The Brooklyn Rail

At eighteen, I had no idea there was a contemporary art world. My genetic family produced farmers, nurses, teachers, and military members only. I knew I didn’t want to follow any of those career paths, but I knew that I too wanted to become a “useful” person somehow. Decent SAT scores and wildly intricate and colorful lab reports I had made for my high school biology class gave my guidance counselor the idea for my career. I initially set off to UC Berkeley to become a biological/scientific illustrator. I understood from my rather adorable chain-smoking guidance counselor that I could even apply my skills to paint prosthetic eyes for people—that alone felt both fascinating and useful. By the time finances fell apart for my family during the first semester of my sophomore year at a different school, Carnegie Mellon, I had to abandon the idea of college and began looking for work.

In the winter of 1993, an artist assistant found out that there was a manually dexterous, out-of-school student who was available for a last-minute job helping to install the work of Nancy Spero for the 1993 Whitney Biennial. I took a bus from my parent’s house to New York, and during the course of those weeks I met and grew to love Nancy Spero and her husband, the painter Leon Golub. Later, I would end up working for both of them again, and for a stretch of years. During that 1993 install at the Whitney, I chatted with Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. I even asked him why his strange “movies” were so short. Before I had even taken a serious art history class I was working among people who would become some of the most famous artists in the world. Roberta Smith closed out her New York Times review of the Biennial by observing that the very ambitious and highly political show—which she had also praised—“too often loses sight of the fact that art is a form of visual communication that must exist for its own sake before it can further a cause.”

If an artist keeps in mind what Smith is saying, then this form of communication has its own inherent needs. Art needs its own voice, a language, and, of course, something to say. A wise woman I am close to suggested that art needs to disrupt and elevate and wake people up from being lulled into apathy—especially in troubled times, as it’s true of the ones we’re living in now. I often think of the best art as being like a great parent. Great parents are useful. They challenge their offspring when they’re lazy, indifferent, or callous, but they also soothe when their children are hopeless or in real pain. A good parent tries to point out the best paths to take, and tries to protect their children from causing harm to themselves or others. Maybe art helps the most when we’ve lost our way, or become overwhelmed.

In many ways I accidentally became an artist, and quite honestly I did not enter into the “art world” without serious fear and reservations. Contemporary art often seems like an obstacle course from hell. When I read The Hunger Games to my young daughter, I kept thinking it was like the contemporary art world, with its wildly unpredictable twists and turns, glorifying an artist one minute, then spitting them out the next (and yes, sometimes even killing them in the process). At times the “art world” seems like some medieval monster that can suddenly lift an artist, who is usually both excited and terrified to be chosen, from out of the deep mosh pit of swirling artists, and carry them up to great, dizzying heights, suspending them above all of us left in the pit below, only to drop them just as suddenly. The process of choosing and elevating artists can seem utterly random. But there are times when it feels like the artists themselves raise up one of their own to be placed onto the stage, so we can all revel in their unfolding.

When I was thinking about the contemporary art that I love, I kept coming back to Hilma af Klint, who is not at all contemporary. Although af Klint is long dead, she anticipated that her career wouldn’t even begin until she was at least twenty years gone. She essentially made herself a peer among artists from another time, not her own. A future point in time. Af Klint felt that her contemporaries weren’t “ready” for her work. Strangely, her art seems to fit perfectly in the present. According to biographers, af Klint became passionately interested in spiritualism and the occult after her ten-year-old sister died in 1880. Af Klint says herself, “What I needed was courage, and it was granted to me through the spiritual world, which bestowed rare and wonderful instruction.” I suppose that in her case the spiritual world she connected with through meditation and seances was the teacher, and the work she produced were the lessons. Eerily, one of her paintings appears to foretell the blitz of London in the second world war, complete with a map of the UK and a human blowing fire towards it. This was painted nearly a decade before the event. Let’s imagine that somehow she actually did connect with a concept of the future. In this respect, perhaps it is fair to consider her a member of the contemporary art world? Maybe contemporary art cannot come to an end if it has no linear course?

When things “run their course” it generally means that they have reached their natural conclusion. But if art is a form of communication, for it to end there would have to be nothing left to say, and its use as a language would die. If our own current “art world” is a kind of behemoth cobbled together by parts of museum collections, galleries, curators, critics, and collectors, then what is the “course” that the artists are even on? How can it end if someone is still wandering on the course, even by themselves, and circuitously? Af Klint is exemplary, someone who determined that her path began in the future. If a long-gone artist like Hilma af Klint can suddenly appear to us now, and as a revelation, we might imagine there may be other visionaries like her, both living and passed on, who might also take us by surprise, offering unexpected lessons with which we can go onward.