this is not an abstract painting.

welcome to slow art aperitivo part two: art visit friday.

pt. 1, throwback thursday, was a medieval religious fresco, so what does an abstract modern painting have in common with that?! is the process of truly understanding the strange new world of modern art so different from that of the antique one we tried out?

i thought i would just give a taste of one adventure i shared with my students in having a dialog with it , and invite you to kind of come along....and hope it opens a door to make this work more accessible to you, and if you already felt you could 'hear' it speaking to you, deepen your conversation together even more.

first, before we "go to the exhibit together" (to follow below) let's consider what modern/contemporary and medieval/renaissance art have in common to us as viewers living today.

we often think that renaissance art is so 'easy' to understand, because it has recognizable figures, we see trees, things, people, saints, we think, "okay, i get it". but actually, i remind my students that we no more "get" medieval art at a glance than we do modern. they have that in common.

both require that we understand a much deeper tradition, a much deeper version of the story they refer to, and also the tradition of the people who painted them and the people for whom they were painted. for that, we have to do our homework, and we have to not rely on banal physical descriptions made by experts which stay on the surface of style, date, and provenance. we have to dig into the hearts and minds of the artists and their intended audience. and that is also true here, with modern art. except that in this case, we are painfully aware of our lack of understanding, and in fact we have no recognizeable objects or stories to refer to, often, that would otherwise give us some clue, and which we could judge as being done skillfully, so we could say the artist, and therefore the art, was either "good" or "bad".

in fact it was only when i was taught art history/criticism by an artist using original sources of artist's writings from the period that the group of modern painters this painting (above) is from began to be able to speak to me, make real sense, and i able to listen. unlike some people, before that, i just didn't have that immediate gut reaction of attraction and "aha!" to a lot of it. but our relationship has changed. it would be totally different if i hadn't had those conversations.

what about you? let's do a "before" and "after" check in...

so once again, i invite you to enjoy pouring yourself a cool glass of apple cider, moscato, a nice chianti, or a bubbly sparkling water with lemon, and let's enjoy our slow art aperitivo together, listening to the work, ourselves, & each other, shall we?

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the above are paintings that i recently saw with my students on our art visit friday as part of the modern exhibit currently at the palazzo strozzi museum here in florence called "from kandinsky to pollock".

the painter, mark rothko, is part of the modern art movement that began with a group of new york artists back in the 1950's called the abstract expressionists. the best-known name among them was probably jackson pollock, famous for his "drip" paintings (which understandably for many seem like accidents of house paint that they leave on their drop cloths when redecorating a room...but that's for another slow art aperitivo!).

coming to this exhibit together, we began a conversation about just what we need to bring when we look at art in order to have a two-way conversation, one in which we are capable of listening and actually hearing the work. this also means talking about what is too often left out of the discourse we read in our art history books or critic's reviews when trying to prepare ourselves for a museum visit.

what is most left out, i have concluded after my experiences as both student, artist, and now teacher and researcher, are the words, the definitions, the intentions, of the artists. so, often what happens instead, as it did to me as a student, is that a sort of bare or intellectualized version of a thing is explained which does not reflect the essence of the thing or make you feel that "aha!" you were hoping for, that personal, supra-logical (as in beyond and more than merely logical) connection you can have with a work.

so as a professor now, it is my passion to make work-- whether it is a medieval icon made in siena of mary and jesus, or a splattered-paint canvas painted in new york-- speak for itself, and directly to us, today, here and now.

let's start off with the words of rothko himself, while keeping the image of these paintings hanging in the strozzi museum (above) now in mind.

“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else."

how do you feel hearing that? what's your first reaction?

perhaps you may feel intrigued, curious? or confused and maybe even like ending the "conversation" right here & now while grumbling to yourself, "HUH?!! if squares and rectagnles aren't form, and big blocks of red and black aren't color, then i just don't get it!"?

all understandable! let's see what happens if we do not walk out on our dialog just yet....and do that "adopting a beginner's mind" trick, pretending for a moment we have less of a reaction just to gain some space to listen, and staying a little more like little kids as we cross over to the curious side of the street in our brains...

there's a bit of a fun way i'd like to talk about it before we think this little modern art chat we started is over before it began!

this statement by rothko-- that this is NOT an abstract painting-- reminds me of the surrealist artist magritte's painting "ceci n'est pas une pipe."... where the french words scrawled along the bottom of a painting (of a pipe) say quite plainly and boldly, "this is not a pipe." period.

i often ask my students if they agree with magritte's statement?

do you?

they universally and quite confidently say "NO! it IS a pipe!" take a look & see what you think....

so i give them another, then another chance, and they predictably stay steadily convinced of the fact that it IS a pipe, obviously!

