Dream Log: Museum Visit With My Brother

Last night I dreamed I was in a museum, not any museum I knew from waking life. It was somewhere in the Detroit area, and it was mostly focused on late-20th- and 21st-century art. It was early evening, a little before twilight in summer, and the museum was crowded with people who'd been let in for an opening or some other special event. Like the identity of the museum, I was fuzzy on what sort of event it was exactly, but I was glad to have been let in. It was my first time there, and I was more interested in roaming the entire building, looking at as much of the entire collection as I could, than in focusing on whatever the opening or special event might happen to be.

Unlike the Guggenheim or a museum designed by Frank Gehry, this building seemed to be made deliberately in order not to compete for attention with the artworks it contained. The building felt new, but it was reminiscent of the Mies and the International Style: very rectangular, very subdued.

Just as I didn't know what museum it was or what the evening's special event was, so too I didn't recognize any individual artworks or know which artists had made them. There were a lot of paintings in monochrome and/or subdued colors, reminiscent of some of the less-colorful work of Marden, Martin, Soulanges and Motherwell. I liked these paintings very much. Then I came upon an artwork which completely covered all four walls of a very large room with a translucent grey-ish substance which looked like plastic which had melted, or like some sort of sugary candy in the process of being cooked -- but no, that's the wrong way to describe it, because it seemed neither warm nor sticky. On the contrary, the overall impression was quite inorganic and cool. Nor was there any smell of plastic. I had never experienced anything like it and I was quite impressed.

Not long after walking through that room, suddenly, my brother was walking along beside me. This was quite surprising, because in waking life, I have never known him to have any appreciation for, or curiosity about, modern art. He's always been a representative of the "my-5-year-old-daughter-paints-better-than-Picasso-did" school of art criticism, Picasso being one of perhaps only three artists, modern or not, whose names he knows, along with Leonardo and Michelangelo. In the dream, he didn't saying anything at all, appreciative or not, about all the non-representational and abstract art all around us. But the museum did contain some pre-modern art, and my brother said something positive about a painting which looked as if it was from the 17th century, showing a man with a grotesquely oversized chin a la Habsburg, astride a white horse.

My brother said he liked this painting, but pointed to the crude and unconvincing depiction of the horse's head, saying he thought this picture was probably made while the artist was still very young. A more mature painter, he said, would have painted the horse in a more realistic manner.

I tried to get my brother to look at the plaque on the wall beside the painting, giving its date and the dates of the birth and death of the painter. It had, in fact, been made when the artist was an old man. I tried to explain to my brother that artistic representations of animals generally had grown much more sophisticated since the 17th century, as mankind's knowledge of biology became more sophisticated. But I wasn't sure whether he was listening to me at all.

Agnes Martin

In the documentary Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, Martin describes how her childhood hometown in Saskatchewan was located on a prairie so flat that you could watch a train approach the town, or leave the town, for hours. I'm trying to understand the effect she said she wanted her paintings to have, the effect others say they get from the paintings: a feeling of happiness, peaceful happiness. I certainly felt that when listening to her talk in the documentary, filmed toward the end of her life, when she was around 90 years old, I felt very soothed indeed -- but I look at her paintings, and I just think, "Whaaaat...?" Honestly, all I feel is puzzled. But I am looking for clues. Over and over again in the course of my life, I have looked at the work of an artist whom others have highly praised, and the objects of art in question have held no appeal for me -- until I've looked at them for a while, and then they have. No luck so far with Agnes Martin's paintings -- but maybe that prairie train-track is an important clue to the mystery of all of those paintings with horizontal stripes in pale earth-tones. Maybe they signified for Martin, subconsciously or however, the prairie horizon, the horizontal stripe of that train track, the colors of the land, fields sun-bleached in summer.

Maybe I'm starting to get it now about Martin's paintings. Right now, as I write this, looking at a picture of Martin's painting Happy Holidays in another window, on the website of the National Galleries of Scotland.

I don't know. I've never taken this approach before, examining an artist's biography or his or her statements for help in understanding his or her work. On the contrary, in fact, sometimes I have deliberately ignored what an artist had to say about his own work, as in the cases of Martin's fellow Abstract Expressionists Pollock and Rothko, both very gloomy fellows. I don't tend to feel gloomy at all when I look at a Pollock or a Rothko, on the contrary. If my reactions are "wrong," I don't really care, I'd rather feel exhilarated than depressed. I can do depressed all on my own, I don't tend to need much help there.

When it comes to exhilaration, joy, calm and the like, however, I will gladly take all the help I can get. Then again, if I find very different things in the work of Rothko and Pollock than what is usually described as their effects, if some critics would describe my reactions as "wrong," who's to say that looking for happiness in Martin's paintings might not be a futile quest for me?

