The Wild Winds of Fortune

I hate Barnett Newman. Actually, to be specific, I hate Barnett Newman’s work. (And do not get me started on Rothko.) I once sat for fifteen minutes in the Museum of Modern Art glaring at Vir Heroicus Sublimis, muttering and trying to get some meaning, any meaning, out of it. (According to the audio guide, when the painting was first exhibited, critics sniffed that it could have been the work of a housepainter. Later, as Newman began to be more highly regarded on the art scene, critics talked about the painting’s subtlety and nuance. They were right the first time.)

The point is, even though I didn’t understand or even like the work, I made the effort to engage with it. When I go to museums, I try to immerse myself in the experience — to connect with the art, sometimes with the architecture (the Tate Modern and Guggenheim in Bilbao come to mind).

Far too many people seem to feel otherwise. Stand in any museum, and you will see some people who move from room to move, looking at the paintings with a bored expression on their face.  I keep wanting to ask them, “Are you enjoying yourself?”

I’ve seen this particularly in museums and with artwork that are “must sees.” Let’s face it, there are paintings or sculptures that everyone thinks they need to see to be cultured. The Mona Lisa, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Seurat’s Sunday on the Island of La Grand Jatte. It’s too easy simply to treat a work as an item to check off of a list. (Even for me, sometimes: I was completely underwhelmed by the Mona Lisa. Although in my defense after I saw it once, I never bothered with it on subsequent visits to the Louvre.) I’ve also seen this at historic sites; when I lived in Northern Virginia, I would visit the Lincoln Memorial, and a disturbingly large number of tourists would walk in, take a picture of Lincoln, and leave.

To be fair, I have seen a lot less of this while viewing special events, such as the one I saw last month at SF MOMA. Edvard Munch is a bit of an acquired taste, perhaps, so the exhibit self-selects for people already interested in his work.

When I was viewing the Gerhard Richter’s Student Nurses at MOMA in New York, A couple walked in, older than me, who read the full description (not only the name but the explanation). After reading it, the man shrugged and they drifted on. I wanted to scream. How could they do that? How could they not even take the time to try to feel what Richter was trying to communicate?

Even Picasso’s Guernica, which reduced a friend and me to tears, got nothing more than simple glances from several people who stopped to view it. (To be fair, most people looking at it seemed to be deep in thought. The painting does that to you.)

My favorite person to go to museums with is the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy, precisely because he is not intimidated by the art. When we visited the Musee d’Orsay, a group of people, myself included, were solemnly intoning about the use of materials in Degas’ Little Dancer. The NSLDB had a different take. “What a brat!” he exclaimed. The entire group grew silent. The NSLDB had broken one of the unwritten rules of important museums — you have to be serious. Nervously, I tried to shush him. “Just look at her,” he continued. “Look at the way she stands! I went to school with girls like her!”

At that point, people chuckled and started talking about the girl. It was as though they had been given permission to really look at the sculpture, and think about its subject, and experience it in a new way.

During that same trip to the Orsay, I saw two women coming out of a Van Gogh exhibit. One woman was exclaiming enthusiastically about the intensity of the sunflowers, how beautiful they all were. Her friend was looking around nervously going, “Shush, we need to be quieter.” (The first woman was not talking loudly, it should be noted.)

I wanted to run up to them and say “No! She’s got it right! The sunflowers are intensely beautiful! Let her be enthusiastic! Don’t make her be serious!”

Because isn’t that what art is all about? About engaging our minds and our imaginations?

And laughing? Laughing in an art museum can get you nasty looks. Once, when I was wandering through the Met in New York and came across a portrait done by Sir Henry Raeburn, I burst into giggles. A husband and wife were passing by, and although I stopped giggling when they walked up, they glared, only glancing to see what I was laughing at.

I want to know from these people, if art does not give you joy, if it does not capture your heart and your soul, if you can’t be bothered to try and figure out what the art is telling you,  why are you in a museum?

Eight.

Eight black and white paintings of young women with smooth and airbrushed skin, drawn from the pages of their school yearbook. Pretty young women, smiling, with the bouffant hairdos so common in the late sixties.

