A series of intimate photographs by Sophie Calle exhibited at OCMA. Photo by Leroy Tran.
By Leroy Tran
In a space enclosed by three white walls not tall enough for the ceiling, I encountered a wrapped mattress left on the floor. The gallery gave no obvious explanation beyond correspondence on the walls for you to parse. It was a phenomenal work.
Visiting the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), a contemporary art museum in Irvine, California, I had few expectations. In a museum like OCMA, rarely are there the paintings or marble busts we expect of fine art. Sometimes, it’s elaborate, meticulous sculptures on display. Other times, it’s seemingly random objects. There are paintings too, but they’re not Van Gogh or Rembrandt.
Hence, there is a dissonance. Contemporary art is dissonant with most people’s perception of art, since we expect beauty, aesthetics and facsimile, as the great artists we know focused on those — even more abstract artists like Pablo Picasso and his Cubism were far closer to this traditional sense of art than to the art exhibited at OCMA. That dissonance creates a barrier to engaging with contemporary art at galleries and museums; most people won’t visit in the first place. We think it’s too inaccessible and alien.
Yet there is a great advantage to experiencing and engaging with these works in unfamiliar mediums, just as there is an advantage to listening to music, reading poetry or watching a movie. At its basis is feeling, which we too often neglect in regard to contemporary art. The art will be unfamiliar — it certainly felt so to me at OCMA — and our natural response will then be to understand it, to know exactly what the artist meant by creating it. Approaching it in this pragmatic way is disorienting and frustrating. The art doesn’t need to be understood; rather, it should be engaged with, and that means responding to the stimuli — what are you experiencing? How does it make you feel? Never decide on something concrete, just create something of what you experience.
Moreover, there is a tangible benefit to this emotional process:
“Enjoying emotionally stirring works of art is adaptive regardless of the emotional valence because the emotions are felt vicariously,” wrote psychology researchers from the University of Milano-Bicocca. “The vicarious experience of emotions may train to make sense of one’s own emotions.”
Many of us look to music, writing, and film for their emotional qualities, so we can better understand our own emotions through their experiences. Why can’t we do the same for contemporary art? Despite its lack of traditional aesthetics, contemporary art — those dingy objects, strange sculptures, photographs strung together — gives the same emotional, potentially transformative experience. The only obstacle is your willingness to be moved by something unknown.
The mattress was a piece by Sophie Calle, a French conceptual artist. Wrapped in plastic and stained, it evoked something larger than its ugly self. The emails on the wall were of helplessness and love; the mattress told part of that story. There is value in that mattress and those emails … you just have to let yourself experience it.
