Last October at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), I stumbled upon a vivid landscape painting tucked in a secluded hallway by Frederick Church, titled Cotopaxi (1855). The painting was quite alluring—deep green trees along the edge of a volcano in Ecuador—but as an avid "birder" I was even more intrigued by a pair small gold binoculars or "opera glasses" dangling from a silver chain next to the image. Peering through the binoculars at the painting, I felt completely immersed in Church's lusciously painted green, leafy forest in front of a pinky sunset. Church frequently invited guests to his studio to view his landscape paintings through opera glasses because, as I experienced, it makes you feel as if you are inside the landscape, completely surrounded by the trees and hills of Ecuador.
Months later, I was once again standing in a museum peering at art through a pair of binoculars, but this time, I was looking at a painting by Frank Stella in the "Benches & Binoculars" exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The painting, Stretch Variation (1968), is from the "Damascus Gate" series and approximately 5 feet long. Viewing Church's painting through the "binos" produced the sense of immersion in the illusionary space of the painted landscape: in contrast, the abstract patterns in Stella's painting seemed to retreat from view through the binoculars. Stella's painting is a sequence of semi-circular forms painted in pastel colors with thin bands of bright yellow between each shape. In addition to Stella's work, there are over 75 paintings in the exhibition. The paintings are hung "salon-style" next to and over one another filling the entire gallery from floor to ceiling. Many of the paintings in the show, including Stella's, were created after the "salon-style" display was abandoned by art museums that preferred to hang paintings in a line.
Before I return to the experience of looking at Stella's painting through the "binos" at the Walker, there is one more twist in this story: when I returned to the MFAH this week, I walked into the main gallery and immediately saw an enormous painting by none other than, Frank Stella. Also from the "Damascus Gate" series, Stella's Stretch Variation III (1970) is 50 feet long. The vibrant colors in the painting—hot pink next deep teal—make pinwheel patterns across the canvas. The swooping curves of the shaped sides of the canvas mirror the architectural curves of the gallery. To make way for this large painting, the artworks that typically hang on the opposing walls of the gallery have been removed. Their absence makes Stella's painting appear even more massive and monumental, as if the painting itself had expelled all of the other artwork from the room. Its independence is striking. Seeing Stella's painting dominate the main gallery at the MFAH brought back the awkwardness of viewing the Stella at the Walker through binoculars.
My frustration viewing Stella's painting at the Walker stemmed from not being able to view the entire painting at one time through the binoculars. Although much smaller than his painting at the MFAH, Stella's painting at the Walker is still quite large—5 feet long and much bigger than many of the other works in the exhibition. With the scale and the large patterning in the painting, I could only view one or two colors at a time, which undermined what I find most compelling in Stella's "Damascus Gate" series—the unusual combinations of color that are sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Quite the opposite when viewing Church's painting in the binoculars: even though only small parts of Church's painting could be viewed at one time, I felt immersed in the landscape. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars, I was "kept out" of the painting. My experience of the work was limited by what was visible through the binoculars, but also the conventions of spectatorship embedded in the binoculars.
Viewing Stella's painting through the "binos" also makes Cartesian perspective the dominant mode of viewing the work. The binoculars as a tool for enhancing and focusing the sense of sight reflect some aspects of Cartesian perspective (defined as the combination of the Cartesian rational subject and the tools of rendering linear perspective, for a complete and eloquent description see in Martin Jay's "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, ed.). For instance, the binoculars harness "natural vision" with both eyes into a monocular viewpoint. In Cartesian perspective, the frame of the artist's gaze has a similar effect of transforming natural vision through both eyes to a singular vantage point. This fixed "window onto the world" of the artist's gaze makes the tools for rendering perspective work. Without a fixed and singular position as a viewer, the objects in the image would appear at two slightly different vantage points, and the illusion of depth would not be conveyed. The tools of Cartesian perspective were introduced during the Renaissance to create the illusion of space on flat surfaces used in painting and drawing. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars makes it difficult for the work to challenge the conventions of spectatorship rooted in Cartesian perspective.
