Embodied Attention: Close Looking at Dana Schutz’s Eating Atom Bombs

On January 20, 2018, the Cleveland Museum of Art hosted a public conversation between painter Dana Schutz and artist and historian Nell Painter about the possibilities and limitations of painting at our current political and historical moment. Schutz expressed that in her canvases she is working out problems, both in and of the world as well as in and of painting. I would argue that these aspects are never mutually exclusive, but in fact complementary.

Her latest body of work, Eating Atom Bombs, which is currently on view at the Transformer Station, includes sprawling narrative depictions of abstracted but recognizable figures in monumental scale on highly textured, garishly colored, and juicily painted canvases.

Here Schutz is responding to multiple complex problems that have surfaced globally, or perhaps resurfaced, in the lead up to and after the 2016 US election. She is working through “problems of making,” but not as a separate exercise. The works embody — or make material — Schutz’s approach to the problem of painting, which cannot be separated from our universal yet unavoidable societal problems.

As part of the public programs offered alongside the exhibition, I was asked to engage viewers in a close-looking session in the gallery. This is a closer look at these sessions and why they are worth attending.

Close-Looking Sessions

Museums can be intimidating spaces. The Cleveland Museum of Art is an audience-centered institution that is dedicated not only to the display of its collections, but also to offering a multitude of points of entry and engagement for our audiences. Close-looking sessions are opportunities to dwell on an object or group of objects with embodied attention, which is a way to describe how we might build a relationship with a work of art even if we are not trained, in a conventional sense, to do so. These sessions allow participants to examine art with depth and purpose, to experiment with new ways of seeing, and to ultimately draw new understanding from an object.

The collaboration between the guide and participants makes for a unique gallery experience. During these sessions, which vary in length from 30 minutes to an hour, participants are asked questions about what they see; they are asked to draw upon the millions of visual references they have in their mind’s arsenal. Often participants note a previously overlooked relevance to their own experiences and to the world around them, even in the most unfamiliar types of objects.

Instead of asking what an artwork gives us, it is also important to think about what it is asking of us. Close-looking sessions begin with the premise that artworks do not merely represent or mirror the world, but they also make the world, restructuring our vision anew whenever we contemplate them. That belief drives the sort of focused attention needed for these sessions.

Close-looking sessions begin with the premise that artworks do not merely represent or mirror the world, but they also make the world, restructuring our vision anew whenever we contemplate them.

Reassessing Your Viewpoint

I often watch people as they explore the galleries. My purely anecdotal assessment is that the average viewer believes that the best vantage point from which to regard a work of art is from a distance, feet planted. Any closeness is typically achieved by bending at the waist and squinting. What typically draws someone near is the explanatory text alongside the work, which is read up close. Then the viewer often returns to their approximate starting point, perhaps taking one last encompassing look. It is as if one has a generalized muscle memory for art viewing. These are precisely the habits of seeing that close-looking sessions, through guided embodied attention, aim to modify.

All guides of these sessions have their own predispositions, but I personally hope that viewers, after taking a session, will have abandoned these preconceived ideas:

1. An artwork’s meaning is always best found by assessing it at a distance and as a seamless whole.

2. One only need to read the wall text to understand an artwork; or, one must read the wall text to understand an artwork.

3. Meaning is found only in the product.

4. The whole is more important than its constituent parts.

5. Art merely mirrors the world.

6. An artwork’s meaning remains static.

7. An artwork has one meaning.

I would instead like participants to adopt a new mindset for approaching art viewing:

1. You don’t have to be an artist or art historian to analyze an artwork.

2. Works of art are always asking something of the viewer.

3. Meaning is also found in the making of the object.

4. What is missing can be just as important as what is known.

5. Art makes the world.

6. An artwork’s meaning is constantly shifting depending on the circumstance and the viewer.

7. A multitude of intersecting, overlapping, competing, and complementary meanings are present in an artwork.

Practicing embodied attention is like learning anything else: the more you do it, it becomes more natural. In this case, the questions often become more interesting.

Focusing on the Artwork

As an educator, the most difficult thing about preparing for a close-looking session is not overburdening the conversation with my own thoughts, but rather to allow an entirely new vision to emerge between myself and my audience. In the case of close looking, I am both guide and viewer, learning as much from the participants as they hopefully learn from the process. In that way, preparing for this first close-looking session was thought provoking and personally illuminating.

