Modern Art is Scary

One of the acting courses I took in college for my theatre degree involved a film professor occasionally trying to get us to experiment with our acting methods. The textbook for the class gave a good short piece of advice for art in general. What techniques should you use? Well, whatever works. If something works for you, great. If it doesn’t, throw it away. During one class we focused on fear centers. In acting, as in life, you have your want, stakes, and actions to achieve your want. Fear work can can help with all three - really digging into the depths of why the stakes are so high all the time. Increased stakes get you to choose stronger verbs. Verb choice can refine and recontextualize your want. In the fear center work, we were asked about our objective for a scene and then why we wanted it. What are we so scared of happening if we fail? And every answer would go a little bit deeper. Instinctively, a lot of us circled around and tried to avoid going too deep. It’s hard to be super vulnerable, especially when it starts to become about you and not the character. If you dig deep enough, stakes almost always play into life and death. But even that often isn’t the center. Most of us are scared that we are nothing. That we mean nothing and we will simply vanish, alone, cold, destroyed, unremembered. What part of that is the scariest part?

Discourse over modern art happens constantly because discourse is drama and humans love theatre, we always have and always will, please lobby for more funding for theatre. A lot of people roll their eyes at Modern Art. They don’t then talk about how or why it isn’t for them. They dismiss it wholesale. Suddenly we’re throwing out meaningless terms like “meaningless.” And then it’s “anyone could do this.” We start talking about beauty. Sometimes people start babbling about the supposed superiority of naturalism and realism. Why is that?

I think those conversations tend to be, fundamentally, avoidance. We dismiss what’s colloquially referred to as “modern art,” regardless of whether it actually qualifies, because it is terrifying. Modern Art leaps off the medium and it whispers to us about our fear centers. Modern Art is scary.

One - Rothko

One of the first plays I read my sophomore year of college was Red by John Logan. I’d seen monologues from it on aggregate sites before when searching for audition material, and it seemed right to at least give it a shot after reading those snippets. Red tells the tale of the legendary painter John Rothko as he creates the Seagram Paintings, a set originally intended for the Four Seasons. Throughout, he argues with his fictional apprentice Ken about the purpose of art, how it’s made, and what an artist is. In my opinion, it’s a great piece of dramatic work.

Rothko is one of the titans of “I don’t get it” types. The conversations often focus around Rothko not only because he was an abstract expressionist which spits in the face of realism, but because he’s often defended with something along the lines of, “They don’t really make sense until you see them in person. Pictures can’t do them justice.” People find that sort response a bit annoying, and their annoyance at their opponents in the discourse ends up hardening them in their anti-Rothko stance.

A viral tweet came across my feed asking viewers to explain the meaning of Rothko’s Untitled 1954 and why the viewer liked it. Given how much engagement posts like those get, it was probably engagement bait by a Twitter Blue user looking to up their payout or something. So we all probably should have simply scrolled past and ignored it. But I couldn’t, for some reason. Hours after I first saw it, the painting was still in my mind. It bounced between heavy and hopeful. I got sad thinking about it, and then it gave me a sense of peace. It was unsettling.

So I’m colorblind. It’s not that I see in black and white, but suffice it to say, I can’t be an electrician. I see green sunsets, cherry blossoms look white, and I can only pass a couple of those color dot circle tests. When I took design classes in college, my professors had to deal with the fact that my commentary on colors might be a little unhinged. When I worked on shows with designers, we talked about colors through metaphor, mostly. All that to say, my take on visual art is informed by the color information I do or can’t take in.

