when a painting slows you down...

while i was in madrid working on my installation, i managed to find three free days to visit the prado (twice) and the renia sofia (once). i saw a lot of incredible things, some of which i will try to post about over the next few weeks or so, but if i had to choose a single object that stood out from the rest, it would definitely be the fra angelico painting pictured above - retablo de la anunciacion, 1426-28.

going to a museum like the prado, the louvre, or the met, i always feel i want to wander without specific goals, so that i can enter some rooms without any idea of what i will see there. fortunately the prado's poor design allows a visitor to become disorientated quite often, and getting lost was not a problem. while i did map my way to goya's black paintings, and the room of bosch's work; everything else was pretty much a random discovery - which is a really beautiful way to experience a museum if you have the time.

when i first entered the room containing the fra angelico i was immediately struck by its size (it is easily 4 or 5 times larger than i had expected), as well as its placement - it is flanked by two incredible works, a small painting by mantegna (el transisto de la virgin, 1462-92) and antonello de messina's christo muerto sastenido por un angel, from 1476.

i should tell you that, as an artist who received a graduate degree in 1989, the last time i studied art of this period was probably in 1982, and whatever information i received then - during slide lectures of course - has certainly vanished. while i do love this period of painting, all i really "know" about it at this point is only what i can see and intuit in the presence of such things - indeed a different kind of research or learning than the kind that occurs in art history class.

while i was installing my own work, i ended up having a number of conversations with both older and younger artists who were also participating in the arte sonoro exhibition. as usual a number of those conversations were related to definitions of sound art, various approaches to performance, and how one experiences sound in various contexts. of course, most of these conversations ended up hovering around the idea of primary experience - with the usual discussions revolving around the qualities of listening to certain works in mp3 form, the relationship of the object of a CD or LP to the activity of listening and downloading.

while i have no interest in following such threads here, the experience of not only seeing the fra angelico on two different days, but also being able to sit beneath it on my second visit for over an hour, was a deeply profound experience. that hour spent in the presence of the original was as good as any illustration about why, in many cases, an mp3 is not a primary experience; but roughly the equivalent of experiencing the fra angelico painting through the postcard i purchased of it in the gift shop.

a primary experience is not only about receiving an image. it is about the experience of that image in relation to the object's physical presence - confronted by the all of the things that do not survive the process of translation, and which influence the process of "absorption" - things like harshness, subtlety, surface, patina, light, color, tone, etc. when one is present with a source, rather than a reproduction, an object is able to speak in its primary voice. a reproduction is simply a tool for the transfer of information, and usually it's source is degraded and veiled... for research or as a memory trigger it is fine, but it isn't the equivalent of being with the thing as it was made.

the next step towards deeper immersion, of course, is time and repetition. to be able to look at a painting for over an hour is certainly a luxury, but it is also a kind of commitment towards conversation and reflection. because of my own inability to process hundreds of artworks in a day with any substance, i am also an advocate of seeing fewer things in a visit, and spending as much time with each thing as possible.

as i sat on a bench facing this fra angelico painting, things began to come into focus that i never would've seen nor thought, had i stood there for 10 minutes and moved on to the next thing. i'm not sure that my notes here are perceptive or interesting, but i share them with you just the same. here they are presented as jotted down upon a small piece of paper between the lookings - words that do not come from memory, nor from looking at the postcard now leaning against my monitor, but scrawled with a pen in hand, in the presence of the object, while conversing through that primary experience:

"the angel in red, with blue robe peeking through/the woman in pink but covered in blue - they are opposites but equal. their hands both in the same gesture - as if an american indian hand signal for bird, angel, spirit, or flight. symmetrically broken up into three - 3/2/1. 1=mary, 2=angel, 3= natural world/eden. (trinity). the interior of her "cell" / "portico" - a blue sky with gold dot stars (is there a constellation hidden?) - behind is a simple "cell"/fantastic bench. the beam of light "the message" coming from beyond/the sun/a beam from two hands. the "eden" seems painted by rousseau - there's a bird in the beam and a bird on a beam - the swirling mist of color of stone, like a hallucination - the beam is the only element present in all 3 sections - uniting the human, the "touched" and the divine. the three flowers at adam and eve's feet. the perspective and architectural scale resembles johnson's folly at glass house. there are no words to describe the angel's wings."