That Spot on the Floor

When an adolescent looks at life and sees how strange and unpredictable it is, we should embrace this aspect of youthful questioning and not try to close the loop with yet-another-project-about-identity. Being confronted with art that is not easily explained away is an opportunity to talk about life itself, and as Chekhov and Kerry James Marshall can show you, the closer you get to these unanswerables the closer you get to something that can be called (if you can forgive me for being UN-post modern) great art. A real art history education will show you that after satisfying aristocrats and religion, even those old-time European masters where subverting the hermeneutical straight-jacket of narrow interpretation. A great work can provoke and challenge, so much so that color, form and life become startling once again.

In order to show my students the wonders of the unanswerable (humor me, please), I point to a spot on the floor. That spot is surrounded by cracks and an uneven surface. The light from the window highlights an area near that spot so that the floor color gradually changes from grayish to something approaching white. Now after examining and contemplating that spot I ask my class "Do you get it?"  What is there to get?

There seems to be a fear that art that is not "gettable" will leave us speechless, and not in a good way. This fear of feeling uninitiated and uninformed and therefore not sure what to say in front of art grips the young and old alike, leading the closest of lovers and the best of friends to have awkward moments in a museum. This awkwardness has been somewhat intentional on the part of modern and contemporary artists, serving as the last bastion between themselves and a glib popular culture.

There is a way out. Young people can be shown that once we get past this quest for conclusive meaning in art we can begin to discuss what it is in front of us.

The folks over at Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) show that learning to verbalize what you are seeing when talking about art leads to the most interesting discussions. In fact, the contemporary art world could learn a lot from this approach because inverse to the fear of the uniformed, there is an equal if not greater fear shared by those who are well educated in art. It is a fear that without the theory and historical references there is little or nothing to say about the art object itself. Criticism has suffered as a result and substitutes clarity with challenging and often convoluted discourse.  If one were to dig a little deeper one would find that this discourse is symptomatic of the faithless who believe that there is little connection between the richness of thought and language and the visible world except what culture artificially creates.

The VTS strategy allows us to strip away everything we have learned and actually look at the art work.   Instead of imposing meaning upon art, we let art inform us. We can restore our faith in the possibility of the visible, and instead of dropping our young into a contemporary art world that believes in nothing, we can share with them something other than the societal cynicism they are trying hard to not to make their own.