I hope everyone has been enjoying Syntax of Things. I must say that after a week of posts I’m still not sure if a “theme” has developed. When I began this project, I decided to simply go at it, no structure, no unifying themes, just posts on subjects I find intriguing. I’m still at that point, allowing SoT to develop organically. I’m sure that in due time a thread of unity will emerge. Until then, these daily ramblings will be about whatever strikes me as interesting and/or absurd.
Today, an article in the New York Times stirred memories of an old debate concerning art. During my undergraduate days, I spent a lot of time prowling around the art department. At the time, my then wife was studying studio art so I was getting an art education by proxy. For the most part, I simply saw and appreciated. We would go to museums, and other than the occasional bit of confusion over a particular piece, I had little difficulty understanding why something was considered art. In other words, I had yet to experience the feeling that Deborah Solomon describes as “What if I don't get it? What if I gaze upon a work of art and see only a giant question mark?”
At some point during this period I decided to take an art survey course under a professor who seemed a bit too enamored with the reclining nudes. One day in that darkened classroom, he put up a slide of a piece by Mark Rothko and the screen might as well have been blank. I stared and squinted, tilted my head, closed my eyes and opened them again. I read over the corresponding section in the handout the professor had given us. I had found my question mark.
That night I dug through one of my then wife’s art books and found a meaty section on Rothko. Similar paintings, similar confusion. I called my wife’s attention to it, wanting to know not only why this was art, but why this art was baffling me. She tried to explain to me about the attention to formal elements. She also claimed that this was art that had to be experienced, that there was no way to “get it” from a slide projector or an art book photo. My retort was simple: “What if I had painted it yesterday?”
Several years later, I saw a Rothko in person. I don’t remember where it was, but I remember the feeling I had as I stood in front of it. The canvas was huge and the colors were mesmerizing. But this only made for a rather large and colorful question mark. I wanted answers and until I got them Rothko would become a tumor on my aesthetic brain.
I’m not sure I ever really got the answers, though. As my own studies advanced and I became more aware of modernism and postmodernism, the question mark became smaller; my understanding of the influence and magnitude of Rothko’s work cleared up some of my frustration. As Solomon writes, “Art, in truth, resists explanation. That is why it is called art. If an object could be explained in 137 words on an oversize wall label at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you wouldn't need the object. You could just have the wall label. Art is not social studies; it seldom reveals its meaning at the end of chapter nine. Sooner or later it stumps you, and your stumped-ness remains a hidden part of the art experience.” For me, Rothko is now a word I use for stumped.
A few years ago, I was showing off a newly acquired, two-volume anthology of modern and postmodern poetry to a then friend who fancied himself a poet. Though I know now that his exposure to the period—and to poetry in general—was somewhat limited, at the time I was a little taken aback by his assessment. As he flipped through the second volume and scanned some of the “visual” pieces, he said, “Not much to it. I could do this.” At the time I excused his bravado, but I realize today that he had simply been Rothkoed.