What do you see when you look at this piece? It’s been on screen the whole time. To me, it looks like there’s an ice cube, floating just above the floor of a sea of flames. The oppressive sun above us is pushing down. There is no escape. The flames will eat the ice. It will melt. It is melting. Soon it will all end. There will be nothing left, and it will all have been for naught… except the streaks inside the ice, the ones that look a bit like people. At first they depressed me further. They’re trapped in this block of earth with no exit. It’s Satre. They’re surrounded by hell and will soon be consumed by it. But they’re red. They’re of the flames. It made me think of the last episode of The Good Place where Chidi refers to life as a wave in the ocean. We are a form that the ocean takes for a bit. But then the wave returns to the ocean, like it was always meant to. There’s a beauty to that. It’s also insanely depressing.

When I look at this painting, I see two people, hell is other people, but they’re facing one another. They’re distant but they can’t flee. Isn’t this love? Despite the chaos and the heat and the damnation, we bind ourselves to other people. No matter how far apart we go, there is no distance that can truly disconnect us. There’s nothing else in the ice. Just these two who see each other. Love and connection are all of life. They’re what counts. They’re both made of the see of flames. No matter what happens, if we’re still in love or if we’ve hurt each other, I am forever of you. You are of me. We will reunite in the ocean of flames. The sun is setting. Ragnarok is coming. Yet we love.

I find it a very terrifying piece of art. A very hopeful piece. It made me immensely sad for a couple of hours.

I’m not alone in having that kind of major response to Rothko’s art. As Aaron Howard writes, “People tend either ‘to get’ or intensely dislike Rothko’s paintings. Those who are moved by Rothko describe a deeply emotional response. … Some of those who don’t ‘get’ Rothko dismiss as a doodler. … Others leave unmooved by what they see as nothingness.”

Benjamin Schmidt has an article in The Interior Review where he tells people how to look at a Rothko. To give a broad overview, he says you cannot simply look at it. You are moving too fast. He says as you truly take in one of the pieces, “Your vision will become increasingly fragmented. The compartmentalized colors will soon unleash. The bottom will drop out and flood the canvas. This miracle will never get tiring.”

Reading his recommendations reminded me of a Meisner acting exercise. You sit across from a partner. Stare at each other. Hands and feet flat. Relaxed. One of you makes an observation about the other. You have glasses. The other responds, “I have glasses.” And you repeat those phrases exactly over and over until a new observation is organically made. Maybe someone scratches a nose. You look at your partner and you hear them and observe them. Anytime I get really into that exercise with a partner, the world starts to warp. I’m focusing in on one of their eyes and their face starts to stretch like a crescent moon. The colors of the world behind them blur and fade. We enter a different universe, one painted by Picasso or something. It gets a bit terrifying. Yet it’s also beautiful. That world washes into you, it settles.

To view a Rothko, really view it, to get lost in despair and hope, is scary.

Two - Take the Money and Run

I’ve been working on another poetry collection throughout this year that’s meant to be a bunch of commentary on art, whether that’s about the art itself, what it means to me, or experiences I associate with it. I associate the movie Psycho with some trauma during my senior year in college, for instance. Working on a Museum of Art and Eggs has given me a great excuse to look at, watch, and consume art of all kinds. It feels less selfish if I attach the ways I spend my free time with some form of work.

While looking through various pieces of art, I came across a set of blank canvasses by Jens Haaning titled “Take the Money and Run.” As NPR explains, the Kensten Museum of Modern Art commissioned artwork from Haaning and gave him about $84000 to make it happen. As you can probably guess based of the title, he took the money and ran. NPR says the museum, though apparently annoyed, “also acknowledged that Haaning did produce a provocative piece of work.”

They kept it on exhibition, displaying it as a piece of art, which it is.

The museum later “filed a civil lawsuit against Haaning due ot the fact that he still had not returned the money and was in breach of his contract with them.”

That is all very interesting. It’s kind of funny. That the blank canvasses were still displayed is also interesting. There’s an implication here that art is anything with which we imbed meaning, and that vibes pretty hardcore with how I approach art as well. A taped banana is art because someone provided it meaning and we have, since, also provided it meaning.

