There’s a moment in art history beyond which it became allowed, and even expected, that certain narrow categories of art would instruct you precisely how to feel about them.
Of course, visual art affected its viewers from the very beginning. That’s its job. The affect of religious icons, for example, was quite clear and direct, by design. Their format and position within their cultures dictated viewer response. Ritualized methods for producing religious icons supplied maximum clarity to viewers as to the identity of each saint, and sometimes even that saint’s specialization of aid, while clearing out extraneous, distractive data.
With the breaking of ritual and the influence of Franciscan naturalism, compelling but entirely unnecessary data began to be introduced, setting in motion the progression of western art. Humanity fully entered the equation, and the dimensions of affect that became available to the viewer were heightened by local details and flourishes: the expression on the face of a background character, the presence of domesticated animals gamboling about, cut flowers and half-eaten food left on a table, aspects of decor and costume. The broader, subtly evocative experiences of lighting, time of day, of weather and seasons.
This affective openness developed through and beyond Mannerism to landscape, urban scenery, the styles and peculiarities of the 18th through 20th centuries.
In Modernism, affective openness stretched from horizon to horizon. Who’s going to tell anyone how they should feel about any given work of Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, or even Pop? Each offered its own special dimensions of experience. Modernist artworks steam with a melange of intended and emergent meanings. It became a maxim throughout Modernism that an artwork with a single direct message couldn’t even be high art. It was instead propaganda, illustration, cartoon. Decidedly beneath the work shown in galleries.
This moment in art history I refer to is the line beyond which that maxim dissolved, and it became acceptable, and even commendable, for art to have a single message, for that art to tell you exactly how you should understand it and feel about it, and for that art to foreclose other responses you might have towards it, a foreclosure amounting to social invalidation of stray reactions.
For example, when standing before Gonzales-Torres’ Untitled (Perfect Lovers), after reading the wall card, the only reaction available to non-sociopaths is the sense of being emotionally moved by two lovers stuck in the early AIDS crisis, knowing one will eventually outlive the other. All rendered in a cold, dry office aesthetic.
Beyond this reaction lie those sparking about in your brain that you’d be ashamed to mention, in light of the wall card’s grim story: thoughts about office decor, or IKEA aesthetics; the relative lives of different battery brands; that time in grade school when the wall clock began running backwards in fast motion, all the kids laughed, and Mrs. Wallace’s lesson plans crumbled before her eyes.
Interestingly enough, the viewing public and the institution are apparently okay with being told exactly how to feel about an artwork. In fact, they love it. People become weepy looking at those two clocks. And why shouldn’t they? The combined clocks-and-wall card told them to.
Years back I visited a solo show in which the artist’s theme was socioeconomics, entirely outside my scope of anything. I was writing reviews at the time, and in writing about this show I referred to Alfred Jensen, due to the color palette and the artist’s use of sticky-note-sized squares. It was all I had because, truth be told, an article could have been written conveying the same ideas seen in the show; no visual art was needed. My review was truly pointless, not coming within sight of the artist’s interests. It was a miss analogous to a review someone might write about the Gonzales-Torres Untitled piece by referring only to a childhood experience of the classroom clock running backwards.
If there was any literature or wall card at that socioeconomics show, some sort of text filling me in about the issue at hand and telling me how I should feel about it, I didn’t read it. I avoid wall cards and supportive texts entirely in contemporary art exhibits, for the same reason I avoid news commentary channels: I refuse to be told how to think. I want to encounter artworks directly, unfiltered.
It’s on the visual artist to use visual art means to make me experience what they want me to experience. Equally, I accept that it’s on me to give artwork the time and receptivity to effectively and affectively mediate between the artist and me.
Where a separate text is required to understand the work, I maintain it’s no longer visual art. It’s something else entirely, a form that lies outside the range of body-to-body experiences, of purely affective experiences, that visual art has evolved over the centuries to provide. Any such required texts can exist on their own, perhaps with the artwork serving as illustration. They can be developed into fully-realized text formats. So how are these unrealized works of literature visual art?
I’ve read essays and articles relating to the AIDS crisis that were orders of magnitude more effective and affective, and certainly more dimensional, than the freeze-dried Untitled (Perfect Lovers).
The emergence of a kind of artwork that requires supportive text didn’t represent a newer, higher level of art. Even in their day, in their own moment in history, these artworks faced backward.
They echo a time centuries past. A time when certain paintings designed for easy recognition, purified of distractions, hung in stony institutions for weeping devotees who, although mostly illiterate, came equipped by culture with supportive information as to how they should feel and behave in their presence.