Deborah Fisher: Just Looking

I like looking at art as a consumer instead of as a maker. As a maker, I looked at more art faster, sorting rapidly into Useful and Not Useful at twenty paces. Yesterday Joel and I did the Whitney, the two of us looking at art together for the first time since we both decided to do other things than art, and the experience took hours because the question surrounding each object had nothing to do with us. Instead of cruising the galleries as if we had a stopwatch running, making snap judgements about that handful of things we could do something with, we actually parked in front of each object and wondered why it existed at all. Why we should be looking at it. What it's here for. What this experience even is.

Turns out the experience of looking in this way is deliciously open, almost gravity free. Time really does go away when you're not approaching art expediently. You really do feel stuff. Make discoveries. I had always relegated Hopper to Interesting, But Of Limited Use bin, and so each Hopper experience I had under my belt before yesterday was cursory. I like the inside-outside peeping tom thing he does, and have always included an image or two of his work when lecturing about space. He's a good gateway to Barbara Hepworth in a beginning sculpture class, because everyone gets Hopper and because oddly enough we live in a world so full of imagery that it's easier for a lot of students to see what you mean by the word "space" in an image than it is in a thing that takes up literal space. These formal ideas about Hopper have pleased me. But I did not understand, because he had always been Of Limited Use, how awesome it feels to stand in front of these works and feel your body create the sensation of the outside of the building, and the view in, and delight in the stolen reveal of naked flesh, or upturned ass, or pensive thought, in this way that really does simulate or represent Hopper sharing his private moment with you and you alone. I can't get over the fact that this representation of intimacy works in a crowded museum. And I don't even know what to say about the Paul Thek exhibit, because I have always found him Useful and so knew how great this work makes me feel. The difference between just enjoying Thek and using him is impossible for me to put words on just yet. Maybe there's no need.

I don't quite have a language for this shift in my own perception, which I may or may not want to keep documenting. And I don't quite have a way to talk about what looking at art is for or like now. Looking has become luscious and shloopy and open ended, and I think of writing as a way to focus, and I don't know what to focus here yet. What I do know right now is that I apologize for teaching art appreciation classes before this experience. It's as if I decided I was qualified to teach a sex appreciation class because I go out and have sex constantly and therefore obviously know everything about it. But I didn't even see that my practice is limited to quickies in bathrooms and the back seats of cars.

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