An Arduous Perigrination

On Friday, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago and spent the entire two and a half hours in one room--not one gallery or wing, but one room (and it was not the bathroom). This was new for me, as I usually browse casually, moving from room to room within 10 minutes on average, some rooms holding me for about 20 minutes if I am truly interested in the art or artist.

While there, I had a few thoughts I had never had before, some that I probably should have thought but which never occurred to me for one reason or another. I thought about them for the past few days and decided to share them briefly here, not because they have particular merit, but because to me they were unique.

1) Art museums are jarring. You jump from one worldview to another to another in the turn of the head. Blink once and you experience the Shang Dynasty in a wine vessel; twice you see Crivelli's Crucifixion; three times you are blindsided by Max Ernst's surrealist works. It's like going to the library for the purpose of looking through the dust jackets. If the works are good enough to deserve being placed in an art museum, they merit contemplation of some sort. Perhaps I am merely weak-minded, but I start getting a headache when I try to think about too much at once. Granted, some works are not meant to be contemplated, such as the wine vessel, but there is still an element of depth to the piece that ought to be considered for a brief period at least. I am not suggesting that you search for the meaning of a piece, or try to "get the feeling" that it gives. All I am suggesting is something that Aesthetic theorists since Plato have posited--the good or great aesthetic experience that defines a well-wrought thing is not a passing thing, but something that pervades you and impels you to continue the contemplation.

2) Art actualizes the desires of the culture. Walter Benjamin suggests (and I am not by any means fully in agreement with his theory!) that art is essentially cultic. Take for an easy example the first two pieces above: the wine jar for funeral purposes and the painting of the crucifixion for purposes of prayer. These things arose out of the need for religious action. Traditionally the artwork has arisen from the desire to create a symbolic representation of the divine ends. The art becomes more and more elaborate as the deities become so. Yet with the advent of a distant deity, or a deity stripped bare of niceties, what replaces him in the human urge for aesthetic beauty is naturally whatever else actualizes the desires of the culture. More recently (say mid-19th through the 20th century) the art has come to reflect the desire of the culture to reinvent the individual as the deified creator of his or her own particular idiom. Even more recently there has been a trend of "rediscovery" of the human inter-connectedness, but this trend is still heavily weighted down by the individualistic purposes that preceded it. In the Ernst example, desire itself is what is actualized.

3) My last point is really just a reiteration of the above points: if art actualizes the desires of the culture, then the effect that it has on the viewer is to evoke the same desire. In some cases this desire is confrontational, in others soothing, in others merely passive. However, and this is one of the main reasons I spent 2 1/2 hours in one room and would gladly spend it again in the same room, the most important thing in contemplating art is to process the experience. I am not good with rationalizing things into logical formations internally, but that is the beauty of art--it is not philosophy and therefore does not have to be fully processed to be understood.

I am not so good at explaining the visual aspect of experience, but I definitely feel that these new realizations have helped me to seize the penetrating aspects of art in a new fashion.