Exposed

November 26th, 2011

Yesterday presented its torture to me through paintings in frames, through on-looking narcissism, through the state of art, through the symphony of machine, man and malady. I woke up with a flurry of misgivings. My dream states throughout the night were not recalled with their content but there included states of uneasy approaches. This, mind you, was starkly different from the preceding day which included a silent calm. I was set to go to the art museum to see a special exhibit: Degas and the Nude. I made the date. I cancelled the one 3 days before in fear of witnessing the very thing I ended up experiencing. It was fate. It beckons me to bring something significant to awareness.

I made my way onto the subway train, not feeling a sound rhythm, not feeling a beat I can latch onto for the day. I could not guard my unguarded sensations. I did not feel comfortable and I could not clothe myself with any sort of certainty. My motions did not feel easy. I was plagued with a heavy body that required much thoughtful work to move. I sat on the steps of the public library in a type of imprisoning pain. The sunlight was cutting into my irises. The noises were splicing my eardrums. The voices of people were tensing my limbs. I sat wondering how to free myself of these sensory imprisonments in which I feel like a silent specimen in foreign waters, unable to voice a reason as to why I cannot integrate well into these conditions. Feeling under attack, I have no choice but to find refuge somewhere- in a place, in a place in my mind. Silence did not seem feasible. I did not have the lightness to organize the sound. I tried to guard my unguardedness with meager attempts of sunglasses, headphones, and last but not least, prayer. I tried the attempt of simply pressing on and so I made my way to the museum in splintering strides with the sun.

In this all, though, there is a war between many worlds. I battle with my mode of perception saying that I am supposed to know how to deal with this at this point. I am supposed to know that I am not really imprisoned, that I actually have the key in my palm to free myself from these struggles. Yet this war had no victory as far as I could see. If I knew this, I could not say my inability to cope with the fury of the senses had won. But even if I did know, it was not a knowing that was active and so I could not say that this side had won either. It was a stalemate- a torturous, silently screaming stalemate.

Before entering into the exhibit, there appeared a sentence which revealed itself in a myriad of colours- the very last sentence of an introduction to Degas which read something to the affect of: It was inevitable that Degas made the nakedness of the nude his own. I voiced my connection to this phrase in what felt like a very exposed state myself. Have I lifted too many veils? I want only to lift more.

The exhibit was busy- busy with everything: Colours, people, voices, paintings, sounds, technologies, movements, reflections. I entered in a state of overwhelming approach. How could I tell where the art lies through all of this? How could I separate myself from the nudes in their portraits with the nakedness I felt as a foreign specimen encountering all of this? Was it worth it to try and separate- for I knew I could never succeed. I stood before a painting and I wished to abandon all my attempts right at this very second. I could not hear it. It was pure static. Not to mention, I could not see it with the swarm of bodies passing through my vision field which contains much more than mere sight. This same theme was repeated with each approach to a painting. Much as Degas approached the same theme of a bodily position with such a myriad of variations. There is a microcosmic infinity within one motion and within one form. How could I swift through each image in passing aesthetic delight? How could I bear the voices beside me saying “I like this one. I like this one more than that one. I think he did much better with those.”
I, eye, I, eye, I, eye.
These voices of seething narcissism never allow the colours to speak to them, never allow the nudes to reveal how to lift one’s ignorance of our tightly knit personas and our unraveling intelligence. It is not through the eye one can see. You both blind yourself and deafen yourself when a hierarchy of senses is established.

The screens of people’s technologies were reflected in the light of the paintings. Suddenly I see a tiny image of the painting before me within the painting, reflected on the screen of a device the person standing next to me had in their hands. The painting is before your eyes! You are peering down at the other image of it! Not the image itself but an image of the image! I wonder what gets lost in translation through all of these copies. I wonder what the nature of our information has become in its expanse. Armies of devouring info droids walk around with snapshots of the paintings on their screens and the voices of others informing them about the painting through the headphones in their ears. Where is the art? Where are the people? What is being communicated? I’m drowning in static noise. I am seething with sadness for I cannot hear the colours through this all.

Consequently my nerves shake and my limbs numb with the stifling motions of all this energy going into all of these places. The noises in the room feel magnified and so I look for a way to dull the external. I find myself subconsciously squinting my eyes and plugging one of my ears to desperately find a way to see and hear clearly. This is the reality I cannot hide in my experiences. I take deep breaths and pray that art does not have to bear this pain of being in this place any longer. Yet the war of my worlds rages on- battle cries of “pull yourself out of this hypersensitive misery!” and shouts from the other side declaring “This is the malady of the age! You are feeling its symptoms!” No matter what I hear myself saying, I came there not to hear myself. I came there to hear the naked intelligence of the nudes. I came there to feel myself in their positions to hear them. I came there to drown in colours and not static noise.

I spent a moment looking at the sculpture of a dancer frozen in time through the glass. Her stance gave me a hope to take with me. Her purpose gave me a reason to hope to take with me. Her eyes were closed. She did not allow the onlookers to peer into her soul. Her one motion masks all that is within her. One cannot simply stare and know. She beckons you to do more with your spectrum of feeling. Her dance is allowed one position. She somehow felt more free than I felt in that moment.

Yet I wish to make it clear I do not blame and I do not rebuke here. I simply want to bring closer contact to the colourful void of feeling to everyone and somehow the attempts to do this in this modern age seem inefficiently detached. But there is an attempt, right? We want closer contact. We want to reach it from a new place.

Drop everything. Drop it all. Let it go. Stop it. Don’t speak. Put an end to it. Go back to the bare walls. Take the pictures out of their frames. Bring the dancer off of her stage. Turn off the screen. Take off the veil.

How did you like the exhibit, Lauren? I loved it so much it was painful. I loved it so much I could not bear that it was an exhibit. I loved it so much that I felt entirely stripped and revealed by the end of it. I loved it so much that I cannot bear being asked how I like it.