The Confounded Viewer

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, 1995

There was a time when there was something reassuring about looking at art, gazing upon paint on canvas, coloured pictures on flat surfaces, the occasional stone or metal sculpture. Sometimes there were also scrolls, watercolours, and lithographs. Much of it was figurative – still-life compositions, portraits, landscapes, all largely comprehensible. Art was about images that even if they were not beautiful in and of themselves, were trying to be about something bigger than our daily existence, and we exited museums feeling enriched. Then Modern Art arrived, and everything went to hell in a handbasket – at least as far as the viewer was concerned.

Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas.

For many, the absence of figuration marked a watershed moment, a point in time when they could no longer understand Art, be it Jackson Pollock’s dripped paint, V.S. Gaitonde’s monochromes, or Robert Ryman’s white canvases. These works defied the very definition of art as something to be exalted, admired, understood. Wassily Kandinsky said, “An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures.” Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “An empty canvas is full.” Such statements on abstraction, though perfectly coherent within the confines of artists’ studios and salons, further alienated the already befuddled viewer, providing fodder for cartoons on the obtuse nature of the art world. Looking back, these conversations on colour – whether splattered, geometric, or non-existent – seem quaint, perhaps because what was new then is familiar now.

Modern art freed the artist – but with freedom comes great responsibility, and this also placed on them the burden of creating relevance for their work without the safety net of a known language. They persevered, because artists are meant to push boundaries and create new vocabularies. Art soon moved off the wall and out of museums entirely. Site specific land art such as Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty on Utah’s Great Salt Lake made of gravel and stone, was a statement on entropy. Not many visited, and fewer would have known they were standing on a sculpture. Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent decades planning and executing massive projects to envelop and cover landmarks, such as their 1995 wrapping of the German Reichstag in silver polypropylene fabric. The installation was meant to offer a reconsideration of urbanism and the built environment. Many, however, likened their innovative projects to construction site curtains. Art was and is an ongoing experiment to see and show things anew. Essayist Anaïs Nin wrote, “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The [artist] shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”

Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramovi uses her own body as a canvas in performative pieces. Mithu Sen and Ravi Agarwal’s practices results from their respective interests in feminism and the environment. They incorporate elements of drawing, sculpture, poetry, and acting, extending the tradition of theatre troops wandering through villages and politically conscious street theatre in urban India, into contemporary activism. In each case, the hope is to make the viewer an active participant who engages with the artist and their art, rather than being a passive spectator meandering through a museum looking at painted canvases hung on walls.

Artists’ repertoires are explorations of materials and ideas that are of personal interest, and not everyone needs to be making a statement on the state of the world. Atul Dodiya has a series based on his love for Bollywood memorabilia, Krishen Khanna has had a lifelong preoccupation with bandwallas. Anish Kapoor delves into the possibilities of innovative materials at a grand scale in his installation art, and at a smaller scale, buying the exclusive rights to Vantablack, the world’s blackest black paint, invented in 2014. There is art made of found objects, animal carcasses and unmade beds. There are multi-media works using lights and videos and crumbling concrete. The rotting banana that caused peals of laughter (pun intended) around the world was the subject of a previous article by yours truly. NFT tokens are sold for art made out of bits and bytes and doesn’t even really exist. Artists, as is their wont, move on to new and uncharted territories, being very present in the moment, sometimes even ahead of the times.

It is the viewer who is left without a playbook by which to understand the vocabulary and language of individual artists. Whether it is the role of the artist or the critic or anyone at all, to educate the viewer is a question up for debate. Perhaps Pollock was right when he said, “Each age finds its own technique... the strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.” It is equally possible that Vladimir Nabokov was the prescient one: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.” Even if “the public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with,” (Golda Meir), so long as the artist is creating, society will continue to play catch-up, and be the richer for it.

(Meera is an architect, author, editor, and artist.)