Has This Happened To You?
If you go to art museums and galleries you will probably recognize this. You leave the Met, say, and step back out into the world of Fifth Avenue and everything is changed. This happened to me most memorably leaving the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. His urban landscape was suddenly there, as if Gansevoort Street had stepped into one of his canvases.
This is what happened to Fleur Adcock as she stepped out from the gallery – now Tate Britain – to the Thames Embankment at Millbank.
Leaving the Tate
Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river
and there’s a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic –
a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different
but it wouldn’t matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.
Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus…Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.
That’s your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn’t exist
before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,
marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye’s become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.
You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You’re in charge
of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art’s whatever you choose to frame.
– Fleur Adcock
White Space and Frames
Fleur Adcock’s poem does what it describes. It frames the act of framing.
In a Jogos Florais interview, Adcock said she was “quite pleased” with the line “Art is what you choose to frame” — meaning that whatever you decide to focus on becomes art. It had simply “popped” into her head. Walking around a gallery, she observed, alters perception: “Everything seems to be in frames, in squares, when you look at it.”
Recalling an argument with A. S. Byatt, who dismissed a short poem by saying she wrote better images “in any page of fiction,” Adcock replied: “Well, yes, but this one has got white space around it!” White space makes you look more closely. That act of isolating — of setting apart — is art.
The Sky Reframed
Upstream at Chelsea, Laura Knight’s Chelsea Embankment and Studio Window embody this, gazing from Cheyne Walk (once home to Turner, Rossetti, Whistler) up and down the river.
Knight never had her own studio on Cheyne Walk but she painted a small number of views of this area of the Thames.
Gazing left downriver: boats and a swan glide on the water, birds wheel in the air, while horses and carts mingle with cyclists, walkers, watchers, lorries, taxis, and a London bus.
In both paintings we see the embankment as a lively boundary between river and street, the river stretching into the city beyond. There is nothing grand or heroic here – art is what you choose to frame.
Zoom in: swans on the water,
watchers on the bank watching them.
Adcock’s poem mentions two painters whose work comes to mind but dismisses both. Neither are wild and pure and ecstatic enough for the April sky before her:
…and such a sky
you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic –
a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps…
With Constable not brilliant enough and John Crome insufficiently ecstatic how about something madly pure and pre-Raphaelite. Perhaps some William Holman Hunt:
Or how about this for a sky?
Looking at Looking
We look straight at Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day – and at the backs of those looking at it. Will it change how we see the street when we leave?
The art has taught and trained us how to see. It multiplies itself.
Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn’t exist
before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,
marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye’s become.
The eye picks out scenes in art – and then life – and crops and frames them. Because:
This is brilliant from beginning to end. The poem is stupendous, and so true, and your examples art works are extremely well chose.
THis was very interesting to read and quite true, too. I want to go to the museum with you soon.
Good project….two a month..to stop focussing on dangerous bridges and get drawing. Now wheres that pen…
I really like the notion that looking at art makes you view the world differently. If only everyone looked at art a bit more. Another very interesting post!
I see the world as I do because of previous programming. Is this “who we are”. And then the question ” can we choose “? Is freedom of choice simply an illusion…
And we think AI is new! A recent tv programme by Hannah Fry was profoundly disturbing showing how a young man had attempted to kill the Queen supported and encouraged by an Ai friend.But now here in yr blog is the earlier method of affecting what we see. However we choose what we see depending on what we want to be see. Now everyone sees the same. Question is “Who are we”?
Who are we? “Dust in the wind” obviously.
But back to material reality” Clearly – art is very dangerous. Do not do it.
Meanwhile S and I were just this very evening discussing your talent as an artist and thinking how wonderful it would be to get one sketch from you on a regular basis.(Time frame up to you. Would one per month be too much?)
Meanwhile – look for use of “Two Sheds ’94” drawing in an upcoming post. Cultural theft and appropriation at its finest.