College Art Association panel discussion
February, 2001
Chicago, Il

ArtN’Life—Or is it Text?
Script for Video,
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Standing in front of Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Chicago Avenue, I can see the Museum of Contemporary Art across the street. My story is about how my contacts with these two institutions, standing so close to each other, were the catalyst for my thinking about what the relationship there actually is between art and life. Despite years of theoretical debates about this subject, accompanied by a great deal of ambivalence in the art-world, these categories for the most part continue to be treated separately. Yet a series of unrelated incidents a few years ago presented me with a new perspective on how the viewing of art can be connected to experiences in life.

My story has two parts. It is about two occurrences, each shaping my understanding of the other. The first was in 1996 in Chicago, and the second happened a year or so later, during a seminar taught by the critic Hal Foster at the University of California at Berkeley. I will let the events of the seminar frame my story.

During one session late in the semester, Foster asked a question that became important to me because it transformed a purely experiential event from the past into a cognitive one in the present, and therefore into memory and usefulness. Foster showed slides of works by some Minimalist abstract expressionist painters from the early fifties, including Ad Reinhardt. He asked the class of graduate students, the art theorists of the future, to look at the slides and to raise their hands if they could STILL get anything at all from these paintings. Because many of the students had grown up far from the museums and major collections in the East, few of them had had the opportunity to spend time looking at the real thing. Foster’s emphasis was on the word STILL, with a barely disguised sneer. Two people raised their hands—myself and a young woman, a painter in the PhD program in Architectural History. Foster asked us what our reactions were and to defend our positions. She haltingly talked about transcendence and a visceral response to the works. Foster’s immediate response was that her reactions were wrong; that this was not what the works were about. Then he turned to me, and with some trepidation, I told the following story.
During the spring of 1996, my favorite cousin, Minerva, someone who had been a big sister to me for all of my life, was dying of Pancreatic Cancer. I was heartbroken. She was at Northwestern Hospital, across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, obviously in pain and dying. But, like many others, my family doesn’t talk about difficult things; we talk around them. So I simply visited as often as I could. After visiting, when I emerged from the oppressive interior of the hospital into the open air, I was so upset it didn’t matter whether I encountered bright sunshine or rain. I felt empty, powerless, and unbearably sad. During Minerva’s final hospitalization, the exhibit Negotiating Rapture opened at the MCA, and I had seen it at the press preview. The introduction to the show was cursory; a glance at a selection of the works accompanied by a discussion of its major thesis. The curatorial idea, that in addition to their other attributes, certain artworks derive significance in their ability to elicit an emotional response, was demonstrated with a variety of works from different periods of time.

A few days after the opening, after the first of my final visits to Minerva, I decided to revisit the show. I stumbled into the sections showing paintings by Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and Barnett Newman. I stood wordlessly in front of these works for a long time, maybe an hour or so, not thinking, just feeling. On this second viewing, I did not have my critic’s hat on. I just looked at the paintings. And then I went on with my day, feeling different, but I didn’t know why yet.

While narrating this story to the class, I retroactively began to understand that exposing myself in the hospital to the intense emotions associated with confronting the pain and death of someone I love had been terribly disorienting. Time stopped. The very cells of my body felt in disarray. I felt paralyzed; there was no internal order from which I could function.

Continuing my narrative to the class, I remembered visiting the Minimalist painters after each subsequent visit to the hospital - there weren’t too many visits because Minerva died shortly afterwards. I stood numbly in front of an Agnes Martin painting, for instance, for a long time. Without thinking about it critically, I immersed myself in it. I became one with the painting. Its internal logic would become my own. Of course, as Foster pointed out, there are important theoretical concepts in Modernist abstraction. However, I was allowing the work to expand beyond the theoretical. Painting’s internal organization, the way that it is made, is not only a function of its place in history, but also of the artist’s selfhood. A work of art’s own internal logic, as created by a particular person, is the reason that it looks one way and not another. Over time, I was able to feel the paintings’ underlying organization and incorporate it. I made the paintings my own by simply looking carefully at them. This active looking changed me. Each time I visited the exhibit, I left, still sad, grieving, but no longer in cellular disarray.

At the end of my story, Foster reflected, “Art of trauma, of repair.” Foster had created a new category for the work. For a moment, I felt the same kind of physical and psychological constriction that the imminence of death had earlier presented to my body. It was as though my experience of expansion through the paintings, of a life-enhancing and energizing molecular restructuring, of an enabling of new possibilities, had been cut off, had been re-channeled into another narrow category, another stricture, an elimination of personal meaning.

In response to Foster’s way of processing information, a graduate student piped up, a bright student thoroughly trained in deconstructing texts and reducing everything to a particular way of thinking about art and language. Having spent the semester in Foster’s seminar practicing “reading” art only by way of texts, he said, imitating Foster’s scornful tone:
 “These paintings are nothing but an endless chain of signifiers.”

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.