We were walking through an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, a few years ago, when I spotted a strange video installation. In a darkened space, on a large video screen mounted on a wall, a video loop kept playing: two women, then three, meet on a sidewalk and greet one another. The video created in 1995 by Bill Viola is titled, “The Greeting.” The women appear contemporary, but also somehow timeless. They are engaged in a conversation which I couldn’t make out, the audio was sort of a strange low frequency drone. 

My first response was: “what the heck is this?” “how is this art?” I sat down so I could watch the loop from the beginning, then I watched it again, then again. I went looking for my wife, Deborah, and brought her back to the installation. Together we watched the video. Again and again. 

The odd thing that happened, actually happened in my response. I stopped asking, “how is this art?” But I couldn’t stop asking, “what the heck is this?” Resistance had turned into attraction then morphed into fascination. 

The video installation worked exactly like so much great contemporary and abstract art works. And that’s what I’d like to explore today. The power of some art to fascinate us is directly tied to its ability initially resist us. 

How many times have we or someone we know walked up to a painting by Jackson Pollock, let us say, and said, “I just don’t get it,” and walked away shaking their head? Either they blame their reaction to his art on themselves, thinking they don’t know enough about art. Or they blame it on the artist, “what a con artist! a five year old could do that!” But seldom do they lay the “blame” where it belongs, on the painting’s declaration of its independence from the viewer, the painting’s own determination not to allow itself to become just another thing the viewer can name and categorize and exert power over. 

In other words, much abstract and contemporary art works first by resolutely resisting us, pushing us back, even provoking a reaction of initial rejection in us so that it can potentially open us up to experience it on its own terms. What is required of the viewer is patience, a willingness to be open. 

So, when confronted by a painting that provokes the words, “I just don’t understand,” what is really going on? 

Let’s try this: I propose a little thought-experiment: You’re sitting in a restaurant, facing the entrance, enjoying a nice lunch. In walks a gorgeous woman or man (whichever gender flips your switch); they are so beautiful you gasp quietly and nearly drop your fork. Your heart skips a few beats. Time slows down. You could watch them forever. 

Your response upon seeing this person is not, “I don’t understand.” Understanding doesn’t come into it. Your response is visceral, emotional. It is perhaps so deep and immediate that you may not notice that your mouth has dropped open and you are staring at the person. At that moment, their presence exerts a power that overrides your need to comprehend them or even think about yourself. Indeed, whatever switch they flip in you, it pretty much bypasses your intellect altogether. Momentarily, every question you might have about everything in that room (from the lighting to the quality of the fish on your plate) gets pushed out of the way, relegated to some dark quiet padded room in your liver, while the rest of you is under the (what shall we call it) the spell of the aesthetics of an attractive human being or maybe just a biochemical reaction.

Let’s return to the art gallery now … if you can tear yourself away from the vision of the woman or the man in the doorway. 

You are standing before a monumentally large painting by Anselm Kiefer, “Aschenblume” (1983-1997) in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. For purposes of argument, I’m going to remove one prop of analysis which usually helps us evaluate a painting, i. e., beauty. This painting conforms to no conventional standards of “the lovely.” And I’m going to confess my own bias from the beginning. I LOVE this painting, and I have since the first time I visited this museum many years ago, just after the “Modern” opened across the street from the fabled Kemble Art Museum. 

“Aschenblume” commands an enormous space and, I suspect, could command a space the size of an aircraft hanger. Its one classical feature is a strangely illusory use of perspective that gives us the feeling of standing in a great hall the columns of which rise upward and gradually recede into an imaginary distance. Constructed of oil paint, emulsion, acrylic paint, clay, ash, earth, and dried sunflowers, on a canvas that stands at about 160” x 300”, the painting has no interest at all in whether we (the viewers) like it or not. Like the great universe with its billions upon billions of galaxies, this grey, brown, black, scarred structure, its surface appearing as though it might crumble at any moment, has absolutely no need for us and takes no regard of us. 

In its presence, I can’t imagine asking it to explain itself. This painting refuses to be interrogated. It resists my every approach. But I am drawn to it. I long to return to stand in its presence. It provokes a sense of awe from me as surely as anything any Renaissance master ever painted; the wonder I feel standing before it is not entirely unlike that feeling I get standing in the nave of Durham Cathedral, its grey Norman columns rising to its ceiling as it has done for a thousand years. And, yet, there is something else I feel as I stand in the presence of this painting, something akin to dread or anxiety. The complexity of the painting, the ambiguity of its voice, only makes its attraction more powerful. 

When Kiefer’s “Aschenblume” first walked through the door of my metaphorical restaurant, I fell in love with it. I now “know” a great deal more about this painting and its artist than I first did, but what I know and think I understand now is largely irrelevant to how I feel about the painting itself. 

Today, as I prepared to write this blog — the subject of which has been on my mind for some time — I returned to a favorite book, “Abstract Expressionism,” edited by David Anfam and published by the Royal Academy of Arts; it is the catalogue for a massive exhibition mounted by the Royal Academy in London and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2017. This book may be the finest resource for anyone who wishes to begin to explore abstract expressionism, the only great artistic movement which originated in the United States. My point in mentioning the book is this: despite the fact that I have read and meandered through its pages dozens of times, on page after page, today as I viewed one color plate after another, my heart leapt in wonder, joy, amazement, delight, and even terror viewing paintings by Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler,  Ad Reinhardt, and scores of others. 

I no longer ask why. I simply yield to the “push” of the paintings, confident they will “pull” me back in.