I was confronted by the paintings as I turned a corner in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After quizzically looking at the title of the piece, I didn’t need to read any further to know who they were.

The Gerhard Richter piece was named “Student Nurses.”

The eight women in the paintings were the eight student nurses murdered in Chicago in 1968. Their yearbook pictures had been printed in the newspaper, which was the source for Richter’s paintings.

I knew who they were because I have, at various points in my life, been an aficionado of true crime books, especially involving serial killers. While I have never read a book about this butcher particularly, I am well aware of his place in the annals of real-life horror in this country.  In addition, my sister had been a beginning student nurse at the time his murderous rampage had occurred, so this particular gruesome incident had left an impression.

As I stood before the paintings, I drew a deep breath and confronted the welter of emotions that slammed into me. First was horror, as I realized what I was looking at. Then distaste. Then an odd feeling somewhat akin to shame, at what messages those paintings were giving. Then, finally, sadness.

Andy Warhol, with his silkscreens of Marilyn and Elvis, forces us to think about the commodification of celebrity. We have the image of stars on our big or little screens; we think we know them. We think we own them. Elvis and Marilyn and Liz Taylor cease to be people and are goods, objects to be placed on a shelf somewhere.  If he were alive today, Warhol would no doubt be making the same point with silkscreens of Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

With “Student Nurses,” Richter does something more profound and disturbing: he confronts us with the commodification of tragedy.

Eight young women are murdered, and their pictures are published in the paper. We read about them over our coffee and eggs, and then many of us shrug and go on with our lives. “How horrible,” we say. Their life — no, their horrific death — has simply become grist for the mill of the public imagination.  The act of putting their pictures in the paper, though, creates an illusion that somehow we know these women, that if we showed up at their killer’s trial we would be able to talk about how sweet these girls were, how we needed to get justice for eight young women who we would never even have known existed if they hadn’t been strangled and stabbed to death in their Chicago apartment.

You see it all the time. At the Scott Petersen trial, I saw interviews with perfect strangers who talked about Laci Petersen as if she were a long-lost cousin. After Casey Anthony was acquitted of her daughter’s murder, “Justice for Caylee!” memes spread like wildfire throughout Facebook. Jon-Benet Ramsey’s murder has spawned a cottage industry of books and televisions specials.*

People use first names of victims as though they know them, as though by the act of watching the news or reading Facebook they can claim kinship with them. That they can own them.

Murder becomes entertainment.

Victims of serial killers, instead of canonization, face erasure. In all honesty, the only victims’ names I can remember from all my blood-soaked true crime reading is Gianni Versace, and that for his clothes, and Sharon Tate, who was an actress, and Rosemary and Leo La Bianca, because they were killed by the Manson family the night after Sharon Tate. I remember that one of the Zodiac’s victims was named Darlene, and another Paul, but that’s it. The murderers’ names, though, come through clear: H.H. Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, Richard Ramirez (a.k.a. the Nightstalker), the Manson family, the Zodiac,  the BTK killer, and on and bloodily on.

Richter’s paintings make us look more closely at ourselves, the way we objectify the victims of tragedy. Of how we distance ourselves from what goes on in the world, or how we pretend a connection that doesn’t exist. Either way, we turn horror into fan-fiction with real people instead of Harry Potter characters.

Doing neither — being neither too distant nor too close — requires walking a fine emotional line. It means accepting and being moved by the circumstances of others, while not obscenely co-opting them like a sensation-fueled vampire. It requires emotional discipline.

It also requires us to accept victims as humans. As, in this case, as young women. As…

Gloria Davy
Mary Ann Jordan
Suzanne Farris
Valentia Pasion
Patricia Matusek
Marlita Gargullo
Pamela Wilkening
Nina Schmale.

May their souls rest in peace.

*Of course, these are white female victims, killed by civilians. Naming African-American victims is not objectifying but humanizing them. #LaciPetersen might be ghoulish; #PhilandoCastile brings attention to injustice carried out by people who should be protecting all of us.