Art is a verb

"Quiet Light," and what it means to look, at Concord Art

How do you look at a work of art? What happens in your body, in your mind? Do you have to move around it? (I do).

I look in order to see. Looking is opening to the unknown, free of judgment. There’s a willingness to dance with whoever is in front of you. Seeing is when something in the art strikes deep. It’s an “aha” moment that may be about the art, about me, or about the energy between us.

In the practice of Authentic Movement, there’s a mover and a witness. The witness does not interpret the mover’s actions. Instead, he watches, open, observing what arises within himself.

Being in that state of unknowing isn’t easy. I’m a critic, for crying out loud! That, my friends, can be an armor. Intellect is an armor.  It’s useful to understand technique and to be able to contextualize. But I’m less interested in rendering judgment than I am in being present, alive, and open with a work of art.

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art,”  Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 in “Against Interpretation.”

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art,” she added, and called for an “erotics of art.”

Approaching a work of art, I don’t lead with my intellect. I see what the art does to me. Do the colors make me gasp? Does my heart open? Do I sigh and settle into my body? Do I want to run away?

Nina Nielsen and John Baker of Nielsen Gallery, a Newbury Street institution for 46 years that closed in 2009, told me a collector friend of hers, Harvey Wood, once said, “‘It’s important to look at a work of art as a verb, not a noun.’”

“Once we start to identify something, we put a border around it,” Nina said. “When it’s a verb, it’s like life.” Fluid, mysterious.

Nina and John have curated “Quiet Light” at Concord Art Association. In the show’s catalogue, John writes that art “is an introduction to the silent mountain alive within us.” That mountain is a mystery even to ourselves. When we encounter art that resonates, we meet a part of that mystery. What a miracle to recognize like an old friend some nuanced, humming, presence on the wall of an art gallery!

There might be an “aha.” There might be tears. There might be unease, or just an open question. Spend time with it. Maybe that’s the best thing about art. It’s a mirror of the self. Good art is as slippery and unpredictable and vast as we are.

“We have to get people to look at their lives in the context of something larger,” Nina said.

She’s a radiant mediator between art and viewer. She doesn’t merely catch the light from a painting and reflect it your way; she holds space for your relationship with the artwork. The title “Quiet Light” conveys that warmth. Nina and John invite us to bask in the small sun each artwork shines onto – or into – our individual, idiosyncratic worlds.

In that quietude, counterpoints arise: earth seems to balance air; patterns play against expressionism. Abstraction suggests the vastness of inner and outer worlds; figuration is our small human self, navigating that vastness. But binaries are a kind of armor, too, and in the end, they collapse. Art makes space for the in-betweenness of it all.

Each portrait could be me on a different day. Anne Harris’s silken, glassy “Untitled (Blonde),” Maureen Gallace’s breezy, painterly “Self Portrait in Red Scarf.” Mildred Howard’s assemblage “Croakanoll,” built around a century-old formal photograph of two Black women standing stiffly in long skirts and ornate hats under rainbow-washed glass.

Portraits play with how we perform, how we present in the world, and what we might be masking. Even animal paintings here, like Albert York’s staunch “Horse” painted in loose strokes in a sunny field, has a persona – strong and calming. To me, each of these works is a moment, putting a pin in the flux of identity.

The abstract works, in contrast, offer something more like eternity.

Porfirio DiDonna’s “Untitled PDN 86” from 1971, at nine feet tall, takes up the space of an altar. DiDonna, who died in 1986 at 44, was a spiritual man who sought to convey his faith through his art – more a Renaissance painter than a post-modernist. In “PDN 86” spiraling dots whirl against a heavy black ground, both particle and wave. They have a pulse. Like us.

The thing is, it’s all us. Figure and abstraction crumple together in works such as Willy Meyer-Osburg’s pearlescent canvas in which a figure retreats behind planes of watery color. Nina’s own oil painting, “Jedermann,” which means “everyman” in German, is so lusciously built up with gritty texture I nearly got lost in the ground and missed the figure – who really can’t be missed, a looming, burnt-red shape. A second, wormier red shape could be distant, or closing in. What do you see? That’s what it is, and it may change.

“Quiet Light” is a wide-open space; it encourages looking without knowing. All the interpretation in the world – including this essay – may be helpful, but it’s blather compared to standing there, undefended, in front of a work of art.

Images: Albert York “Horse,” 1975 (Collection Estabrook Foundation); Porfirio DiDonna, “Untitled PDN 86,” 1971; Willy Meyer-Osburg, “Untitled,” 1972; Anne Harris “Untitled (Blonde),” 2001-2003; Nina Nielsen, “Jedermann,” 2022-2023.