It is this mode of spectatorship that Stella's paintings react to—the ability to project one's self into the image is limited by his exposure of the flatness of the painting's surface. In Stella's two paintings from the "Damascus Gate" series, there are no luscious landscapes to imagine moving through, or even thick brush strokes to create a physical space on the canvas. Although entirely flat, Stella's paintings are very much about space. The space he creates when a pale pink line leaps out in front of deep blue hue. The space he makes evident when the painting in its intense color and curving forms reaches out from the wall towards the viewer. As the architecture critic, Paul Goldberger writes:
And for all the extraordinary power Stella's art has had as an exploration of color, line, and form in two dimensions, it is hard not to look at this paintings and feel that what has most intrigued him, all along, has been space: the space between lines, the space left out of the canvas, the space you imagine as you look at his shapes, and the real space that exists between the painting and the viewer. (Paul Goldberger, Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007).
In Goldberger's analysis, Stella's paintings are above all about the creation and control of space (Goldberger 31). Stella's painting certainly "controls" the gallery at the MFAH: yet, in the salon-style exhibition at the Walker, Stella's painting instead seemed struggle to control the viewer's experience of the space within the structure of the exhibition.
Stella's earlier paintings are described by art critic Phillip Leider as examples of Literalism because their abstract patterns reveal the inherent objectness of painting (Phillip Leider, "Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella's Retrospective at the Modern," Artforum, vol. 8, no.8, April 1970). Although the "Damascus Gate" series perhaps move away from Literalism, Stella's paintings in this series still make evident the blunt objectness of paintings. It is their physicality as objects that enable the individual in the gallery to be reminded of the "real" space of the gallery and their own physical presence in it. It is the objectness of the painting that the binoculars remove.
Viewing Stella's painting at the Walker through the binoculars is to transform an object into an image. As a result, my encounter with the work focused on sight as opposed to a "whole-body" experience. Without the binoculars, the scale and vivacity of Stella's paintings affect my body in the gallery. I find the intensity of the color dizzying: sometimes nauseating, sometimes jarring, and often difficult to look at. The scale of the painting is larger than my own body and the curves on both ends of the canvas produce the sense that the painting is expanding to envelop me. The introduction of the binoculars diminished the effect of Stella's painting on my body, because the binoculars changed my sense of the limits of my body in relationship to the limits of the painting. Certainly the binoculars improve my sense of sight, I can see greater detail farther away, but this amplified vision means that my attention is on what I am seeing and my other senses are dimmed. This is a wonderful feature of binoculars, when I am trying to spot a tiny Blue-grey Gnatcatcher bird in a dense forest. Looking at artwork in the gallery through binoculars, however, produced a similar effect, I was less aware of my body in the space and about my body's relationship to Stella's painting. The binos did not diminish my experience of Church's work because this painting already primarily engages the viewer's sense of sight above the other senses. It is through the sense of sight that I project myself into the scene—a landscape created by Church's use of Cartesian perspective to produce the illusion of space on the flat surface of the canvas. The ability of Stella's painting at the Walker to engage the body of the viewer in space was also challenged by the "salon-style" hanging of the show. The painting was hemmed in on all sides by other images, and so did not relate to the architecture of the gallery or impart the feeling of surrounding the viewer.
So as my friend asked after reading this essay, "why are you foaming at the mouth over a show that is just supposed to be fun?!" So a bit of a disclaimer here, I like this show, it is fun, but I also think it is important to talk about how the curating of an exhibition can profoundly shape our experience of a work of art. It is not that I don't understand the reasons for the "Benches & Binoculars" show (i.e.the history of the T.B. Walker collection, making the work more accessible to a broad audience), or that I am convinced the curators of the exhibition did not discuss the same issues I have just described relative to Stella's painting, or similar works in the show. It is just that it seems like such a dramatic change to the experience of Stella's painting that I found it startling and worth unraveling.
