BY RORY SYKES

In print | Published November 1, 2007

Leo Steinberg is a god. For those not in attendance at his lecture last week, you missed out on a public chastisement of all pretenders in the field of art history and criticism for their frequent betrayal of the fundamental visual image in their devotion to the text as authority. Notorious for his championing of crazy close visual analysis (seriously — check out “Eve’s Idle Hand” to see his fascination with detail taken to an extreme), I’ve long admired Steinberg’s ability to LOOK and genuinely SEE. With renewed admiration, I decided that this week’s column would be an exercise in just that kind of sustained and careful looking.

Secluding myself in a gallery to concentrate solely on the art seemed as if it would work well with my mood. I was teetering on the raspy edge of a sore throat which a ten minute walk in the rain did nothing to help, so I was more than happy to forgo making merry with the masses. Instead, I made my rain-drenched way past the music and tittering laughter and went deep into the complex of galleries to engage in that other privilege afforded by Friday’s late hours – private, silent viewing amongst the works themselves.

I wound up in the big Duchamp room, due in no small part to the fact that it has a bench. Comfortably seated, I scanned the walls waiting for a work to emotionally grab me. Well, there was a bride being stripped bare, a woman descending and a urinal — all well-established and ample fodder for visual mastication. But no, my eyes couldn’t quite stop. I kept looking, kept twisting about on that large slab of wood, kept dismissing works after about five seconds of consideration. The longer this went on, the more worried I got. I simply couldn’t look at a single piece long enough to get into it — each one confronted me as a closed object, repelling my vision which in turn left me with absolutely no connection of any kind to the things surrounding me. I’m an ART HISTORY major that couldn’t find a SINGLE THING to say about ANY of the Duchamp works in front of me. Fuck.

This brings me to a problem I have more generally when viewing works in museums and galleries: I feel like it’s a competition as to who gets the most out of the experience, and even given the socially recognized advantages of my educational background and sheer time spent thinking about and discussing art, I’m still failing to prove myself to the works. Just because I can (typically) encase a visual work in verbiage, does that mean I’m truly getting something out of it? All too frequently, I enter the museum in a state of self-consciousness about how intensely and productively I’m engaging the art, and the measurement of such engagement tends to be tied with how long I stand before a given work. Really now, what is the required time in which to absorb a painting? How long until I can properly say I beheld the sculpture? Obviously, there are no clear answers. It differs from person to person and work to work and by what exactly is meant by “absorb” and “beheld” — but I guess what I’m getting at is that going to an art museum and gallery is ultimately a performance of looking and a social display of consuming these privileged visual cultural artifacts and I do feel the pressure to distinguish myself from the artistically dismissive plebes (and oh how I hate myself as I see in print that blatant confession of elitism). Yet even as part of my insecurity stems from those ingrained social prejudices and a desire for myself to be seen as truly seeing, there is another very legitimate reason to seriously ask the question about duration: Steinberg’s crusade against superficial viewing. If we are to follow his command to look closer and deeper, we must consider the time we spend physically viewing art as a factor in the quality of our engagement.

As Steinberg demonstrated, there is a clear trend of privileging text above image that has resulted in impatience with visual contemplation that leads to misperceived viewings. Given that some of his examples predated the modern institutions for art, it would be inaccurate to solely blame museums and galleries for spoiling my ability to simply sit still and look. Still, I think there is something very particular about how these institutions are structured that contributes to and exacerbates that tendency to glance briefly at the art and then go back to some form of text for explanation or description of just what it was that you skimmed over in under ten seconds. In a previous paragraph I used the word “consuming” quite deliberately. Museums participate in our capitalist system and are dependent on as many people as possible purchasing an experience of the wares they have to offer: the more people walking in and out of their doors, the better it is for them. In addition to their permanent collections, museums are also constantly putting on special exhibitions that typically come at an additional cost to the regular entrance fee. In correspondence with these permanently and temporarily displayed works, museums are also always equipped with both permanent gift shops — featuring a slew of books that explicate the art just twenty feet away — and visiting exhibition gift shops, which again always provide an exhibition catalog for sale. So how does this relate to my conditioning as a fast-paced viewer?

First there is the hype surrounding special exhibitions. With a constant rotation of temporary works, the viewing of art becomes obsessed with newness, but framed in the way of seeing an object that is new, rather than seeing the same object in a new way. Next we can consider all the text available for purchase as an encouraged substitute for the works themselves. If we’re already predisposed to read as a way to gain knowledge, so long as we are still able to legitimate our knowledge with the basic claim that we did, in fact, pass in front of that Duchamp work, it is still perfectly acceptable for the ideas that we express about that work to be derived from what we read as opposed to what we “saw.”

Then there is the issue of the physical space that the works (traditionally) reside in. The art is presented as objects of display in a honeycomb of rooms around which we perambulate. Benches tend to be infrequent and are almost always found in the center of the room. This provides a great way to get a sense of the works together, but is not so great a way to sit and contemplate an individual work up close. Even operating under the assumption that walking and standing is feasible for the viewer without a large degree of discomfort, it still remains a bit unreasonable to expect that viewer to stand in front of a work for longer than five minutes, maybe ten if you’re dedicated (or feel like you have something to prove). Not only does it get uncomfortable, but because everyone else is walking around and moving from piece to piece, there is an established flow that the still viewer interrupts.

Additionally, in order for you to stand close enough to the work to get a good, detailed view, you simultaneously obstruct the ability of others to get that same privileged vantage point, which can be quite an annoyance if you are one of the viewers just trying to get a glimpse before moving on. It’s simply not in the interest of the museum to structurally encourage its visitors to have that sort of intimacy with the works and so there has been developed a culture of self-regulating museumgoers who understand the etiquette in taking up space and time in the viewing of a work.

Lastly, there are the gallery guards. While not there explicitly to time your viewing, their own watching and monitoring does increase one’s self-consciousness. Try standing in front of a popular work for an extended period of time under the gaze of a guard, and I really do mean just standing, not taking notes or discussing it with a friend, but engaging with the work through unmediated looking, and see if you don’t feel uncomfortable, or guilty, or pressured to move on.

To go back to last Friday, I sat there and simply couldn’t look. I couldn’t force myself to take the time to visually read the hallowed works in front of me: I would skip parts, fill in the blanks, get a sense of the whole and move on. I would gut the painting, the ready-made, the giant glass object and be done with it, not at all able to say a significant thing about how those works were impacting me, how I was experiencing them.

With Leo Steinberg haunting my conscience and my frustration mounting, I realized that I was past the point of productivity and that leaving might be for the best. Sullenly stomping out of the room, I set off at a rushed pace through the galleries when, in an entirely cliched manner, something caught my eye. It was a work by Antonio Mancini of a young boy, back pressed against the wall as he beholds a bloody white shirt. There was something about that depicted boy’s intense expression in his own act of viewing that genuinely caught me, that made me want to look more not only at him, but at the shirt, at the shadows, at the sword visually slicing across his knees — it was thrilling. But on that faint note of hope, I realized I couldn’t afford a longer look if I wanted to make the next train and so, like the other visitors around me, I kept walking.

Rory is a senior. You can reach her at rsykes1@swarthmore.edu.

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