? In Official Welcome, Fraser embodies presenters and recipients at an art awards ceremony, but she is most famous for incarnating “Jane Castleton,” the docent-character documented in the video Museum Highlights (1989). Castleton narrates for her real-life tour group the banalities of the Philadelphia Museum—the cafeteria, a water fountain, the admissions desk—as her sibling docents might have narrated the innovations of Monet, Cézanne, Jasper Johns, or Robert Adams, also on view at the museum in 1989. Jane might, I believe, reveal SF MoMA’s freight elevator cab as “a hidden gem, a space of intrigue and metamorphosis, a room in the process of becoming, whose subjects—carpenters, electricians, preparators, among others—foster the becoming throughout the museum.” Her satire might hang on the characterization of the normally unacknowledged and undervalued efforts of exhibition creation and museum maintenance as being as magical and wondrous as art creation, itself. It might also suggest that the museum is a storytelling institution, in both senses of the word: weaving truth from a conjunction of events and characters, and fiction from the assertion of a narrative truth that, alas, is always partial.

In a sense, though, the elevator performance is an opportunity not only for institutional critique, but also for the sort of possibility inherent in the museum operation itself. So, although I might criticize the strictures of the museum—the forced march structured by signs, images, and spaces: wall plaques and labels, the sequence of numbered artworks, the route from one gallery to the next—it is also true that the museum offers endless opportunities for unexpected juxtaposition and revelation. It is easy to follow the pathway in a kind of structured trance, but not so difficult to deviate, even, and especially, accidentally.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #92, 1981; chromogenic color print; 24 x 47 15/16″ (61 x 121.9 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Fellows of Photography Fund; ©2012 Cindy Sherman.

My experience unfolded, coincidentally, on the day I viewed the Cindy Sherman retrospective, in particular the Centerfolds series, which Sherman produced in 1981. Sherman is the consummate performance artist, although that is not how she is catalogued, and, in the Centerfolds, she appears the master of the pregnant moment, each image a one-act play depicting its climax. These vulnerable moments both encode the plot and expose my own vulnerability. They also ask, coincidentally, “Should I look—or not?” Looking, it is impossible not to feel that something is violated, whether it is the privacy of Sherman’s subjects (as the wall text observes), or of Sherman (who plays the model playing the character, but with the feeling of a subject), or, most of all, my own privacy. Yet, looking seems the only option at a museum. Certainly, it seems the only option when the freight elevator doors slide open—and, even more, when someone walks on stage.

The centerfold pictures are not, however, just about the danger of seeing. They are also about the inevitability of framing, about the constant stage-potential of living. Which is also what the elevator cab unwittingly, magnificently, enacts when it opens its doors to reveal a Chekhovian tableau. I find myself hesitating, I resolve to gaze, and the story unfolds.

The show goes on in the SF MoMA freight elevator, 4th floor landing; Photos: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Even without characters, the set—an assemblage of a pallet, a sign stand, dollies, carts, a portable crane, ladders, wall panels, cardboard tubing, a chair—performs the hard work that all successful theater undertakes. It suspends audience disbelief, hanging it upon what seems to be our inclination to tell ourselves stories. It combines donated material—the set, the props, the characters, even the plot—with each spectator’s material—imagination, preoccupation, predilection—thereby achieving the feeling of consistency. The same consistency as a material that gets called “truth.” So, in the freight elevator named Stage Presence, there appears a Beckettian set, containing the instruments of our mundanity: a cell standing in, I guess, for life, furnished with the tools standing in, I guess, for the never-ending work of living, and inhabited by a character, an everyperson, standing in both for the “me” who watches and for the watched person who performs the work. Performs it apparently without complaint, accepting even the gaze of a photographer as if it were part of the task. As if his task were not even the task that requires the tools but the task that requires the gazer.

