Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Yesterday, before coming home from the Joyce Research Colloquium, I spent some time in the Dublin City Gallery and was reminded of just how tiring looking at abstract paintings, as compared to representational art, can be—especially for someone like myself who works and thinks primarily in language. Abstract art forces you to relate to color as color, to texture as texture, to contrast as contrast etc.: in other words, it demands that you relate to the technique and the visual effects rather than processing a face as a face and moving on. The more purely abstract a work, the truer this is. If a work is representational in a non-realist way, a viewer may elect to be satisfied with having solved the puzzle of what is being represented, though surely a heightened awareness of how that representation is achieved will have been created along the way.

Often people who don’t “get” abstract art are looking to understand it in a representational way. “What does it mean?” asks for a symbolic key or at least some indication of a referent.

When I look, for instance, at Sean Scully’s work, that’s not what I’m looking for. I look instead at the contrast between bands of color, the stability of those bands and how the appearance of the borders changes as you move closer to the painting (at least as close as the guards will tolerate), and how colors are blended within the bands. The latter creates both texture and the illusion of texture.

Taking the time to consider visual elements on their own terms will, I hope, improve my own approaches to photography—but can it have any value outside of improving one’s own art? At the very least, it serves as a reminder that our everyday ways of thinking are not the only ways possible. That understanding is a prerequisite to deeper forms of social change.

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I’ve spent a lot of time in my life looking at trees and have followed, with my eyes, how the branches split into twigs and taper into leaves from quite a young age. This sort of close observation should be a prerequisite for drawing something whether in a realistic style or in one that requires primarily an understanding of the spirit and the idea of the tree rather than its actual physical details. In kindergarten, however, it proved to be a source of frustration in part because my fine motor skills were insufficient to allow me to draw what I saw and in part because when we had to draw trees as part of an in-class activity we were only given enough time to make lollipop-shaped deciduous trees or vaguely zigzag evergreens. Once when the teacher saw me growing frustrated (and falling several steps behind the rest of the class in the process), she told me to just draw the trees the way everyone else did.

I don’t mean to pick on her individually. I won’t even disclose her name (especially since it may have been the classroom assistant rather than the teacher). She probably believed she was doing the right thing; the problem, after all, is structural. Schools too often do not have as their goal the development of creativity and individuals’ ideas, abilities and vision but, rather, the creation of workers who can produce to schedule, who meet standards and only go beyond them in accepted ways and only when there is sufficient time to allow for it. There is no allowance for students to progress at their own pace, even when allowing extra time would mean that they would create something unique.

The worst teachers accept this. The best teachers struggle against it but are limited by class size, the demands of parents and administrators, and similar factors.

In the end, this incident became the most vividly remembered of several which together convinced me that I couldn’t really draw or create much of anything with my hands, except to the extent that camerawork counts.

That may be for the best in my case. I’m probably better at writing than I could ever be at sketching or painting. But I wonder how many genuine talents are suppressed in similar ways.

Some of the discussion around the long-overdue arrest of Roman Polanski I take very personally indeed. The man who raped me was an artist—a poet, not famous, not great, not even as well published as I am, but an artist nonetheless, so when I hear people suggesting that an artist’s work can somehow expiate the crimes he has committed against another human being, I have to consider it from that angle. Let’s say the man who raped me wrote a collection of poetry so remarkable that even I felt the need to learn from it in order to improve my poetics. This would have to be a truly astounding work because I’m not all that skilled at compartmentalization. Based on my knowledge of his work with its rhetoric-pretending-to-be-important, it is highly unlikely that he could ever produce anything like that. Still, if he did: would it change anything he did to me? Would it make up for any of it? For the trauma? For the pain? For the loss of my sense of autonomy?

Of course not. Nothing that man could ever do would change the reality of what he did. To suggest that a cruelty committed against an individual can be canceled out through the some more generalized set of good works is to engage in a sort of moral bookkeeping that is fundamentally inhumane.

But what effect then does committing such crimes have on the value of an individual’s work? It’s very easy to paint a line between the life and the work and to say that one should not impact the other, but if you do that, then you construct a second identity for an artist in which s/he is a pure avatar of ideas. The problem with that (besides all the general issues with constructs) is that when an artist goes to create, they still have all of the rest of who they are hanging about them. Experiences, beliefs, attitudes: those don’t change just because someone has put on their art-making galoshes today. To actively avoid applying knowledge of those factors to the evaluation and understanding of a work of art may make certain cases simpler or at least more comfortable, but it is as much an error as ignoring any other aspect of context would be.

When the man who raped me uses a word like “sex”, it has tremendously different meanings from when the man who loves me uses it. I’m not sure that should only be the case when I read or hear it. I don’t believe that interpretations from my position should be waved aside as biased (as if any human were ever purely objective) or invalid in a broader sense.

But it’s messy, right?

That’s part of how you know it’s valid. A legitimate consideration of art as a human endeavor should be messy because humans are messy. Artists are messy. Audiences are messy. The creative process is messy. To try to present a clean and simple picture of any of that is a disservice not only to art but also to the experience of being human and all the horrible and wonder things that entails.

You may have heard about the off-duty security guard at the Seattle Art Museum who took it upon herself to perform an “excavation” of Yoko Ono‘s Painting to Hammer a Nail, removing notes and business cards other people had tacked onto it. If we look at the work in terms of power, as allowing museum-goers to share the artist’s power to create (if only to a limited degree), then what Amanda Mae (the guard in question) did was to claim all that power for herself.

Taken as a commentary on the role of the curator, this is an intriguing act which makes a fair point. Even the problematic framing of Mae as the savior of the work with a “higher calling” fits this interpretation.

On the other hand, her act is also a real use of power—as real (if trivial) as when some asshole tears down all the fliers on a utility pole because they think ads for indie bands or lost cats don’t belong there.

Whether we look at this as a statement or as a real act, that Ms. Mae apparently referred to public interaction with the work as a “gang rape” shows a total lack of empathy for people who have survived that sort of violation. It also seems to suggest a failure to understand the piece. (As this comment was made in an email to an artist friend rather than publicly, I am disinclined to class it as a poor attempt at commentary on the understanding of curators).

ETA: Jon Hendricks, curator for Yoko Ono Exhibitions, sent a response to Ms. Mae that reads in part:

I think you have to consider art in a much deeper, more profound sense than you do. And also, to have greater respect for the artist, and not presume that you know what she intends. If the artist had instructed the work to be returned to its “austere” beginnings, that would have been her prerogative. But as she did not, you didn’t have the right to dictate what the artist’s intention was, and to rob those many people who had interacted with the work before you of their contribution to this process.

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