I'm looking at Happy Holidays again in the other browser window, and... naaah, I don't really get it yet. Although I do now like the pictures made by Martin's former roommate Ellsworth Kelly. I've been discussing art with some people, and in the last few days Kelly's name came up -- that's why I started thinking about Martin again, I knew they and others had once shared a living and working space -- and I kept looking at Kelly's stuff, and, suddenly, as has happened with so many other artists before, bingo, I got it -- or if not "it," then I got something at least, something I wasn't getting before. Something quite nice, something I'm very glad I have.

As with Ellsworth Kelly, so with many other artists. Although some, like Martin, remain thoroughly enigmatic to me, I feel I am becoming more and more receptive to the beauty of art in generally -- more open, more... I can't think of a more accurate word here than "open."

21. May 2015: I'm finally starting to get it! The powerful soothing effect in her voice which I mentioned -- her paintings have it too! You just have to be open to it.

All That Dang Modern Art an Stuff

Last Night I saw a wonderful documentary on the Sundance Channel: Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World. I had seen some of Martin's paintings before, but had no particular reaction to them other than bewilderment, and I knew nothing of her biography. But I was fascinated, charmed... I'm searching for a stronger word... I was really captivated as Martin spoke. She talked about growing up in rural Saskatchewan and Vancouver, then living and painting in Taos and New York. Some of the things she said seemed a little weird to me, like that she had been married hundreds of times before, had hundreds of kids, in previous lives, and so had been fine with a more solitary life this time around. Some of it made a great deal of sense to me, like her advice not to worry about other people's mistakes, because your own will furnish you with plenty of material for learning. But everything she said was fascinating. And there was something very gentle and soothing about her voice and her manner. She talked about rejecting the prevailing way of life which relies on intellect and aggression, and instead emptying one's mind and awaiting inspiration.

My immediate family, when I was growing up, was not particularly receptive to modern art. By modern I mean Impressionism and everything after. Not that we were particularly attuned to painting and sculpture before Impressionism. We were more up on music, all genres, classical, folk, pop, jazz, there we were a little more caught up. There was usually at least one keyboard instrument in the house at any given time. At times there were lots of different instruments in the house.

But not very many paintings or prints, and very little that by any stretch of the imagination could be called sculpture. So what little I know about that sort of thing I've picked up elsewhere. When I was 19 years old I had a roommate for a short period of time who was a pretty accomplished draftsman and painter. He explained to me, drawing with various colored markers as he spoke, how abstraction can come out of representation. When I was in my 20's, I was tearing illustrations out of some magazines and taping them up on my wall for decoration, and I saw a picture of a painting by Matisse, and I looked at it and wondered what the fuss was about. I taped it onto the wall alongside pictures of models and movie stars and cars and such, to see whether it would grow on me. It did, and that in turn opened my mind to other artists. I had already become interested in the Impressionists, and in the superstar artists of the '80's, Sherman and Longo and Salle and Schnabel. Especially Schnabel. Some people snicker at Schnabel. I don't care. I suspect he doesn't either. He's grandiose, which means he's aiming for great things and willing to miss badly now and then for the sake of the chance of great success. Well, Hell, I don't know what Schnabel is aiming for and shouldn't speak for him. All I wanted to say was: let 'em snicker, who cares.

Some art I like right away, like that of Schnabel and Pollock, some artists have taken me awhile, like Matisse and Van Gogh, some I'm still working on, like Martin and Donald Judd, with whom Martin was exhibited decades ago -- mistakenly, she said in the documentary on Sundance, because she was not a minimalist. Minimalists, she said, did not display their emotions in their art, she did.

I suppose my writing is not minimalist. Other than that I approach things much differently than did Agnes Martin, who died in 2004 at the age of 92. I am ego-driven, I am concerned with facts. Or with the attempt to closely approximate facts.

And I suppose I haven't put as much distance between myself and my family on the subject of art as I sometimes like to think. As much as I deride the wholesale way they dismiss modern genres, as enthusiastically as I like so many painters and sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries, I haven't completely extinguished within myself the suspicion we all felt in my childhood home when we saw art we didn't understand, the fear that someone was just pulling our leg. (Sometimes, of course, modern artists are pulling the public's collective leg, but not as often, and not at all as crudely as we thought, as some of them still think.)

I want to understand everything, although I understand that I never will, that I shouldn't even want to, that it's absurd, a mania. There's a ravenousness to my curiosity sometimes. I wonder where I got that. I don't see it in any of my blood relatives. They're better off not sharing that with me, there is no doubt.

But I try to urge them to keep an open mind when it comes to all that dang weird modern art. I seem to have no talent for making interesting pictures and objects, so I talk them up instead.

There was a stand-up comedian who had a half-hour special on Comedy Central recently, who was that guy? I'm sorry I don't remember his name. I didn't recognize him, I only caught the last few minutes of his special, but I loved what I saw. And I especially loved the way he ended his set: his last words were, "Less killing! More art! Less killing! More art!" He said it twice, like that.

I like it so much, I'll say it again: Less killing! More art!