In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound stresses the importance of approaching poetry through a "careful first-hand examination of the matter." He illustrates his point with the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:
A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.Post-Graduate Student: 'That's only a sunfish.'Agassiz: 'I know that. Write a description of it.'After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.
Phil Terry at A Reading Odyssey advocates a similar approach to looking at art, and he has organized the Slow Art initiative to encourage museum visitors to take the time to really look at art and see it in a new way.
There were Slow Art events at sixteen museums in the U.S. and Europe on October 17. Participants were invited to look - really look - at a number of artworks (ten minutes minimum per piece) and then gather afterwards to discuss the experience.
I went to the meet-up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and looked at Jackson Pollock's Troubled Queen (1945) and John Singer Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). For those of you who couldn't be there, I made this video to try to capture one representative minute of the experience of looking at Troubled Queen.
Note: I do not know whether Madonna is a troubled or an untroubled queen, but the music that you can hear in the background comes from the nearby multimedia installation of Queen (A portrait of Madonna) by Candice Breitz.
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4 comments:
Some viewers have asked whether the sound is broken in the video.
The only sound in the video is the ambient sound that I recorded standing in front of the painting - footsteps, the murmur of voices, and in the background, sounds of singing from a multimedia installation.
When we are looking at a painting, we often don't notice that we are also hearing things because we assume that the "real" experience is visual.
The anecdote of Agissiz and the fish is all about getting beyond what we are "supposed" to see, and learning to look for ourselves.
The map is not the terrain. This is not a pipe. Art is a contact sport.
This blog post was reprinted on A Reading Odyssey by Phil Terry, the Founder of the Reading Odyssey, Slow Art and Creative Good: See the reprint: http://showsupport.typepad.com/odyssey/2009/10/seeing-the-troubled-queen.html
I loved the video--only wish it were longer.
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