In 2006, at UC Berkeley’s CalPerformance presentation of the Dublin-based Gate Theater’s production of Waiting for Godot, I had the strange sensation of incredible hopefulness. Four people wait. For Godot. Who never comes. At least not today. Waiting, it seems, is just another word for living. The accidental companions of our waiting—geographic coincidences—are, it seems, all we have. The stage is all but barren, the language all but repetition, the action all but inert. Yet my subconscious recognizes this condition as the world that I inhabit, a world not only absurdly repetitious and pointless, but also familiar and comforting.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket, performed by the Gate Theater Dublin at Cal Performances, Berkeley, November 2006; courtesy of Cal Performances.

As the elevator curtain comes down, the everyperson’s eyes glance up and then forward. The quiet repose he assumes as he sits looking out seems to represent the state of peaceful coexistence with life that I suspect we all try to pull off. Yet, as the fantastical figure pasted to the elevator door swallows the man, it also swallows that illusion: we must settle, as a last resort and at least in public, for impersonating the appearance of the peaceful by staging the impassive. In any case, that’s my story.

The experience at SF MoMA was compensation for the performance that I had failed to document at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February 2012. A group of, black-clad, white-gloved perpetrators—I mean preparators!—sat at a black-robed table facing the blocked entry to a large gallery, like a panel of inquisitors facing a prisoner. Each of their movements was articulated by work lights focused precisely on their hands as they cleaned the glass of pictures for the exhibition, Robert Adams: The Place We Live. If the elevator play is Beckettian, the glass-cleaning performance was Kafkaesque. Later, wandering through a different exhibition, I came upon the backside of the future Adams show, and there under the equally dramatic light, I spied framed photographs, propped up or arrayed flat, jockeying for position. A single image had made it to the wall. The performance was complete.

It surprises me that the museum has not taken advantage of the performative possibilities of the freight elevator. Imagine this procedure: the scene is set on the third floor, props and actors gathering in place in the elevator cab; the elevator rises to the fourth floor, actors on their marks; the doors rise signaling the beginning of the action and fall signaling its end. I have imagined requesting the space for a performance piece myself. There is, though, something precious about the impromptu performance I observed that would be lost in a planned performance, something startling, improvised, not by the elevator inhabitant—his action seemed planned, repeated a dozen times before—but by me. My mother, who accompanied me, thought the elevator man was engaged in a performance piece. In any case, that’s her story.

The dénouement; Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2012, with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and the effect of the aesthetic experience on self and society. He received master’s degrees in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of Art, and is the Publications and Training Manager for the Alliance Health Project of the University of California, San Francisco.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art defies the normal boundary between landing and gallery at the entrance to the fourth floor space that houses Sharon Lockhart’s “Lunch Break,” 2008. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2011, with permission of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The stairway to the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art leads me directly toward a long, narrow, darkened space, at the end of which is the image of another, much longer, passageway. In that image, a concrete floor below and light fixtures above trace a trajectory toward infinity punctuated by pipes, wires, hoses, storage boxes, tools, and lockers. The scene is not monochrome—red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are common—nor is it dark, but the fluorescent lights, the faded floor, the absent windows, and the constrained path—no more than five feet wide—suggest that this as a place to travel through, not a place in which to settle.

This sensation is amplified by the fact that the image, I slowly realize, is moving. Inch-by-inch down the corridor, the slow-motion journey of what turns out to be Sharon Lockhart’s film, Lunch Break (2008), might be confused with a series of stills.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

Lockhart, who says she is interested in “duration,” describes her method of filmmaking as “photographic.”[1] Despite appearances, the film is not typical slow-motion; Lockhart has digitally inserted eight repetitions of each frame, ballooning a 10-minute, 1,200-foot traverse into an 80-minute encounter. It is a film engaged in repeating moments, in suspending, not slowing, time. It asks me, in effect, to witness the moment once, and then again, and then again. It proposes that I might answer the question “What do you see?” only by pondering yet another, “Do you see what you see?”

