There’s a kind of loveliness that’s almost too overwhelming to look at directly, and walking through rooms and rooms of hearts in bold color, beating in canvases, beating in clusters surrounding them, at the Tate Modern today made me a little dizzy—if I’m allowed to be a bit sappy and sentimental for a while. The first exhibit I passed through, Infinite Geometry, was made up of geometric designs inspired by the idea of seeking of order. In Nabil Nahas’s Eclypse 1978, for instance, interlocking squares in red, sea green, and purple cluster against a woven background as a shard of black intrudes into the piece. The wall text explains that designs from this period “focus on ideas of infinity and interconnectedness. The repetitive and modular structure of poetry is important” (Infinite Geometry). Indeed, once you make your way to Saloua Raouda Choucair’s Poem Wall it becomes unavoidably clear that something about poetry, like painting and art, demands organization. Choucair’s blockwork piece links together in a complex network of white, wooden pieces that fit together with only the slightest gaps. It’s cool and calm, but certainly not soulless, and I guess when I think about poetry that is what I think of: how am I to deliver an emotional experience in a logical way? How best do I organize my words so that they can make their way to someone else without the obstruction of poorly ordered thoughts (I say as I write an overtly wordy sentence)?
Choucair’s design surprised me in it’s ability to link the concepts of art and poetry, a relationship that I’ve always suspected existed, in such a streamlined way. It also made me wonder, as I stopped to take a second glance at Virginia Chihota’s Fighting One’s Self, about what the best way is to communicate pain. Fighting One’s Self almost presents itself as an interior view of a womb. A white figure curls inside a vein-blue circle with their hands clasped defensively around their face. The wall text aptly describes these brushstrokes as “watery” (How can colours help us look inside ourselves?) as the figure’s emotions blur in a wash of color. There’s something so incredibly visceral about the internal nature of Chihota’s work being presented for a massive audience to see, and in a way that kind of vulnerability is brave, but part of me wonders if a piece like this should be viewed on its own because of the strength of the impression it leaves. Tate Modern is filled with so many testaments of the work that people do after the wreckage of trauma, but after Chihota’s piece, I spent a little less time with the rest of them.
Books often hit me in a similar way. I brought A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara to read on the plane and two-hundred or so pages in, I just couldn’t continue. Yanagihara’s novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, is essentially a character study of suffering that keeps traveling deeper and darker for over eight hundred pages. The older I get, the more I realize how sharp experiences of grief can be and how important it is to feel them in their entirety, but also how unnecessary it is to be continually steeped in tragedy. There’s a kind of logic to processing emotion that, I think, works like Eclypse and Poem Wall are getting at as they organize the intricacies of being human into neat boxes that you can jump into and out of at will. Sometimes, sharing our experiences of pain, failure, and even just quiet disappointment through art creates community, but I question the kind of art that leans into the indescribable simply for the sake of provoking a few stray tears from an otherwise content audience, which if you can’t already tell, I suspect A Little Life to be guilty of. Then again, some confessions of internal suffering, like Fighting One’s Self, just require a bit of breathing space to process what the artist has just handed to you.
What I hadn’t considered walking through walls of geometric designs and swaths of abstract color, is that sometimes beauty, too, overwhelms us: the smell of honeysuckle in the rain just might bring me to tears at the right time of the afternoon, joy in a friend’s eyes can be so specific and so strong that I have to look away, and trees (always trees) with their soft-breathing canopies of branches overhead become too generous and ancient to understand when studied at too close a distance. As I was struggling to concentrate on any one specific piece out of the seas of storied paintings and the seas of people pressing in with their curiosity and their own stories and their own hopes to find something recognizable in the remnants of brokenness on the walls, I wandered into a nearly empty room. After the buzz of color and patterns at the beginning of the Artist and Society exhibit, comes an almost blank hall containing the works of Agnes Martin. Past this, another room of paintings focuses on the use of the color white.
As you enter into these spaces, the thrum of conversation dwindles. No one stays very long to ponder over what might be hiding underneath the surface of the pale gray and pink stripes in Agnes Martin’s Happy Holiday and Faraway Love. There is no great mystery here. As a little kid running past me with her dad said with a sort of aghast gesture of her hands in the air, “Daddy, everything here’s just…kind of…blank.” Yet, in this space there’s also respite. The quiet makes the room grow a little wider, and the vast landscapes of barely visible pastels provide sanctuary from the bursts of dizzying color before. As the wall text indicates, Agnes Martin once said that she wanted her paintings to communicate what she felt when she was surrounded by the desert she lived in (Agnes Martin 1912-2004). “I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at a landscape…it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom,” the exhibit quotes (Agnes Martin 1912-2004). In a way, the absence of beauty is also a kind of freedom. A little break from the heart, how it aches, how it wonders and loves and doubts, is as liberating as a walk on your own in the desert even if you’ll be back again soon.
More tomorrow,
Kath
Sources
Agnes Martin 1912-2004. Wall text, In the Studio Exhibition, Tate Modern Museum, London.
How can colours help us look inside ourselves? Wall text, In the Studio Exhibition, Tate Modern Museum, London.
Infinite Geometry. Wall text, In the Studio Exhibition, Tate Modern Museum, London.
Theatre in London U of A 