Minimal reaction – on jumping over the installation piece and feeling compelled to lick a Picasso

by Seantel Ara Blythe Anais

My lover,

This communiqué emerged acutely out of the nearly imperceptible (but ever-so-there) recoil in your voice on having been told that I jumped over an installation piece at the National Gallery yesterday.

In hearing your silence over the phone line, I asked: “If I had licked a Picasso, would you stand by me if I got arrested?”

Your pause answered before you even had the chance.

Wanting a mutual understanding on the subject of art appreciation, I feel compelled to share with you, my love, some of my feelings on art.

My favourite piece in the National Gallery is called “Lever”. It was produced by American artist Carl André in 1966 at the height of the minimalist movement and consists of 137 firebricks lined end to end on the floor.  The piece elicited an exasperated cry from my art enthusiast companion who asked, “How is that art?”

I jumped over it.

Perhaps you are familiar with the expression, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”?  As it turns out, I know a bit about art and a bit about what I like. Minimalism (the artistic movement emerging in the 1950s, and continuing throughout the 1960s and 1970s) challenges traditional notions of acceptable form. It thrives on both simplicity and complexity as it forsakes richness in content for richness in perception. The tacit aim of a minimalist artist is to engage the viewer without the distraction of composition, theme, context, traditional display, and so on. Minimalism allows viewers to experience intensity they would not experience otherwise.

“Lever” re-enchants the idea of the objet crude; it asks viewers why they should not leave the gallery and see art in arrangements that the world begs us to forget as mundane.  Quotidianity in art – that is, the presentation or assemblage of ‘everyday’ objects and artefacts and their contemplation as art – forces us to see art in the quotidian.  My love of minimalism is deeply rooted in my romantic notions for humanity. I believe that when we start to see art in the everyday we will naturally view art in everyone. I believe that when we come to that kind of view of others, my dear, we will come to something which approaches some kind of peace.

I didn’t jump over the installation piece in blind rebellion; I jumped over it with eyes wide open.  I jumped over it because the work asked me to. I jumped over it in order to conceive it in all its three-dimensionality: at all speeds, angles, and distances.

By the time I arrived in the next room and saw the Picasso, it seemed a profound shame that I should not be allowed to taste it.  In case you are worried that you may one day get a call from the downtown lockup, I should tell you that wanting to lick the Picasso was only a residual effect. I had minutes before seen art in a moment of flight.

I had been tempted by the idea that art can be an experience and not only a privilege.

I can promise not to lick a Picasso as long as you are my lover; only because I couldn’t promise to stop before I’d wear a hole right through the canvas.

Seantel Ara Blythe Anais is a sociology PhD student at Carleton.