All of a sudden, a person moves, and I recognize the objects dangling off a storage bin down the corridor as human legs. In this otherworldly place, everything that seems obvious at conventional speed becomes a mystery, a puzzle to be solved only by the closest attention. A young man with short blond hair in a white jumpsuit raises his hand to his forehead, or more precisely, raises———–his———-hand———-to———-his———–forehead, where the hand rests for two minutes of my time, or only about 10 seconds of his time. His hand settles back in his lap, and he looks down. Is this a moment of despair? As the blond man turns toward me, I recognize a gently waving hand below him. The hand is speaking, and it is attached to the green hoodie of another man. I assume the co-workers are friends; I want them to be friends. There is something emphatic in the gesture of the green-shirted man, something that could be advice or reprimand. The blond man’s lips part briefly. Then he turns away and looks down for what seems to be an eternity. Is he pensive or despondent? His hand returns to his forehead. The camera inches onward, never turning. There in front of me, two distinctive characters in a distinct place have enacted a story with no ending, one of some two dozen the procession reveals. Were the men talking about a spouse, a boss, a co-worker, a sports team, or the union? Were they complaining or sharing a story? Was the hand to the head about despair, exhaustion, a thought, or an itch?

Installation View of Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 15,2011—January 16, 2012, showing entrance to the film screening gallery (left), the neighboring gallery with a series of lunch-related photographs, and a pile of Lunch Break Times—Bay Area Edition, the 24-page tabloid newspaper Lockhart produced in San Francisco for this show. Photo: Johnna Arnold Photography.

It turns out that although this place looks like a passageway, it functions as a destination, a place for moving in rather than moving through. The film documents shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in Maine during the moments when they are not building ships. The procession down the hallway reveals one “all of a sudden” after another, its repeating moments of apparent stillness both facilitating contemplation and kindling suspense. I cannot make out the messages of these subdued bodies: body language needs the fluidity of its natural pace to achieve clarity. Further, the slow-motion procession foils the normal capacity to anticipate a movement the moment before it happens. I cannot join the rhythm of life in the corridor, and everything—a woman biting a sandwich, a man microwaving popcorn, a hand brushing a knee—becomes a riddle. While ordinarily I might compensate for these limitations through closer inspection, I cannot manage this: the procession, while inching, is inexorable, and the camera’s wide-angle frontward gaze, while inclusive, is unyielding.

The beauty of Lunch Break is that its attenuated moments make it difficult to lock onto a single interpretation: the slow shifting disturbs the storyline, twists it into another shape. I cannot resolve what has happened between the two men, but the film incubates a dozen possible answers, confounding the normal snap of my judgments. I have witnessed not simply the recorded event, but also the event of my own wondering, the activity of my imagination, which is often unconscious, extending over time. Lockhart has found a way to viscerally demonstrate the elasticity of the temporal-spatial experience. The event of the two men has taken only five minutes of my time, the camera traversing only 50 feet of corridor. Yet, within these repeated moments and movements, Lockhart has packed the narrative of a short story, one of many in the bursting anthology that comprises Lunch Break.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

The word “duration” refers to the period of time it takes for an event to occur, but I cannot sever its kinship to “endurance.” Both words stem from durus, Latin for “hard.” As I sat down to watch Lunch Break, I intended to stay, to endure, but I anticipated that the 80-minute experience would demand a sacrifice that would exceed my capacities. SFMoMA Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, says of the experience, “The viewer’s attention and perception are constantly at work,”[1] meaning that Lockhart’s film forces the viewer not only to attend to things that he or she might normally overlook, but also to attend to attention, to perceive perception happening. There were moments when this was exhausting. In fact, the film asks me to perform the very labor the workers will soon resume: a repetitive effort. It was, however, never boring.

