Pay Attention

A friend recently took me to the Museum of Modern Art and invited me to try a new approach to viewing paintings. The idea was simple, but turned out to be profound. As the best simple ideas often are. The whole thing was based on two words and one simple act that human beings have rarely down throughout the ages, but now is virtually an extinct species in our biosphere of constant distraction: “Pay attention.”

 

The instructions were to stand in front of a painting for ten minutes and discover what you notice. Ten minutes of undivided attention. No peeking at your phone or other paintings or other people. Just you and the painting alone together in your ten-minute universe. Don’t read the little museum blurb until the end.  

 

My friend chose the painting. A figurative work by Elmer Bischoff titled Orange Sweater, with its subject reading a book in the library. (Again, I didn’t know this until the end.) So I set to work noticing what I could. I divided the painting into 4 vertical quadrants and tried to identify objects in each quadrant— some distant mountains, the green leaves of a plant, a person, a desk, a book, two other background people, the walls, the windows and so on. Then I noticed the blend of earthy colors, lots of greys and browns, the curious splotch of red in the subject’s hair and then the textures of the brush strokes. I found myself wondering why the artist brushed vertically here and horizontally there and how he chose the colors and how we decided when each area of the painting felt finished. 

 

After a while, I stepped back one step at a time until I was some twenty feet back and noticed that the desk was more of a wrap-around counter. The painting had a different feeling looking at it all at once from a distance. Then I got close again and put on my glasses and noticed yet more details— like a series of thin x’s that could have been made with a razor blade. Was this the canvas cracking or an intentional choice? 

 

My friend announced the ten minutes were up and it didn’t feel too soon, but I could have spent another five minutes without feeling restless. He then took me to another part of the museum with more abstract works and set me in front of a large canvas that mostly was a wash of again, greys, blues, browns and other earthy tones, but this time without a single representational figure or recognizable object. The painting divided itself into four vertical quadrants set apart from three thin streaks of white going from top to bottom. This painting was to be more of a challenge.

 

But I repeated my strategies of taking it one quadrant at a time, viewing it from different distances and different angles. I observed it with one eye shut and then the other and then squinting. After staring intensely for a while, I sometimes got the impression that the colors were swirling a bit, not unlike fog. Sometimes there seemed to be a little pulsing or vibrating. I hung in there, but I confess it was not connecting either to my mind or heart or sensual pleasure. 

 

Afterwards, I found out that the painting, titled Scarface and painted by David Diao, was an attempt to go further than the Abstract Expressionist movement and painted using sponges and squeegees. The three vertical lines were actual the wood behind the canvas used to stretch is showing through in the front. 

My friend then showed me the two paintings he had looked at and we sat and shared our experiences. Though neither painting I looked at genuinely moved me or enticed me to bid for them at an auction, the simple experience of spending ten minutes with each was a radical awakening to the fact that I never do this in museums. Nor do most people. We walk through noticing this one or that one and maybe occasionally linger a bit longer at some. But mostly a trip to the museum is like passing a roomful of people at a party and greeting them with a short hello or at most, a few minutes of small talk, without ever sitting down to have a genuine in-depth conversation. Very similar to the way we skirt by all the background music in our life without really listening.

 

So my takeaway was to remind myself to do this more often. To sit in the park and look at a tree for ten minutes. To listen to a piece of music with no distractions, like I used to when I was younger, lying down between two speakers. To pick three paintings next time I go to a museum and do my own five or ten minute immersion in them. 

 

To simply pay attention.