But more than that, I’m interested in what it’s like to look at a blank canvas. To be confronted with it. What if an artist took a blank canvas and, with near invisible brush strokes, repainted it in white? What if they did that multiple times? At what point would people who despise “modern art” consider it to be art? Would they ever?

Imagine a blank canvas. Here, I’ll help. Look at a blank screen. What do you see? Is it nothing? Really? Is that your answer? What happens a lot of the time with art is that it reflects on you what you bring to it. Clearly representative art, like a portrait, might guide you quicker. If it’s someone you know, like a historical figure, you bring the context of your personal judgements about them. What I took from that Rothko painting is much more reflective of my inner life than it is necessarily of the painting or of Rothko. A blank canvas makes us imagine what might be there. What exists? What doesn’t?

As a writer, I’ve stared at a lot of empty pages on new documents. The cursor blinks, which I suppose make it so they aren’t truly empty. And staring, not working, I start thinking about the possibilities. Am I good enough to make them? What if what I make goes no where? What if I hate it? Worse, what if I love it? The blank page is terrifying because it is brimming with potential.

Here. I’ll end the blank screen for you.

Why is it so scary to create? I guess, really, that’s what my past couple of videos have been about. It’s a question that spins around in my mind a lot. It’s a joy to make art. I am happiest when I’m on stage or behind my sax. I feel alive when I’m filming or writing or composing. It can all be difficult and frustrating, but it is a joy. So why is it so goddamn scary to create?

Creation reminds of us the nothingness. The opposite of creation is destruction, but they’re both siblings. They involve a something. Nothingness transcends both. It is an empty.

Sometimes what’s coloquiolly called Modern Art forces us to engage with the creation of meaning. We imagine things in the gap. We imagine their destruction. We question it and ourselves and our reality. It makes us think about the Empty.

Three - Difficulty

TikTok likes to show me videos of people hooking up buckets to ropes, filling said buckets with paint, and then throwing them to swing over a canvas, spinning and dropping colors onto the canvas. Sometimes those same videos will get reposted to twitter and people will roll their eyes at them. It’s easy after all. They could do it. Go back to that article about Rothko. People who call it doodles. Rothko’s paintings are supposedly easy. They could do it. Therefore it doesn’t count, right?

Why is difficulty so important?

Maurizio Cattelan duct tapes a banana to a wall, titled it Comedian, and the internet has lost its mind ever since. And every time it does, people come out of the woodwork to say, “Hi, yes, you are proving its point.” Another artist, David Datuna, walked up to Comedian, plucked it off the wall, and ate it. That too was art. Neither of these things were difficult. Yet they took the world by storm. It’s so easy to leave a canvas blank, isn’t it?

It is, isn’t it? Splatter art is so simple. So do it. Go on. These pieces are simple, so make it. Sell it. Put your name to it. Do it. That isn’t a request. It’s an order. People like to go on and on about how easy it must be to write romance books. Taylor Swift is bad because her songs must be easy to write. Pop music is so dumb, haha, look at how we point out the common chord structure. That obviously must mean it is easy and so therefore it doesn’t count as art. But then those people don’t turn around and make any art. They don’t put out albums or write musicals or publish romance books. They don’t film horror movies. They don’t paint a Rothko or make any sort of painting. They make nothing.

That, I think, is why they dismiss things as “easy.” If easy is the same as not worth making, then they can go on creating nothing. But if they truly believe these things are easy, and then they think they qualify as art, the question remains. Why don’t they create? If they accept both premises, suddenly they have no excuses. They’d have to create whatever dream they have. They’d have to sit at the blank document, the empty sheet music, and primed canvas and actually put themselves out there. They’d have to face the nothingness and actually draw something forth from it. They’d have to confront how terrifying it is to create.

Sometimes the label of easy is actually to make ourselves feel better. Writing takes a lot of work. There’s sentence level craft, plotting, constructing character arcs, writing out lists of details so you’re consistent with them, knowing the rules so you can break them as you please. Then there’s editing. There’s querying or self-publishing, both of which take a certain level of marketing skills. You have to sell it.

