Wednesday 30 September 2015

Art Gallery Zen

Catching up with weekend papers, I came across this extraordinary challenge in Oliver Burkeman's column in the Guardian magazine of 22 August 2015:

"When you take a class with the Harvard University art historian Jennifer Roberts, your first task is always to choose a work of art then go and look at it, wherever it's displayed, for three full hours. Three hours! If that notion doesn't horrify you at least a little, I suspect you're atypical: in our impatient, accelerated age, the mere thought of it is sufficient to trigger an irritable jumpiness. (Stick me in front of a painting for three hours and I'd soon be swiping my thumb on it downwards, to see if there had been any updates.) Roberts knows this: the whole point, she writes, is that it's 'a painfully long time'. She doesn't expect her students to spend it all in rapt attention; rather, the goal is to experience that jumpiness, tolerate it, and get through it - whereupon they see things in the artwork they'd never have imagined were there."

Leaving aside the slight doubt that last sentence raises - do you simply start hallucinating, or do you actually see things you might not otherwise have seen - I find the idea intriguing. I think I would need to help the time pass by trying to draw the painting. In my experience, there is no better way of seeing than trying to capture an image of what is before you, regardless of whether what you produce is any good. The image you are producing is not the point - it can be really terrible (always is, when I try). The point is that you pay a special kind of attention to what you see when you try to draw it.

Three hours just standing there looking, doing nothing, though - I think that is completely beyond me. And then there's the fascinating question of which painting would be the one to choose.

6 comments:

  1. Three hours would be less painful with Frith's 'Derby Day' than one of Yves Klein's blue canvases, but I usually pat myself on the back if I've managed three minutes.

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    1. How long would you last with a Rothko, I was wondering. It's possible that it could be slightly mesmeric just looking at colour; maybe that's exactly what his pictures are for. Porbably a Brueghel, like the one showing children playing, or the Babel one, could keep yielding more and more details, but three hours is a very long time

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    2. Funnily enough, when I was 17, I went to the Tate and was very derisive about Rothko. A gallery attendant - in those days, they were all Cockney 'geezers' over the age of 50 - overheard me and said "Awright, you might fink it's a load of old cobblers, but you try lookin' at it for more than a couple of minutes."

      Being a callow youth, I thought he was a fool and gladly accepted the challenge, staring intently at the painting. At some point, weird things happened. A strange mist started to form in the centre, which then left the canvas and moved towards us. It was very odd. As predicted, after two minutes I'd had enough.

      I've always been very grateful to that guard for that lesson in humility and teaching me how to look at a painting.

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    3. I love everything about that story.

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  2. With the best will, I can look at art, meaning some tens of pieces, for about an hour and a half. Some of this is physical, for my eyes tire. Even at 20 I might not have had the eyes to pass Roberts's class.

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    1. For me, it's not the eyes that are the problem so much as my fidgetiness

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