Lockhart gets to the crux of the activity common to both workers and viewers: the skill, ingenuity, and variation at the core of undertakings usually dismissed as trivial or onerous simply because they are repetitive. I cannot claim that my attention never wavered, only that Lunch Break inevitably rewarded the patient process of discovery. If speed seems to be the bugaboo of our age, critiqued for its narcotic-like capacity to gratify a sensation-seeking society’s desire for stimulation, then slowness, particularly as it unfolds here, offers another avenue toward the great rumbling revelation of experience: an opening—one story after another—into the expansive world of the imagination.

Sharon Lockhart, “Dirty Don’s Delicious Dogs,” 2008; chromogenic print; 41 1/16 x 51 1/16 in. (left), and “Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator,” 2008; chromogenic print; 24 3/4 x 30 3/4 in. (right), both courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; © Sharon Lockhart

It seems accurate to say, as one description does, that “Lunch Break’s gradual passage through the aged factory offers a meditative and melancholic reflection on the architectural, social and phenomenological space of a notably anachronistic mode of industrialized labor.”[2] And I might easily reflect—as Lockhart did during her gallery talk—upon the bookends that coincidentally bracket Lunch Break’s making and showing: the real estate bubble’s pop in 2007, and the union rupture in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement, both in 2011. But what is it about the film itself—rather than my projections about its subject—that evokes melancholy? It is true that the corridor is filled neither with laughter nor even many smiles. One man stretches, perhaps relieving an ache; a woman stares, perhaps fatigued; many read silently, as unanimated as the figures in the Duane Hanson sculpture that initially inspired Lockhart.[3] It may well be that melancholy unavoidably surfaces in this claustrophobic underground world, but it may also be that the restraint and deliberation of Lockhart’s procession forces me to consider not only the practices of perception and attention, but also those of reflection and judgment. Although the film inevitably raises associations to the conditions of factory labor, I found myself suspending—far more often than reaching—easy conclusions.[4]

Lunch break, indeed.

[1]Exhibition press release, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 30, 2011.

[2]Harvard Film Archive “Timestage. The Cinema of Sharon Lockhart,” 2009 [accessed October 19, 2011]. ”Anachronistic” may reflect both an actual trend toward automation and, particularly in industries like shipbuilding, a fantasy of completely automated processes that discounts the persistence of human labor.

[3]Lockhart’s triptych, Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14, December – 23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), documented the installation of Hanson’s Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold) (1989). Lockhart’s photographs of live workers installing fiberglass ones marked the beginning of the project that resulted in Lunch Break, the film.

[4]Among these associations are: contemporary globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; 19^th-century industrialization, the conditions of factory work, and, ironically, the increasing automation of manufacturing; and the work ethic itself.

Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s “Sequence,” on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”

Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra’s “Sequence” (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?

Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and the artist approved of the site.

Half of Richard Serra’s “Sequence” (on loan by the Fisher Art Foundation) nestled in the cul-de-sac formed by the museum’s old and new wings. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

At 1:00 p.m., the pad is empty. Seen from the second-floor McMurtry Family Terrace of the new wing, the 200-ton crane that would lift each plate sat idly on the dirt to the left of the slab, the site of a past and future lawn. In the distance, each of the steel plates sat on its own flatbed trailer. The silence was barely disturbed by the arrival of Budco Master Rigger Joe Vilardi and his crew. Brandishing a floor plan, a T-square, two tape measures, a spool of hot pink twine, a roll of lime green masking tape, a hammer and stakes, the team carefully mapped out the reference points for each steel plate to guide the assembly of the sculpture.

Joe Berlese (left) and Domingo Tejada work with John Barbieri and Joe Vilardi (behind the plate in the left hand photo) to guide it into position. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. “Sequence” is on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation.

Over the course of the next three days, the assembly unfolded, at times like a dance, but one that never masked the painstaking process of hauling the trailers, attaching the plates to the crane, hoisting, swinging, lowering, and positioning the plates, and winching, clamping, hammering, grinding, and welding.

