Two terrific essays that I’ve come across recently, both wonderfully perceptive examples of arts criticism, have struck with me their astute insights about how we look at art, how we think about art, and how that can change how we see and think about the world.
I suspect these essays hit me hard because how we see and think about the world is changing rapidly and dramatically as everything pauses during the coronavirus pandemic, and as we witness the Band-Aids that have been just barely holding together the house of cards we call a society have been ripped off and it has all started to collapse. Being able to reorient our perspectives is suddenly a radical imperative, if we’re going to remake the world for the better in the wake of this. That is not something that is in any way guaranteed, so we need to push for it. But before we can push for it, we need to imagine other possibilities. And before we can do that, we need to reexamine how we look at the world.
So…
Back in February (yes, this link has been sitting in an open browser tab for a while), Sebastian Smee at The Washington Post reviewed the exhibition “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870,” which had just opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. (Its run was cut short by the pandemic shutdown, but you can see some of the canvases at the exhibition’s NGA site.) In a piece with the remarkable title of “You’ve probably never heard of these artists, but they painted reality in a way we’ve lost sight of,” Smee writes:
[The show is] about how a bunch of European painters started paying close attention to empirical reality (remember that?) and how, one by one, they figured out how to set aside convention and prejudice, and to paint what was before their eyes.
…
[F]or all its quietude, the show is radical. [snip] Why? Is it the authenticity? Does painting as fresh and firsthand as this provide the antidote we need to screens, social media and the capital’s all-around ambiance of lies and spin? Could be. But I think these small, luminous paintings are pressing us into an awareness of something deeper.
The fact is that we’re being pulled ever further from an awareness of our minds’ basis in, and dependence on, nature, and from the idea that there exists an empirical reality. That’s scary. You can point to the subjectivity and partiality of vision all you like. (We’re all limited in our perceptions. To be human is to struggle with bias). But when you’re so obsessed with exposing bias that you abandon the idea of an empirical reality altogether, you leave a vacuum.
Here’s the bit that also applies to movies (and all other forms of art):
In art, it’s always fascinating to see how strong the collective conventions that govern vision can be, and how seriously they can impede our ability to see clearly. When Europeans first came to America, for instance, or to Australia, they spent decades painting the distinctive new landscapes they encountered — landscapes that looked nothing like Europe — as if they were just another version of Europe.
Their visions were dictated by the conventions they brought with them. As examples of bias, of cognitive dissonance, the results are interesting. But they’re also absurd, stale, embarrassing — in the same way that seeing the world through the lens of your social media feed is absurd, stale, embarrassing.
Advice for making art (and perhaps for remaking the world):
Don’t accept received wisdom. Dispense with acquired habits. Find out for yourself. Look. Look with feeling. Look again.
[snip]
It’s a cornerstone of journalism, scientific inquiry and poetry. It’s an instruction for how to be in the world. It has never been more important.
Smee wrote that in February. It’s even more important now.
And then there’s Will Gompertz at BBC News writing about the brand-new and mind-blowingly amazing high-res and deeply zoomable photo of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” that Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum posted online this week. (That zoomable photo is here. WARNING: You will get lost in it for hours.)
The photo is a whole new way of seeing this astonishing painting like no one has ever seen before with the naked eye. Not even Rembrandt himself. Curators and conservators will only have seen such detail previously with the help of microscopes. Certainly no museum visitor will ever have gotten this perspective on it.
And what is there to see? Well!
At no point does the image start to pixilate or distort, it’s pin-sharp throughout.
And it remains so as you continue to click, getting further and further into the painting until the Captain’s paint-cracked eyeball is the size of a fist, and you realise that tiny glint you first saw isn’t the result of one dab of Rembrandt’s brush, but four separate applications, each loaded with a slightly different shade of paint.
And then you stop and think: Crikey, Rembrandt actually used four different colours to paint a miniscule light effect in the eye of one of the many life-sized protagonists featured in this group portrait, which probably wouldn’t be seen by anybody anyway.
Or, maybe, this visionary 17th Century Dutchman foresaw a future where the early experiments with camera obscura techniques, in which he might have dabbled, would eventually lead to a photographic technology capable of recording a visual representation of his giant canvas to a level of detail beyond the eyesight of even the artist himself!
Here we’re seeing how Rembrandt saw the world! But also not! We’re seeing how he thought about the world — in much the same way as Smee saw how those landscape painters were seeing the world: as it is, but also the small, solid elements that combine to create a perception of the world… and how the tiniest detail can have an enormous impact on the big picture. Figuratively, but also literally:
The Night Watch is as close to theatre as a painting can get.
