MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
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Dedicated to Learning to See (in Goya)

(21.11.2022) Let’s orbit a while around this ink drawing by Goya, a drawing within a double frame (it is from the so-called Album E, and it belongs to the so-called ›black frame series‹ of drawings (well, is it black here?). ›He’s learning to see – aprende a ver‹. This is Goya in his sixties (the artist, not the figure). Does he make fun of someone? But of whom? And what does it mean at all – learning to see (we actually should know, since we already have used this, well, title, in some of our visual essays: Learning to See in Hitler’s Munich; Learning to See in 1992; Learning to See in Spanish Milan). Who does learn what, and from whom? And what do art historians learn – from seeing? Or from historians, telling them what we believe to know about a certain context, in which a something has to be seen?

Let’s make something clear from the beginning: learning to see might not be the same thing as learning to look at pictures (one might call the one the generalization, or the abstraction of the other). But what if the man in the picture would be looking at a picture. Let’s say at a Rubens picture. Equipped with a telescope the man would be looking at a large Rubens canvas. And yet we have filled the empty space with fleshy colors or muscles. And yet we might have learned that looking, seeing, can involve the imagination as well. To dispose of a telescope would not be wrong, and not disposing of the tool wouldn’t be wrong either. But perhaps we, the viewers would be looking at the canvas in the background, while the man already would have turned his eyes away from it, digesting what he has seen, or believed to have seen. Seeing would mean learning here: the man would be learning to learn to interpret what he has seen (or to reconstruct it, or to fully recreate, reconstruct it anew, and differently; which would mean that seeing would imply change, perhaps forgery, but perhaps also and primarily creativity again, as in the aforementioned imagination).

How beautiful the precision, but also the vagueness of Chinese ink. Is the man perhaps looking into the sun? Is he standing high on a pedestal, with the sea below us? Or in a studio, as a model representing an Ottoman pirate? Perhaps he is looking at a majestic fleet. And learning to see would mean to estimate the strenght of the Christian navel forces at Lepanto here. And we see, perhaps we learn that we would need more context. To actually being able to understand the picture. But do we have to understand it at all? Perhaps it was meant to trigger exactly what we do here: orbiting around a figural drawing, set within a double frame. Or it was meant to do nothing at all, but only to be. Awaiting what might come from it (perhaps nothing).

How fortunate I am to dispose of a Goya oeuvre catalogue! But is this indeed some sort of advantage? What about not wanting to read about pictures, or not wanting to look at pictures? Or at all pictures? Or at all pictures by Goya? (How fortunate I am that some of the pictures are printed rather small). What if learning to see might mean, or also mean – to look away at times, to filter away the hardly bearable (which might result, in some cases, in pictures, interior pictures, coming back perhaps, at night, or it might result in becoming ignorant, or in making you more inventive: eager to find pictures that – like Guernica – seem to find ways to combine a stance of ›not looking away‹ with a facing of the drastic and horrible in more symbolical and allegorical form. And Picasso could be drastic at times, but Picasso did not seek to reach the last levels of the hardly bearable, and still he did not shy away from making pictures displaying drastic things, but in more symbolical and allegorical ways. Do we look, perhaps, at an allegory here, and is the man attempting to understand what he has seen, but without yet having reached that goal?

The frame cannot be ignored here. A frame marking the boundary between context and the inner world of a picture. The man might be captive, caught inside Goyas imagination, but on some level extradited to ours (and freed from Goya). But what about our responsibility (and what about Goya’s)? Does learning to see also mean to learn about the responsibility of making pictures? And of looking at pictures? Perhaps the man is just learning about responsibility (perhaps about his responsibility, perhaps someone else’s, without ever knowning of that of Goya, or that of us, because we might learn here, due to a frame, what it does mean to be worlds apart – as in the blind man’s bluff game, another series of pictures, possibly triggering an orbiting around the phenomena of seeing, which, finally, might mean also: linking pictures, that, perhaps, never have been linked before).

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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