Artists also like to call what we do easy. I’m a decent saxophone player, and I think it’s a pretty easy instrument for the most part. But I’ve also been playing it for about 16 years. I took lessons. Almost every single school day throughout middle and high school, I’d practice for an hour when I got home. I’ve been writing plays for eight years, musicals for six. I’ve put in a lot of study and reading. I’ve participated in workshops and watched talks on every artform I participate in. Calling it all easy, though, is a great way to be humble and dismiss myself.

People hate the art dumping videos because they feel like it’s something they can do. They’re not wrong, either. Most art isn’t beyond your grasp. You can write a novel. You can compose a song. You can paint. You can tell a joke. You can take a picture. You can create. There are lots of forms that don’t even take an insane amount of effort to be kinda good at. But it takes a level of bravery and vulnerability to do any of that. You risk failure. And, maybe worse, you risk success. What if you start making the “easy” art and you find success and some fulfillment in it? Well then, this whole time, you could have been doing it. Think of how much time we all waste to being too scared to try. The concept of wasted time makes us think of mortality. We’re at the fear center.

Four - Beauty

A lot of the dumbest people on the planet believe that art is objective, taste is real, and there’s such a thing as the “best” when it comes to art. Their entire deal often gets on my nerve. There is a certain reactionary element to this viewpoint. You can get to it through weirdo conservatism and you can get to it through idiotic materialism. So people get into a lot of arguments about this because there is not a single argument throughout all of time that has ever ceased being argued. Discourse is eternal, oh my god, it’s hell. One really funny attempt at this I saw on twitter once listed 15 things that separate supposedly good art from supposedly bad art.

It’s utter nonsense because the entire idea is nonsense. I’ll talk about that whole subject in a different video. But on his dumb little chart, number fourteen was Beauty. According to him, good art “believes in, and tries to produce, beauty.”

Is there beauty in in a banana duct taped to a wall? Well… I think there can be. Beauty is such an abstract concept in the first place. But as far as this guy is concerned, probably not. How about a Rothko painting? Some people find the colors beautiful, but as someone who can’t see colors all that well, his paintings look almost muddy to me in their colors. I’m sure I’d find them beautiful if I saw them in person, but the effect the painting I talked about earlier had on me had nothing to do with beauty. When these types of people say “beautiful” what exactly do they mean? Do they mean western beauty standards imposed on body types and makeup? Do they mean aspiring to classical ideals?

One place to look, I think, would be catholicism.

In college, a lot of my friends were Catholics of one sort of another. The furth we went into our years there, the more devoted they became. Several of them had lapsed before freshman year, and one of our friends slowly got them all back in love with the religion. I don’t really talk to most of them. One of them started retweeting Tucker Carlson. One got mad at me for disliking homophobia. One was a homophobe who ran off to become a nun. Before she left, said nun made an instagram post with some sculptures. She started talking about how art should strive to be beautiful. Beauty, to her, was connected to the divine. Beauty was bringing glory to god. Art that wasn’t beautiful was “bad.” I sincerely disliked her as a person by the time she left my life.

An article on Good Catholic mostly strives to talk about sacred art - that is, iconographic art - but it does talk about beauty in art itself. In it, Lori Hadacek Chaplin says, In 1992, I graduated from art school, but I don’t remember a lot of beauty … Beautiful art causes us to marvell it makes us hope for more and aspire to become better people. Beauty points to the divine…”

In an article for Catholic Answers, Paul Senz says, “What can bring people to their senses, make them see what is true and good, like a splash of cold water bringing them out of their stupor? Beauty. … Truly beautiful things are good and profoundly true; truly good things are true and profoundly beautiful; truly true things are beautiful and profoundly good. This is why beautiful things can so easily lead down the road to the true and the good.” So, maybe it needs to be pointed out, but “good things are beautiful” has led to some awful things throughout history. Cruelty, witch hunts, murder, discrimination. People justify their atrocities by calling them beautiful and thereby attempting to paint over them with the apparent connection to goodness and truth that beauty has.

