The Labor of Leisure

How Do You Get (into) a Work of Art

It happens sooner than I expect. One moment, I'm focused, alert, engaged, and then suddenly, I'm out of steam, ready for fresh air and natural light. In my 20s, I could spend half a day in an art museum without much of an issue. Now I have an hour, two tops before a switch flips, and I want to leave. Museums, as you know, are not exactly hospitable environments. You can't bring a snack, there's never enough seating, the restroom is on the floor you just came from, and raising your voice above a whisper feels like disturbing the peace. 

I suspect that my diminished capacity for visits has less to do with anything happening in museums and more to do with how we absorb culture these days.

Trying to keep up with culture today can feel overwhelming and, at times, exhausting. For almost every episode of television you watch, a podcast recapping and breaking down the finer points of the plot seems to exist. You can listen to an album, think you've made perfect sense of what you've heard, and then find a page on Reddit decoding each song and all the beats you missed. And this may say more about my specific interests than any larger state of culture, but for me, Instagram has no shortage of reels made by stylists slash writers slash digital creators that explain in painful detail why a casual outfit worn by a celebrity "works." If you're lucky, they'll even tell you how to recreate it.  

A few days after getting swept up by the dancing in the video for Kendrick Lamar's song Not Like Us, I came across another video, this one of a woman studiously pointing out each time the music video's choreography made a purposeful reference to minstrel shows. Her tone (somewhat understandably) didn't so much as hint at the fun the dancers seemed to be having.

The option to ignore all of this supplementary information exists, but who doesn't crave a little context? 

And yet the more I notice people deconstructing cultural products they clearly care about, the more I wonder about the relationship between understanding and enjoying. Can you claim to enjoy something without a thorough understanding of it, and can understanding too much about something make it less enjoyable?

I suppose there are many types of understanding, but I mostly think of two. The understanding that comes from information and the understanding that comes from a more direct emotional connection. I seesaw between the two, though I'm not proud to admit that I overvalue the understanding that comes from information in part because it feels earned, like something you worked for.

If an artist goes through the trouble of making things, maybe we owe it to them to deconstruct, decipher, and decode our way toward understanding what they've done? Or perhaps we shouldn't try so hard? I'm not sure, but a few months ago, I had an experience that helped me get closer to finding the midpoint on the seesaw of understanding. 

In April, during a conversation with an artist acquaintance, I confessed, "I love to look at her work even though I don't think I really….get it."

This statement could apply to several artists, but in this case, I happened to be talking about Julie Mehretu. I find Julie Mehretu's work hard to classify and, therefore, difficult to describe to you in any way that feels neat or complete. Her work has an "and also" quality that allows it to slip past categories, containers, and boxes.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4), a 2018 work of ink and acrylic on canvas.

Her practice includes painting and also drawing, elements of printmaking, and photography. Her work is abstract and also somewhat figurative. The compositions in Mehretu's paintings are concentrated and also expansive, measured and also exuberant. The colors are bold and also muted. The lines are ordered and precise and also meandering and intuitive. The work can be large enough to fill the cavernous entrance to a museum and also so reasonably sized that you might imagine one hanging in your modestly sized bedroom.

Two days after my confession, I visited an exhibition of Julie Mehretu's work called Ensemble, which she helped curate. In addition to including work Mehretu has made over the last almost 25 years, Ensemble, as the title suggests, also includes the work of other artists, some of Mehretu's equally talented friends. People like the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the sculptor Nairy Baghramian, and the mythic conceptual artist David Hammons. The exhibition has the uncomplicated aim of highlighting "visual echoes" amongst the works on view. A shape in one painting meant to remind you of a form in a piece nearby. Before entering the exhibition, visitors have the option to grab a 40-page pamphlet packed with information about the artists and artworks in the show; the walls are free of explanatory text.

A work by Julie Mehretu and a sculpture of flip flopped feet by Paul Pfeiffer

The absence of wall text helped me realize what I meant when I said I didn't get Mehretu's work. I meant that I've never seen what's written about her art. More often than not, the words that I've read in museums and galleries seeking to describe her work have led not to understanding but to confusion. With Ensemble, any words liable to cause confusion were safely tucked away in my bag. 

As I made my way through years of Mehretu's creative output I realized what I did get about her art. I got that some of her paintings reminded me of things from my own life, the tie-dye clothes my mom made when my sisters and I were young, the airbrushed design on the matching t-shirts my middle school bestie and I wore on our 14th birthdays, the x-rays I've pretended to understand at doctors appointments over the years.

I got that there were moments in some of the pieces that made me think of other works of art like Alexander Calder's mobiles, Sam Gilliam's works on paper, and Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing. And I also got that this experience would join the others I've had with Julie Mehretu's work, and one day, I'd probably try to stitch them all together into a cohesive story I could tell myself about the work's importance.  

The frames for these Mehretu works were thought up by Nairy Baghramian.

Ensemble tipped me over to the emotional side of the seesaw, where I felt a bit selfish and a bit empowered. Is it wrong to look at a work of art and think mostly of your own experiences, not the artist's, or is that part of what makes a work of art great? For now, I've landed on thinking of the emotional approach as a way into a work of art. A starting point that will, hopefully, down the road, allow you to think about other things like the artist's process, intention, and biography. I bet you'll want to know how and why the work brought up certain feelings or memories for you, and before you know it, you're searching for information.

As I left Ensemble, surprisingly exhilarated, I considered how important it is to love to look at something, to try to find a way in before you decide it's time to get out.  

The Extras

• Ensemble is on view at Palazzo Grassi, an 18th-century palace turned contemporary art museum along the Grand Canal in Venice. Francois Pinault, the French billionaire and father-in-law of Salma Hayek, shares his art collection with the public across three museums, Palazzo Grassi being one of them. You can find more information about the show, including the artists and artwork, here. 

• If you look closely, just in front of the third column, you'll see the setup for the complimentary pamphlets and a colorful painting by Mehretu on the second floor. I'm a fan of the take-home exhibition booklet. It's like when a teacher says they won't quiz you on the reading, so you can really be in the moment with a book. Knowing that I could read about the exhibition later let me relax into the museum experience and think a little less about other people's ideas about the work. 

  

• You know what happens when you don't get museum fatigue; you have energy for the gift shop. I was delighted to find this Pharaoh Sanders record, which features Mehretu's work on the cover in Palazzo Grassi's gift shop.

Thanks for reading!