In 2013 the online magazine 2Paragraphs asked a group of visual artists to write about the image that had “affected them most profoundly.” The question elicited some fascinating stories, from Goya‘s influence on video and conceptual artist Karen Ostrom, to William Lamson‘s discovery of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain, to Rachel Perry Welty‘s absconding with Agnes Martin‘s soiled paper napkin at lunch.

I was delighted when 2Paragraphs invited me to participate, but I soon realized that choosing one image or “art moment” was a tall order.

A Quest for the Quiet Mind

Our lives are made up of a series of these moments—intimate encounters with beauty, strangeness, horror, or mystery that forever change us. One of art’s most profound characteristics is that it can be the catalyst of that shift. “We are only alive to the degree we can let ourselves be moved,” writes Lewis Hyde (a quote I am particularly fond of and also included in my 2Paragraphs piece). The opposite of such evolution is stagnation. Depression. Hopelessness. The death of possibility.

Increasingly, these intimate, unexpected encounters are in short supply. One of the greatest downsides to being constantly plugged in is that it is harder and harder to create this quiet, open state of mind. (It is the old Buddhist analogy that equates the busy mind with a silty pond that has been stirred up. But when the water is allowed to become still, the silt settles and the water becomes clear again.)

This quiet mind is not only essential for encounters with art, but also for our everyday interactions with people, nature, work. In other words, life.

How can we possibly be “moved,” as Hyde says, when our minds are busy scanning emails, text messages, and our ever-growing to-do lists? How can we have a real conversation with someone when we are distracted by the dings and pings coming from our cell phones or when we are “waiting to talk” instead of actually listening? How can we decide what we truly believe on a certain issue if we are merely spouting back what we have read on Twitter or in our favorite media outlet (whose viewpoints are most often aligned with our own)?

 

Receptivity: In Short Supply

Quiet and stillness are in short supply, but so is open-mindedness. Too often we consume culture and use it as a badge of superiority, instead of seeking out the genuine exchange. We attend dinner and cocktail parties armed with a litany of trending topics and canned opinions. (And I must credit my recent conversation with writer William Powers for this brilliant insight.) We fear looking ignorant or foolish more than we desire revelation. Receptivity is under threat. 

We need to seek out “intimate, unexpected encounters” more often, and this can only happen if we clear and create the necessary physical and mental space. Isn’t it time to inhabit our real lives again, to court play and surprise, whether it is through books and art, travel, making new friends, having a meandering, late-night conversation, watching the moon rise, or simply listening and speaking the truth at a dinner party or staff meeting?

Such experiences may not spawn tidy bullet points on our to-do lists or make us feel “productive,” but that is the exact reason to do it. Because these rare exchanges are pregnant with possibility. It is within these spaces that true revelation and innovation occur. And, as research is proving, it’s also good for our health, physically and mentally.

 

 

Can Art Make Room for Sincerity?

The response I gave to the 2Paragraphs assignment (included below) describes only one revelatory moment art has given me in my life. It’s the reason I will defend, embrace, support, and engage with the arts until the day I die. It isn’t fashionable or hip to say that, I know. I am walking a fine line here; I’m on the verge of tripping and unwittingly plunging head-first into a gooey morass of sentimentality and New-Age mumbo jumbo (and isn’t that stumble what so many artists and art critics fear most?).

In a world obsessed with auction prices, bestseller lists, and what Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are wearing to Art Basel (or not wearing, as in the case of their recent, controversial music video for West’s song Bound 2), sincerity appears to be a silent minority. But is this actually true? Do most of us really prefer corporate spin, celebrity gossip, and hipster irony? Or is it simply harder for us to drown out the noise?

The late David Foster Wallace understood that irony and cynicism have their limits. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” he argued that our culture’s real rebels were writers and individuals “who treat…plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue:

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

If you were asked to describe the art work that has affected you most profoundly in your life, how would you answer? Your comments are welcome below.

 

 

Photographers: What image has affected you most profoundly?

From 2Paragraphs

by Michelle Aldredge

When I was a girl, my father kept a book on documentary photography in his office. I remember sneaking in, sliding the book from the top shelf, and looking. There were certain images I returned to again and again: Mathew Brady’s photo of dead Civil War soldiers on the battlefield of Antietam; Jacob Riis’s picture of squalid living conditions in New York City’s slums; Walker Evans’s image of poor sharecroppers in Hale County, Alabama; and Nick Ut’s famous photograph of a screaming, naked, 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running toward the camera after a napalm attack burned her village, clothes, and body. Growing up in a strict, religious household in Georgia (before the Internet), these forbidden photographs were riveting and disturbing, their effect nothing less than sandpaper against my skin. I knew my father had been to Vietnam, though he never spoke of it. Was this the kind of violence he saw? Was this what the larger world was like? A confusing mix of awe, fear, pity, and outrage welled up inside me.

What happened next is what happens with most famous images in our culture–the photographs became so familiar that they lost their bite. What was once radical became commonplace. But two years ago, when I first saw these rare color photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographers in the early 1940s, I was reminded of that book in my father’s office. Russell Lee’s photograph of a homesteading family in Pie Town, New Mexico, stung me like a hornet. In vibrant Kodachrome, these migrant workers, Japanese Internment Camp prisoners, farmers, and families seemed more contemporary. More real. More like us. The gulf of time and over-familiarity closed. Suddenly, it was 1940 and I was sitting right across from Jack Whinery and his family in their radiant calico, suspenders, and stripes. The writer Lewis Hyde once said that we’re only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved. This quality also defines great art. Whether an image makes us feel pleasure, discomfort, or outrage, it temporarily lifts us from the apathy of our daily routine. It’s like a pinch on the back of the arm. When we feel it, we know that we’re awake.

 

You can read the responses of 13 other artists in the full 2Paragraphs article here.

 

 

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