Learning to sit with art in discomfort
Hello!
And welcome to the latest installment of The Intangibles. I have been remiss in updating y’all – in large part because it’s a privilege to be invited into your inboxes and I don’t want to overstay my welcome. A lot has happened in the last few months, including the soft launch of a new coaching and mentorship part of my services portfolio. If you’re stuck on a writing project or just want some support, you can book a short call to see how we might best work together.
I also held my first Creative Mornings workshop, trying out a more interactive means of sharing my expertise with the broader world. The workshop picked up where my Vox piece — How to Look at Art — left off. If you missed it, I’ll be holding a variation on the theme called 13 Ways of Writing About Art for the London Writer’s Salon in early June; you’re welcome to join (for a small fee if you’re not a member) if you’re curious to learn more about the process of writing about art or using the visual arts as writing inspiration.
One of the things I wrestled with both in writing the Vox piece and in creating the presentation was the notion of discomfort and how, often, when we think we don’t “get” a work of art what we’re really saying is I don’t understand and I’m uncomfortable in that unknowing. For me, learning to appreciate art arose out of a similar experience with an Abstract Expressionist’s work at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. A friend who had studied art history sat with me and talked me through it and in the end, that painting remains one of my favorites because of the context in which I was introduced to it. So I wanted, in that Creative Mornings workshop, to ask people to step outside of their comfort zones and into the context of the moment.
My initial plans were to include some really powerful works by Gregg Deal, the Indigenous artist I spoke with for the Vox story, whose work I became acquainted with in Denver and whose art challenges me anew every time I see it. For copyright reasons, though, I can’t reproduce it so you’ll have to head to his website or Instagram and have a look for yourself. He has a really extraordinary reflection at the Ogden Contemporary in Utah that just opened as part of an exhibition reconsidering the mythology of American westward expansion that gave me pause. Tasked with taking a cross-country train trek to inspire a unique piece for this show, Deal’s resulting work ties in the role that Christianity played in driving the Indigenous population from their homes. Pop over to his Instagram if you want to see his exhibit outside of the museum context and read his artist’s statement on it.
In speaking with Deal and taking in his work, an undercurrent developed that I think we need to consider, namely that some of the experiences we view as liberating are detrimental to others. How a belief in destiny can overwhelm humanity. This is the visual arts at their best, challenging the amateur and the expert alike. Deal told me in our interview that he sees his role as an artist and curator to be one of showing his own perspective based on lived experience more than teaching the viewer. The idea of art as education is an idea grounded in the white gaze, which doesn’t request education from artists of the dominant culture because we are already steeped in those creative traditions. I appreciate his understanding of the role of the public artist; a lot of bigger name artists who don’t have this awareness reveal a stunning lack of curiosity and that shows in their work.
As much as my discomfort tends to arise because I’ve encountered a work that feels unfamiliar or unknowable, it more recently has begun to arise out of what I perceive as lazy non-intellectual art. That’s a personal proclivity – I’m not really here to be entertained. And the increasing ways we see the flattening of the visual arts as a result of the two-dimensionality of our lives lived through screens is a real loss for the arts and for our imaginations. The local schools here just announced that they’ll no longer be running exams in the studio arts, trading them out for film. I lament this loss already, not least because we know that kids require the experimental processes that practicing the arts provides in order to develop emotionally and psychologically but also because the (charter) schools that continue to offer the arts ascribe to a curriculum that prizes the white male artist and teaches the ethics of Roman philosophers as superior to those of other cultures. It is a re-entrenchment of art as something for the privileged minority and I’d rather consider the visual arts as a transgressive enterprise — accessible, inclusive, welcoming, non-judgmental.
I see this shift as part and parcel of a broader conversation, one in which self-proclaimed public intellectuals are arguing for maintaining hierarchies that our youngest generations are rejecting. That adherence to hierarchy is a theme that has been recurring through many of the books and articles and podcasts that I’ve been taking in lately; perhaps most explicitly, though, it shone through in the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which I found maddening in its fallacies and exploitation of real parental concerns. Romper asked me to dissect it and though I normally disregard Haidt’s work, in undertaking a careful analysis, I was most struck by his argument that kids should be off phones because social media no longer adheres to the formal hierarchies in our culture. While I’d agree that the way expertise is currently being sold to us online — through likes and followers more than education and experience — is dangerous, I don’t agree with the premise that children should sit back and learn from the elders who reinforce a status quo that we know is not working for many of us but most especially not for children. I am curious where this will all go and saddened that those who might need art as a creative outlet most (adolescents) will be losing access to it; I hope that perhaps instead of eliminating things we don’t understand, we can sit in the discomfort that comes from not knowing.
With that, I’ll leave you friends. Have a nice week, month, year, moment.
Take care,
Courtney
Read more from me, like this review of Gina DeMillo Wagner’s memoir of sibling loss or Anna Gazmarian’s book navigating bipolar disorder with her faith. Or from one of these incredible authors (using this affiliate Bookshop link will bring me a very small commission). Otherwise, drop me a compliment if you like this newsletter and want to read more or talk to me about how we can work together on your next creative project.