Perplexing art

I try to be open-minded about a thing as vast and subjective as art. I try not to be too quick to judge. But sometimes, even in my eagerness to see the beauty or significance of a thing, I bump up against the limitations of my own understanding.

Today I read in Metroland, the Albany-area alternative news weekly, my friend David Brickman's insightful review of a show of paintings by an accomplished local artist, Richard Callner. Since I fool around with watercolor in my own amateurish way, I always take interest in observing how professionals use the medium, and how critics rate their successes and failures in the use of it. Brickman's review piqued my interest, especially in its last few paragraphs, in which he explains why he has devoted a lot of his critical efforts to shows at a particular Albany gallery, the Firlefanz. It basically came down to that fact he feels this gallery exhibits what matters as opposed to what sells. I went online and found the gallery's well-put-together Web site and browsed the .jpegs of the Callner show. The painting below is one of several in the exhibit that impressed me:

I am intrigued by the combination of mimesis and abstraction, and my overall reaction is that I  take pleasure in the viewing of the paintings and the feeling that they have in some way connected me to the artist. Each is a one-way window from my world into his.

After spending some time with the Callner images via the Web (no substitute for being in the presence of the actual pieces of art, I acknowledge), I surfed through the rest of the gallery's site and came upon a display of work by a younger artist, also local, named Justin Baker.

That's when frustration started to overwhelm me. I tried to take in his works with the same good-natured disinterestedness that I had approaching the Callner paintings, and it just wouldn't work. Here's an example from the gallery's Web site:

OK, I said to myself, he's going minimalist, using the negative space, very neutral tones. The works taken together certrainly have a unity of style. But they simply don't impress me .. they don't move me the way I want to be moved. The feeling of connection I felt with the Callner pieces was absent from the experience of looking at Baker's. 

Now, I used the word "frustration" earlier, and I want to be clear that it is not this artist or his work that frustrates me. It is, at least in part, my own inability to appreciate what he's done in these works. When I look at a piece of visual art, I generally ask three questions: 1. How does the experience of viewing it affect me? (Is it pleasurable? Discomforting? Exhilarating? Or does it make me shrug?) 2. Am I able to detect what the artist has attempted to acheive, even if it doesn't necessarily work for me? If I can answer "yes" to either question, my judgement (that's too strong a word) of the work is positive. (I've found I can arrive at such a determination even if the net effect of the work is to offend or repulse me ... ) If I answer "no" to both questions, the only effect is the aforementioned frustration, the persistent peal of a third question: What's missing?

Apparently I am able to isolate and ruminate on the qualities of a piece of art that make me enjoy it, but I am less able to grasp or pinpoint any qualities (or lack thereof) that make me fail to enjoy a piece of art.

Could it simply be a matter of looking longer? Looking harder? Perhaps yes and yes, I think. And perhaps continuing to view more art, expanding my conceptual vocabulary until I have the mental tools to make that connection.

As long as Baker, and artists like him, keep working beyond the borders of my apreciation zone, I promise I will keep trying to meet them half way.