...that is, until i agree with them and invite them to smoke it.

at which point we all break out in laughter, and they smilingly say something like yes, okay, oops--it's a PAINTING of a pipe- it's an image...it seems like a small trick of words, but in fact it is the whole point of the painting, where the artists like magritte began talking about the new world of psychology and the subconscious and dreams, and about the new fields and philosophies coming out of linguistics.

. so they started playing-- not just directly representing like in past art-- with images and words. they started to point out through this play the way that we construct, not just passively "show" reality with both our words and our pictures. and they liked to point out the ways that what a word means, and what an image means, goes beyond its official and logical dictionary definition & becomes also full of our own emotional, symbolic, societal, personal memory associations, and so on.... so that means that like the pipe, a thing, or an image of it, and a word labeling it, are not the same thing-- in several ways.

this pipe experience points to what we have to work to understand in modern art order to not simply be frustrated by the work if we don't feel like we "get it" right away, but to begin to hear and converse and even have fun with it.

so let's go back just to be sure, and hear rothko tell us again about his paintings:

"If you... are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point."

so what, we ask, is rothko interested in if these are not about abstract painting?!

and now, we will let him answer for himself:

"I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

and he in another moment clarifies,

"That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

and

"If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas."

Eternal? Spiritual? hmm.....this may indeed not be a pipe, no pipe at all.

so what were these abstract-but -not-just-abstract artists doing?

let's ask robert motherwell, another painter in the strozzi exhibit, to clarify, as he is one of the most articulate of them, and was also a prominent teacher who was influential in getting the abstract expressionist movement to be born when he came over from germany to new york fleeing the second world war.

motherwell writes that what art has to do is be religion for people whose religion has collapsed and whose religious meaning, symbols, images, and ideas are in “default”-- they are bankrupt, useless, void of value. modern dehumanizing scientific technology allows us to control each other, cuts our experience up into categories, makes authentic spiritual human existence impossible.

he explains that our old images have gone into default. they no longer carry the POWER they once had. so he asks, how do you revive the authentic spirituality in people? you have to withold the images. you can’t do it through the old images & try to revive them.

if so many people have lost their faith, then painting another madonna, another saint, another image of jesus will not touch them. they will stay on the surface, talk about how pretty it is, or how good the artist is, what period it's from, and what date and where it was stored, and for how long, and what the technique is called, and what the name of the story/subject represented is (these are some of my actual experiences with recorded museum guides and with some art historians/guides in person on occasion).

so these abstract paintings can be understood as a kind of imageless “icon”. that absence, void, yearning for god to appear, is the spiritual experience.

strange, isn't it? that maybe yesterday's thirsty thursday feet fresco has more to do with these colorful rectangles on canvas than we originally could ever imagine?!!

so now, back to rothko-

"The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need."

what do you think this eternal, all-across the centuries, present in every single human culture, every aeon, "need" is?

it is the need of the transcendent, the divine...and by painting these larger canvases, he creates a space for us to enter. right there in the gallery, he is transforming it into some kind of secular-sacred-church-museum-space.

"The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command."

and as you stand in front of these paintings in the strozzi museum, you are quiet. listening. and you remember that rothko said,

"Silence is so accurate."

like the silence that is respected in a holy space, traditionally a church.

"...I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.”

so you find yourself stopping in front of one of these paintings.

and you stop taking pictures.

you hold still. wow-- already, that is a revelation. we keep rushing, walking past everything, so fast. consuming. these are not about that.

you block out everything around you.

you get quiet.

you listen.

and then, just maybe... you hear something that is not about the labels of materials and styles, but about a deeper intention. in the silence, you have something move you, something that you wouldn't have even listened for if you hadn't known it could be there waiting to tell you something.

if these were just abstract, decorative paintings, then they wouldn't deserve this kind of attention you are giving them, this kind of listening. but you know a bit about who they are, so you stand still. you get into a "pocket of silence". and there, you start to feel inside of the space of the canvas. and then... you might find yourself agreeing that, indeed,"ceci n'est pas une pipe" after all.

"...the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them."― Mark Rothko