Schutz’s painting style, especially of late, is at once technically masterful, florid, and disturbing. Her color palette is typically a slurry of ochre, brown, and slate, but there are hot strokes of chartreuse, yellow, and magenta punctuating the gloom. Her figures, denaturalized by abstraction, speak to trauma and to love, to terror and to endurance, and ultimately to human frailty. But how do they do so, and to what effect? And how might we get a sense of this in only 30 minutes? These questions framed my preparatory thinking and led me to focus our conversation on Schutz’s Deposition.

In the exhibition, Deposition resides alone on a wall, which limits visual distractions. The subject matter feels particularly relevant to our current political moment because of the central, presumably white, presumably male figure wearing perhaps a “presidential” red tie and being dumped into a shark-infested sea. It also draws deeply from the well of art history. Because the work was still wet, I could smell the pigments and varnish. These aspects provide ample points of entry into the work.

To prepare for my session, first I sat. I stood. I knelt. I moved closer, then farther away. I looked straight on and at an oblique angle. I looked at the sides and bottom of the canvas. Then I sat again. I stood again. I took notes the whole time while repeatedly asking myself two questions: What do I see? How has it been made visible?

Afterward, I returned to those notes and found the theme of materiality, which in turn directed the supplementary information I would periodically deliver during the session. In this case, much was drawn from my knowledge of the materials and techniques of painting. This allowed us as a group to wonder about the object’s path from conception to completion, from canvas to varnish, and ultimately to understand how that path itself contributes to a viewer’s response.

To prepare for my session, first I sat. I stood. I knelt. I moved closer, then farther away. I looked straight on and at an oblique angle. I looked at the sides and bottom of the canvas. Then I sat again. I stood again. I took notes the whole time while repeatedly asking myself two questions: What do I see? How has it been made visible?

Engaging Audiences

At their best, these sessions are conversations rather than lectures. Their nature demands high audience engagement, although not everyone is comfortable being vocal in front of an artwork. I don’t actually see the participants as conventional audiences with the requisite distance from the “expert.” Instead, I think of everyone in the room as a collaborator in creating new universes of thought and experience. I hope that everyone departs with new observations and ideas, and with a new, or renewed, sense of comfort that gives us the courage to advance our ideas among the group as well as on our own.

Close-looking sessions are relatively brief, lasting between 30 and 45 minutes. Because the average time a visitor spends in front of an artwork in a museum is about 20 seconds, the time devoted to a single work during the session deepens contemplation so that a viewer’s engagement might extend well beyond the time spent looking. If the session is done well, participants will leave not only with new information and new ways of expressing what they see, but also with a brand new set of questions.

Independent Sessions

Each close-looking session is different because each guide approaches close looking differently based on their predispositions. For example, every session that I guide is different as my own intellectual, political, and aesthetic preoccupations shift. I encourage visitors to attend sessions run by different guides or by the same guide on different topics. Close-looking sessions are a wonderful way to experience the museum’s encyclopedic collection and to build personal visual literacy, or the ability to identify, interpret, and understand works of art.

It is also important to note that you do not need a guide for a close-looking session.

Try this: next time you visit the museum, go to an artwork that catches your eye. It could be a work that you’ve seen before or one that is completely new. First, do not read the wall text; do not look at the title or the date. Stand wherever you feel comfortable and look at the work for 60 seconds. Simply observe. Then ask yourself, “What do I see?” Pay attention to the first thing you notice and then to where your eye lands next. Take a few steps closer and ask yourself again, “What do I see?” Move to the left and right, move far away. What else do you notice? Then, rather than asking yourself what the work means, ask yourself, “How was it made?” Give it some thought. Even if you’re not an artist, do a thought experiment and try to work out just how the artist constructed the work. Finally, ask yourself not only what the work might mean, but also how that meaning is made visible. This process may take you 10 minutes or two hours, but it is a worthy experiment.

Close looking sessions at The Cleveland Museum of Art are collaborative learning experiences that build a momentary community in the space of the gallery and slow down the pace of perception. We create new understandings and new complications. It is beautiful. We hope you will join us.