A crowd gathers around Mark Rothko's No. 14, 1960, which the museum considers its prize work. They use this work more than any other to market their business. To the right, not visible in this picture, is Jackson Pollock's Guardians of the Secret.
The place is packed, but it's not an unpleasant experience. It's great to see so many families running around, looking at "art." I see a lot of mothers with a couple of kids in their wake. And there is plenty of room to view the pictures. I move to the right and stand in front of Guardians for probably five minutes. I've taught this image for years, but I'd never actually seen it.
Then I move over to the Rothko. I'd visited the Rothko Chapel in Houston for the first time earlier on the trip, and I had been a little disapointed that the paintings in the chapel aren't like his classic color-field pictures. They have harder edges. Rothko's classic works are so mesmerizing because the colors bleed into each other. And the washy texture of the paint on the canvas gives the pictures surprising depth. So I stand in front of this one for a couple of minutes and soak it in before moving on.
Later I drift back into this gallery. Standing before the Rothko, thinking about the colors and conscious of the colors I am wearing, I suddenly realize that miraculously there is no one around me and that this would make a great picture. I cross my fingers that there is some cool young person behind me whom I can just hand the camera to, and sure enough there is. He's a cool looking college-age dude, and when I ask him to take my picture, he holds up his camera and says, "I just did."
So this became the first of a series of photos of me standing in front of well-known abstract expressionist paintings. One of the cool things about all these pictures, not just the one above, is the circumstances surrounding their having been made. All of the museums where these pictures were taken allow photography, at least in their permanent collections; but of course flash photography is prohibited, and so some of the images are slightly blurry. The above image is probably the blurriest of all, but I like it. It has a Gerhard Richter feel to it. And many of the museums were as packed as the SFMOMA was that day. I visited the MoMA, in New York, on a Sunday during the summer, and it was like Times Square.
The picture on the far wall is Jackson Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950. This is probably the first painting by Pollock that really knocked me out. While most of his drip paintings adhere to the "allover" format he and the other abstract expressionists were known for, this one has a faintly discernible web of lighter colors in the center that stands apart from the rest of the composition. I noticed this center section the first time I saw this painting, as a teenager, and I always felt that Pollock called it One for two reasons: because of this center section and because he knew it was the best he'd done--as in, "This is the one."
If you look closely you can see the skeins of white paint that almost form a mandorla around my figure. This was a particularly gratifying picture to get, because the museum was packed, and also because the photographer got me standing right in the middle of the mandorla, even though I hadn't alerted her to its presence.
Of course, the other cool thing about these photos is that I'm standing in front of some of the most famous paintings in America. This is me standing in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 35. Motherwell started work on this series in 1948 and continued to issue tokens from it well into the 1970s. This one (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) dates from 1954-58, and I think it's one of his best. It really shows what the pictures are supposed to represent. The ovals are supposed to be heads, and the two verticals in the middle represent the feet of a hanged person. This picture puts the viewer in the position of the witnesses in the painting; the back of my head becomes another of the dark ovoid shapes.
I kind of got lucky with this picture. I've always liked this series by Motherwell, but I was putting a lot of emphasis on Pollock at that point, and I was actually at the Met to see Jasper Johns's White Flag. And then here was this great example from the Elegy series. I got a quick shot before moving on to the Johns. I love the little patch of earth tone between my arm and torso.
Johns kept White Flag in his personal collection from the time he painted it in 1955 until 1998, when he sold it to the Met for an undisclosed sum of money. This was the first time I'd seen it. I'll be honest, I do think about what shirt to wear in front of each painting. The red shirt can represent the red in the American flag which is absent in this painting. It also brings out all of the different colors in the apparently monochrome painting. Johns is most often identified as a pop artist, or at least as a precursor of pop, but he is also the last great abstract expressionist. Here Johns exhibits the same "expressionistic" brush- strokes that one might find in a de Kooning. And yet the subject matter is not the painter's innermost thoughts, but the American flag. It's as if Johns is saying, you might think you're expressing your subconscious impulses, but you give away more of where you're from than you think.
Abstract expressionism is the great American art movement, and in many ways it is the last great movement in Western painting. To this day, its practitioners stand as the epitome of the romantic artist, and that's part of what this series is about. These pictures remind me of those paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, with a solitary figure staring into the immensity of the universe.
Which is why this picture of me striding out onto Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) fits into the series.
But then there's also my pilgrimage to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974), outside of Amarillo, Texas. After abstract expressionism, the art world just exploded. Anything, finally, could be art, including nine old cars half buried in the ground. Besides, there's a little bit of abstract expressionism in the spray paint on the cars. There's a little bit of pop in the bright colors and the cars themselves. And there's a little bit of surrealism in the random overlapping of words and images from a disparate group of painters.
The series is rounded out with two photos taken at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., standing in front of Pollock's Lavender Mist (1950) and Joan Mitchell's Piano mecanique (1958).
I know that some post-modern critics will talk about these pictures in terms of the gaze. These are pictures of me looking at famous works of art. I could have just taken a picture of the works themselves, but these photos emphasize that this is my perspective, that these are the ones that I like. They also illustrate the way the paintings are meant to be viewed. The French word for "gaze," of course, is le regard. That is why this series is called Regarding. I am illustrating the act of regarding.
