Hello Friends,
I have been thinking alot about close looking that I’ve been writing about for weeks and realize that my close looking, even as it connects to solace, is largely grounded in my training as an art historian. I’m looking, but as a step to research and investigation of the work of art. I think, more and more, that we are looking too closely at the work of art and not at ourselves.
The transformative learning moment for me, long ago, came when I found Marcia Pointon’s circle of questions, her so-called Interrogation of a Work of Art.
I had been trying for years to just look, step back, to control or contain my own desire to interpret and analyze, the looking that leads to the epiphanic discovery, that I had figure it out, the meaning of a picture, the key to the artist’s intention in the time he or she worked. She stopped me dead in my tracks, and later helped me teach students who had no idea how to look at a work of art, with questions like: What is it? What is it made of? What condition is it in? Iit the only one? What is going on in it? How is it presented? Eighteen questions. What could the artist have possibly wanted to convey, a question so filled with mystery when studying artists who were long gone, with only scant letters and documents, if any. We’d move to cultural awareness—for whom was it made, how did it get here, who acquired it and why, what did it cost, who looked at it, who looks at it, what did it mean, what does it mean—trying to see the work in the time and place it was created, thinking about people and settings, landscapes and interiors, endless things with potential symbolic meaning. And so much of our work was and is about discovery.
What I’m thinking about now is meeting people where they are, even meeting myself where I am, which leads to another line of looking and questioning. Over the past few weeks, if you read or listen to my posts from Crystal Bridges, I spent time with visitors to the museum, hoping to discover what questions they might have when standing in front of a picture. The usual questions for a curator or a museum educator would be aimed at the picture. What if we aim outwards and flip the tables so that the human response comes first.
I am fascinated by the work of others who are already delving into this work. I’m inspired by the approach developed by the Campus NatureRx program, encouraging college students especially to walk outdoors without a whole lot of deliberate thinking, a presence of attention that certainly requires focus and looking, but allows the scene to sink in rather than open up to interrogation. I might be getting too reductive in explaining the work, but it’s about feeling and awareness, rather than trying to identify every plant along the way. Once in a forest bathing class a little over a year ago, we were instructed to just walk, just look, just take it in. One in the group was troubled by his natural inclination to try to distinguish the maples from the oaks, the meadow from the designed garden, to see the trees rather than the forest. Putting our own awareness first is difficult, when we’ve been trained to discern, learn, looking to label. The NatureRx initiatives focus on people and their health, particularly mental health and the results are significant. A very recent advance in their work hones in on access and the many vital protocols and initiatives to welcome green spaces to all people, green justice. I wonder if such training in walking and looking without impulse to name and know can be translated to indoors, to art in museums.
Several museums are taking this on, in programs designed to help us figure out ourselves, rather than figuring out the art. The American Alliance of Museums has created a compendium of work in health and wellness going on in museums now, designing programs for communities and individuals who are looking to museums to go beyond the usual menu of tours, exhibitions, installations, and classes for general enjoyment. The idea of a general audience is long in our past, as we reckon with cultural diversity and awareness, it’s not enough to convey cultural heritage and artistic practice, no matter how profoundly beautiful. The work ahead is creating a bridge between culture and healthcare, a tall order but entirely possible. In 2017, the Minneapolis Institute of Art created a Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts, a huge project that aims at using art to “identify with the experiences of others.” The Wexner Center in Ohio invented Art & Resilience through collective intelligence of museum staff and social scientists and psychologists, creating a safe space for “deep looking and healthy conversation” in the galleries. One more, the Art Institute of Chicago has created a vocational program called Civic Wellness, again with museum staff working in tandem with occupational therapists and medical students. In each of these programs, and there are more, a true ground-swell of energy, looking joins inquiry, but not inquiry into a work of art, even though groups sit, contemplate, meditate, talk in front of a painting, but into their feelings, their objective thoughts, themselves, what Sam Ramos, who runs the program at AIC, calls making a “case for how art can change minds and improve society.” And that’s what I’m talking about.
Take a Walk
Yesterday I rode my bike 17 miles, from Michigan to Indiana, to visit the Wellfield Botanical Garden in Elkhart, a stunningly beautiful 24 acres of meadow and designed gardens in an urban center. I’ll admit my mind at first starting reciting names of native plants, as if I was on a research trip to catalogue native prairie plants, but in just a bit of time, I stopped the madness and just walked. Maybe it was the little girl with her father, she was having a temper tantrum until he pulled her under a weeping willow to sit. Maybe it was the bridge to the island garden—oh my critical mind immediately started carping about the fact that oakleaf hydrangea would never be in a Japanese garden, but I had the wherewithal to tell myself to cut it out and just walk. I rode back home fully present in the finished corn fields, the dry soy crops, and the setting sun,
And Onward
Next week, I leave the heartland for trips to Denver and New York, looking forward to visiting museums anew and with an eye to seeing my favorite galleries as places of solace and healing. I know it can be done.
Until then, keep walking and looking, slowly and with curiosity and courage,
Carrie
