Dear Friends,
I’m trying out something new this week. Here is the first installment of “Ways of Seeing,” a series of inspirations and practical exercises for deepening attention and engaging with art. I’ll be interspersing these exercises between my longer posts. Let me know what you think!
To start us off, here’s a method of looking excerpted from my book, The Uses of Art. I hope you have a chance to try it out! If you do, post your results and responses in the comments.
—Sal
Practicum
So, you find yourself standing in front of a work of art; what do you do?
I’ve come to believe that a person can make something happen between themselves and virtually any work. To approach a new piece, there are a few simple principles I follow.
First, I try not to judge the work, not to worry if it is good or bad or great.
Second, I try to focus directly on what I see or experience, whether I know anything about the work or the artist or not.
Third, I expect that the process will need some time.
These are the basic ingredients: your own direct, personal experience without judgment or expectation, and time. This kind of experiencing implies a slightly peculiar kind of art-going—you might visit a museum or exhibition and see only one thing.
As a practical matter, if you are going to experiment with this, try to give any work at least twenty or thirty minutes.
Begin with simple looking (listening, smelling, feeling).
Focus on the work, but let your own self be part of your awareness as well. As with meditation, don’t worry about being distracted—simply return your attention to the work when you notice that it has wandered away. If the time seems long you can give yourself perceptual tasks: count the colors or figures or shapes, find the darkest and light- est places on the work, divide the work into quadrants and make sure you travel through each one. Invent or borrow methods.
It can be helpful to take a break midway, to leave and return refreshed.
Before you are done, ask yourself, and ask the work, what have you to say to each other, what could you mean to each other?
You might take a work of art to be a kind of oracle, as if you were reading tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, or watching birds cross the sky. You might look for keys and resonances between specific aspects of the work and your momentary, feeling self. The connection you have with a work may go on for years, circling and returning; your changing relationships to works of art can be indices of your changing self.
The key to entangling yourself with works of art, making something of them, is simply to believe that you can.
The title Ways of Seeing is an homage to the continuing inspiration of the BBC TV series and book by John Berger.
Today’s post is an excerpt from my book, The Uses of Art. If you are curious, you can read another excerpt from the beginning of the book. If you would like to support me, please consider buying a copy, or telling other people about the book or about this Substack.
The Uses of Art is a memoir of transformative encounters with art, asking what it would mean to make use of art in the way we make free and personal use of music and literature. Artist and writer Sal Randolph answers with stories of sitting eye-to-eye with Marina Abramović, making the pilgrimage to Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, and returning again and again to a Tiepolo painting at the Met. The Uses of Art invites readers into new methods of looking, engaging with both the classic museum visit and with contemporary art, including the work of Lygia Clark, Ann Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, David Horvitz, Juliana Huxtable, Donald Judd, Ragnar Kjartansson, Agnes Martin, Bernadette Mayer, Aki Sasamoto, and Tino Sehgal. Liberating and emboldening, this book will change the way you experience art.
The Uses of Art has been an SPD nonfiction bestseller for the past eight months.
“Sal Randolph’s The Uses of Art is a dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent and—I’ll say it—profound examination of the relationships between human beings and art, with the understanding that there’s often no clear boundary between the two. It’s rigorous, wide-ranging, and full of the emotion and humor often missing from books about art. It altered and expanded my own awareness, which is not something I say often, or lightly, about any book of any kind.” — Michael Cunningham
Wonderful post and lessons for seeing. The step of looking without judging (good/bad/etc.) feels so useful. Both my daughters are artists, and though they'll talk at length about an artwork they see (as in, look at the way Sargent just threw the paint on the canvas right there), they don't judge, at least as far as I know.
I'm very glad to have found your thoughtful and inspiring newsletter, Sal, and look forward to reading all the posts. I've been looking around Substack for original and unique responses to artworks to help me develop my ideas for the publication I'm planning to create and, although it'll be nothing like yours, it has helped me enormously to read your work and see the warm, intelligent responses it is eliciting. To really look at works of art in this world of fractured attention and superficiality is a radical, valuable act. Thank you.