Shuttered in Place

Shuttered in Place

By Tom Wachunas

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.  - Joseph Campbell

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.  - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time.  - G. K. Chesterton

There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.  - Alexandre Dumas

   It’s a desert out there. Art museums and galleries - those fertile oases of nourishing cultural preservation, exploration, and discovery - are temporarily gone dark and empty. In this parched landscape, I thirst.

   But wait! What’s that I see in the distance? A light! Getting brighter now. Then, many lights! Now a voice. Then many voices! Getting louder! Why, it’s…it’s…I.T. Information Technology! Internet Therapy! Instantaneous Tutelage! We’re saved!

REALLY?

   During this moratorium on assemblies at our beloved exhibition venues, I’ve nonetheless had ample time to appreciate their presence in absentia. I’m certainly thankful for the expertise and creativity of all the folks who have been diligent in providing virtual viewing via numerous digital platforms and programs.

   Yet such efforts, commendable as they are, can go only so far. “Distance learning” indeed. It’s one thing to look at, say, a digital image of a painting on a laptop or desktop screen, in a classroom power point projection, or for that matter, in an art history book. Welcome to art by proxy. What you’re looking at - no matter how faithful it may be to the actual painting, no matter how excellent in detail resolution - is a photograph. A calculated imitation. A picture of a picture.

   Of course these kinds of academic and social engagements with technology are useful, indeed necessary, for fostering a meaningful and ongoing experience of art on both intellectual and emotional planes. Still, though, they remain inadequate substitutes for a true and full embrace of the art object’s tangible reality.

   To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton (quoted above), I must have looked at 999 pictures of Picasso’s Guernica in my youth, or 999 pictures of Monet’s Water Lilies triptych (made 1914-1926), before actually seeing both of them at MoMA in New York during the 1970s. I remember it like yesterday. Nothing I had previously read, no photos closely examined in myriad art history books or magazines, could amply prepare me for what I encountered on that 1000^th occasion. What had long been merely a cerebral reverence for these iconic works suddenly became a wholly thrilling, in-the-moment empirical reality. I was flabbergasted and ecstatic.

Since then I’ve had countless similar experiences of really seeing artworks exhibited in galleries and museums by artists past and present. My soul remembers.

   If I’ve acquired a virus in this diseased season we are currently weathering, it’s my fevered longing for the lights to come back on in our local arts venues. To go to a real place in real time and mindfully be in the presence of made things.

 Virtual schmirtual. Gimme the real deal. I wanna see art the way it’s meant to be seen.