Riggers from Budco Enterprises undertake a variety of tasks to install Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The assembly mimicked the disorientation and confusion I felt when I first walked Sequence’s pathway—formed of two nesting S-curves—in 2007. The first plate, closest to where I stood, curved from the terrace, blocking the space beyond from my gaze. Each succeeding plate seemed not only to bare itself and define the growing form, but also to hide more of the concrete and abscond with the expanse—compressing the volume as if into the magician’s hat. I had not expected that this process, as beautiful as the evolving form was, would also entail a feeling of loss, a spurned desire to see.

Time-lapse video portrays the four-day installation of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra describes the primary experience of Sequence as confusion: “After a point . . . you become confused about whether you’ve been in the same place before or whether you are turning back on yourself. And then you arrive at an exit and you think, ‘This isn’t where I thought I was going to be.’” Sequence is not only about this confusion of orientation, but also about the veiling of space, about the theft of the certainty of my bodily relationship to the space I inhabit. Experiencing a new perspective, I lose the old one. Retracing my steps, I fail to recover the space that was.

On the fourth day, I walk through the completed sculpture. My experience of Sequence matches both Serra’s description of confusion and my New York memories, at least until I look up. Hovering above the sculpture is a bit of parapet, the curved wall of the terrace, a tree top, the octagon’s wall, the building’s pediment—all landmarks that might orient the Sequence participant and fix reference points that establish what Serra calls “your body’s own axis.” Do these markers undermine Sequence’s ability to steal, along with everything else, a consistent sense of verticality by registering not only top and bottom, but also north, south, east, west?

Landmarks of the Cantor Arts Center do little to orient the participant walking through Richard Serra’s “Sequence,” on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University

To remove the work is to destroy the work? It is a mistake to assume that Serra hews to site specificity out of abstract and unyielding principle rather than out of practical necessity: to collaborate with a site is the unavoidable means he applies towards his goal of engaging space. A sculpture’s intended site is integral to this process of creation. That particular site, however, may not always be integral to the resulting sculpture’s capacity to achieve Serra’s goals for his participants. Tilted Arc could achieve Serra’s goals for it only in Federal Plaza. As Serra wrote in 1985, “Tilted Arc was constructed so as to engage the public in a dialogue that would enhance, both perceptually and conceptually, its relation to the entire plaza.” And, as art historian Douglas Crimp notes, “[Tilted Arc] imposed a construction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architecture. It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experience that was counterposed against the bland efficiency established by the plaza’s architects.”

Can Sequence, born in the cramped MoMA gallery, achieve Serra’s goals for it in the expansive space of the Cantor courtyard? It remains, I suspect, that Sequence works best in the place where it originated. Sequence’s seeming expansion of the New York MoMA gallery space seemed magical in a way that Sequence, situated in the Cantor courtyard, cannot match. But Sequence’s capacity to reconceive space is far more potent than the mundane verticals of the courtyard’s architecture. And the sculpture’s capacity to confuse is far more significant than the landmarks that might otherwise orient me within the Google-mapped world of my mind.

Serra’s goal for Sequence was not to perform a political or social critique of the New York MoMA gallery’s space, as his goal for Tilted Arc had been to engage Federal Plaza. Instead, he sought to finesse the limitations of the gallery’s architecture toward the goal of engaging the participant in this disoriented experience of space and time.

Video of a walk through the interior passage of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Ultimately, Serra seeks this work to “be a catalyst for thought, [to] change how people think . . . and how they see.” In this sense, his work remains profoundly political. It is political, too, in its capacity to force the subject back and forth between the positions of outside observer and embodied participant, and to construct an environment in which the participant freely relinquishes, or at least shares, agency with the sculpture. Sequence, then—at Stanford as in New York—is not just movement and meter. It is an emergence from the safe cocoon of autonomous selfhood into the danger of an unpredictable dance, a negotiation with the sculpture, the space it reveals, and other visitors, as each participant navigates a self-contained—yet profoundly communal—encounter.

Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, is on view now at the Cantor Arts Center. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.