He goes on to say a bunch of pointless and incorrect things. For instance, “Chritistians have always been recognized for their joy and how they love one another.” Nope. The article paints the idea that beautiful art leads people to Catholicism. As with my former friend, it attempts then to say that which isn’t beautiful is thereby bad. “It is no coincidence that this proliferation of bad art coincided with our society’s fight against truth and goodness. Hans Urs von Blathasar said that denial of the true and the good would inevitably lead to ugliness.”

So on some level, modern art is seen by some on attack on their very worldview. It summons up the ugly things. It says the ugly is a form of beauty. It makes you question whether beauty matters at all. You start asking questions about meaning and mortality. You ask about the purpose of art and life. And doubt, apparently, is evil. If you view modern art as ugly and ugly as thereby immoral and attempting to destroy the world, it makes sense to hate it. To want it destroyed. But this is just moral handwringing. The fear though isn’t about beauty and ugliness. It isn’t about good and evil. The concern with modern art is that it questions so-called objective truth. It says that there is none. And that questions the church’s authority. It forces moral responsibility on the human.

And it’s right.

And that’s scary.

Because if you start questioning, if you start doubting, if you consider that maybe ugliness can be good, can be meaningful, can be true, then you might start thinking of death. No, not of death. If you’re religious, that might not matter so much. It isn’t death it brings up. No, that’s the fear center. The fear isn’t even hell. It’s the empty. Modern art can make you confront the idea of…

Five - Untitled Portrait of Ross in L.A.

A pile of candies ideally weighing 175 pounds. Viewers may come and take a piece. You can eat it, give it away, take it home to keep. They’ll replace the candies at some point. You have to choose. Do you take one or not? Why?

The art pile is part of a series by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. It was made in 1991 after his partner Ross Laycock died from AIDS. He weighed 175 before the virus started to take him. Gonzalez-Torres eventually succumbed to the same, like many of our queer elders did. So many of us died. When I was in college, I complained about the amount of AIDS stories that we studied in my theatre courses. It was so much tragedy. Where was our joy? But over time, it’s hit me. I watch Tick tick boom and besides relating to the whole composer freaking out about getting older and needing success thing, the AIDS storyline really hit me. We were in the pandemic. So much art and love and joy died during the AIDS crisis.

A giant pile of candy out in the wild would be considered trash. Cockroaches would get it. Do you use colorful candy or dull candy for it? It seems to be up to the exhibit.

Ross weighed 175 pounds. Each piece of candy together is him at his healthiest. As you take a piece, you take him. You share his memory. You interact with his spirit. I assume he was sweet. He brought joy. He made you like life. But each piece taken makes him unhealthy. The disease is killing him. We’re killing him. At the same time, by pressing pieces of him to our lips, we’re kissing a man stolen by a disease that made its victims avoided like monsters. In his final days, how much touch was he deprived of? With each candy eaten, he is kissed. He is trusted enough to love and consume and enjoy and kiss.

I almost cried when I wote this. This pile of candy, with its little story and simple title…

I am scared of this piece. I have not yet seen it in person, only in photographs, and it hurts me. This is death. But it’s more than that. What is life? What is love? What is art?

It hurts. It all hurts.

Is that why modern art is so scary? It will bring you to face whatever horrible thoughts are in your mind. You will see the void. You will see our attempts to make meaning. You will be asked to make meaning. Look at the empty. Does it scare you? Why? At the center of your fear, is there a Rothko painting? A blank canvas? A banana on a wall? Or is it a pile of candy slowly emptying?

Open up your heart and your mind to the idea that you are the maker of meaning, and you’ll start seeing art all around you. You just then have to ask: Is that liberating or goddamn terrifying?