As the director of the Rijksmuseum said, it is a school photo taken before everybody is lined up in order (it shows Capt. Cocq instructing Lt. Ruytenburch to bring his men to attention).
It captures a moment of movement and mayhem.
You can see that when in front of the canvas. But what you are not, when you’re at home, you can now see the same sense of chaos in the way Rembrandt painted his masterpiece
What is making art if not bringing beauty and order to chaos? What is thinking about art if not striving to understand the chaos?
Time to starting seeing and thinking about the chaos in new ways…
Brilliant. Thanks for this. Smee’s insight (I don’t know if he already talks about this, since I can’t access the Post) also describes the hurdle we face when we attempt to improve our drawing skills. When, as kids, we first tried to draw a cloud or a tree or a house, we probably came up with the “curly” circle for a cloud, or the curly circle standing on two straight lines for a tree, or the box with a triangle on top for a house. We were regurgitating preconceived ideas. Learning to draw realistic clouds, trees, and houses means giving up our notions of what those things “should” look like, and seeing what’s actually in front of us.
On a bit of a tangent, I recently watched Fred Wiseman’s National Gallery, and learned from the curators and conservators in the film another way to appreciate all the art. It turns out that artists often knew exactly where their patrons intended to hang the paintings, and therefore painted them to take full advantage of the location: intensifying colors and contrasts if the room was in shadow (or flickering candlelight), deciding on compositions depending on which angle viewers would see the work, even choosing the painting’s light source to match the direction of the actual light coming from a window. It was cool to learn how artists were thinking and planning on even more levels than I assumed.
In one of my film classes a few years ago I was taken with the concept of the social imaginary, which my tutor applied to popular Indian cinema, much of which imagines a highly stylised, upbeat, forever singing and dancing world very different from the reality of life in modern India. It prompted much thinking about the lack of utopias and a plethora of dystopias in contemporary Western cinema. The recent Star Trek Picard took the basic optimism of 20th century Trek and buried it under facile lazy cynicism. Forget “working to better ourselves”. Today’s sci-fi TV apparently must reflect the bleak mood of the times, not imagine a better life than the one we have. Imagining other possibilities grows harder when so much of the fictional media presented to us reinforces pessimism.
Feelgood utopias can be accused of empty escapism, diverting attention away from real issues, but surely seeing a better world, even a highly improbable one, inspires the urge to recreate it in reality, not merely temporarily enjoy it in fantasy? The stories that show those better worlds (not only futures, but reimagined presents and pasts) hold great appeal as beacons of hope. I’ve no problem with depictions of the past that insert anachronistic values if it’s done well and deliberately making a point. And sometimes ‘progressive’ values did exist in the past, but have been buried under the ‘we’ve always been at war with Eurasia’ lie.
In trying to overcome biased ideas of what things “should” look like, there is the possibility for imagining what they could look like, which is woefully under-explored in cinema. One of the impediments to imagining better worlds is the persistent nitpicking of films for not comporting with reality, according to a subjective bias as to what constitutes a depiction of reality onscreen. It’s almost as if people suffering this curse of literalism are saying “I watch movies to escape reality”, then immediately complaining “Why isn’t this movie more like reality?”
On a related note, here are a couple of old essays by Neal Stephenson on techno-optimism and Philip Pullman on dystopias in YA fiction. Stephenson has a narrow focus on technology, and some of Pullman’s assumptions are outdated (pandemics aren’t a “remote threat” anymore), but it’s still true that visions of better worlds have value, if only so that we have something to work towards.
And yes, “a highly stylised, upbeat, forever singing and dancing world” is the future that I want. :-)
So your ideal future would be a cross between The Red Shoes and Joss Whedon’s “Once More, with Feeling”? :-)
Well, Tonio, let me put it this way.
*inhales to begin singing, while a crowd gathers to bust out the choreography*
Thanks for the suggestion. Minor correction: the YA dystopia article is by Phillip Reeve, not Pullman. That article is nearly ten years old and said pretty much what I was trying to say, only better. Reeve’s point about humour stood out. The Mad Max films, and most 80’s apocalypses, had a sense of playfulness, of finding some humour in the wasteland. Of recent cinematic dystopias, only Fury Road really captures that buoyant quality. It also ended with hope.
Whoops, thanks for the Pullman/Reeve correction. Brain fart. :-)
You were right about getting lost in that zoomable Rembrandt. Coming down with a bit of Stendhal Syndrome.