Monte protests all the work I've been doing on my thesis
I just turned in draft #483 of my MA thesis on Sunday. I'm thinking of it as the rough rough draft, the draft that precurses the official rough draft that's due in another three weeks. I'm thinking of it that way because it does not feel complete. I still have plenty of work ahead of me. Like trying to properly end those two essays that just sort of drop off. Ooops.
My thesis is a series of creative nonfiction essays about my experiences with art; two essays are about street murals in Chicago and one is about the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit I worked on in my days at the Eiteljorg Museum. I'm interested in what inhabits the space between artwork and observer, why some art makes us wild with joy or crazy with anger or struck by sadness. Is it the art itself? The observer? I'm not so much interested in exploring theories that answer those questions as I am with telling the stories of how I came to those questions. Hopefully that's a more interesting thesis, too, something that's exciting and readable.
It begins in the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where I lived and studied my junior year of college. While we waited for the Print Room supervisor to bring us the first drawings, my tutor, Juliana asked if I had ever seen 16th century art up close. I hadn’t, but Juliana had been guiding me through slides and books for several weeks, so I was eager to finally see the real thing. The supervisor brought out the first heavy, linen box. She ceremoniously pulled on her white cotton gloves and lifted the cover. Juliana thanked her as she set the first drawing in front of us; the supervisor merely responded with the warning that we should let her know when we were ready for the next drawing. Only she could touch them.
Juliana turned reverently quiet while I took everything in. The protective supervisor disappeared; I was only vaguely aware of Juliana still seated next to me. I was completely immersed in the aged, gray paper sitting on the ledge in front of us. I was looking at the crucifixion of Christ.
He was alive, but barely. Only a small piece of cloth draped Christ’s body, clinging to his thighs. His eyes rolled upwards as he pleaded to be released into eternity, and I could imagine his soul poised to leave its corporeal sheath. His right hand was open; his left, clenched. His body was contorted: his torso jutted away from his legs, which pressed together in pain, and he stretched his toes apart, tightening and releasing. On either side of him, an angel clutched his face in sorrow, mourning Christ’s imminent death. A single skull rested at the bottom of the cross, partially submerged in the ground. Many others had died here.
I struggled to pull myself back into the Print Room. I began to look at this drawing with the art historian’s eye that Juliana had worked to develop in me. Christ’s body was clear and polished, but the pencil was softly drawn and smudged, giving the drawing lines that were focused enough to dramatize the pain of the Crucifixion’s final excruciating moments, but soft enough to prevent this from merely being a study of the physical form. There were no unresolved pentimenti, the changes an artist makes as he works, and that are frequently visible in drawings like the one before me. This drawing was decisive. The extraordinary emphasis on both body and soul was executed by an artist who knew every muscle and every nerve. It was executed by an artist who knew where the soul pulsed and where the spirit breathed. Following Christ’s gaze upwards, I could almost hear the angels’ cry. The spiritual longing was palpable, vast, and unrequited. I needed no faith to feel this. I didn’t have to look at the label on the linen box to identify what I was looking at. In front of me was a Michelangelo.
It was that moment of being pulled into the here-and-now of a work of art that made me want to be involved with art all the time, every day. It was that moment that ultimately inspired me to schlep out to Pilsen on cold winter days to look at street murals and try to figure out if other kinds of art can unleash that magical power. I think they can.
