The Utter Emptiness of Explaining Art
an unexplained image; or, the shadow of memory“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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Some people say the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark is the finest museum in the world. It’s easy to understand why.
The museum, considered a masterpiece of Danish architecture, is an unpretentious combination of hard angles, warm woods, and large panes of glass that both reflect and welcome the verdant landscape overlooking the Øresund, the vastly blue Nordic sound that separates Denmark from Sweden.
Even if the Louisiana were nothing more than a building to walk through and admire, it’d be worth the visit, but it just so happens that since its construction in 1958, the Louisiana has fused artistry, architecture and landscape into a singular experience that only three expert Scandinavian architects could muster.
There is a combination of severity and warmth to the place that cannot be explained, only experienced while walking through the international exhibits and their masterpiece halls (be still, my hygge heart!). And, like the layered Nordic landscape that defines this place, art reveals itself as a palimpsest at the Louisiana, a message written on top of another, a half-erased idea sketched upon tracing paper and superimposed upon the world.
In this this particular exhibit’s featured artist, Firelei Báez, however, the natural beauty of the artwork becomes political overwrought with history. “Do not trust history,” Firelei Báez tells us in a filmed interview on a screen, which immediately distracts from her masterful paintings. “Trust memory over history.”
It’s an admirable sentiment, but given the amount of descriptions of artwork in this museum, there’s just one problem: throughout Báez’s monumental exhibition, the visitor is encouraged to make sense of their own past memory via the artwork, and yet they are encouraged to do so by listening to Báez’s explanations and by dense academic literature on the walls, which the curators deem necessary to understand Báez’s paintings.
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What was that again about trusting memory over history? In Báez’s paintings, the depiction of plumage and hair and coarse skin depicts an undeniable humanity that glows beneath, glowing embers of a collective consciousness that ultimately succumbs to the far-more-political narrative of post-colonialist life. At the Louisiana, Báez’s work is presented as an ideological commentary product of contemporary life due to its exhausting exhaustive details about the various and brutal historical truths of European colonialism human history.
To be clear, as someone who spent the last decade writing a novel about the unlearned lessons from history, I’m the first to believe that artists engaging with the past have a responsibility to speak truth to the vast structures of chauvinist white-supremacist power that seek to erase history. There is no such thing as apolitical art when it comes to making art about history, but in this particular analysis of Báez’s work, it seems to me that the explanation of her politics relegates her work’s otherworldliness spirit to the all-too-twenty-first-century realm of politicized moralism. Instead of allowing the visual elements alone to speak truth to power, the lengthy explanations about why her work is important become unnecessary at best and pandering at worst.
if not, Paris i“Do not trust history,” Firelei Báez tells us. “Trust memory over history.”
To insert an analogy of a short-sighted elder pressing their nose into a painting’s description so they can appreciate understand it, the explanations of Báez’s work do little more than blow hot air onto the lens of individual memory. Thankfully (at least for now), museumgoers aren’t obligated to read the writings on the wall. But alas, in a subsequent room, the audio recording of Báez’s explanation about why her work is important rings loud and clear—colonialism was, is, and always will be violent, brutal, dehumanizing, if you didn’t get the memo—at which point it becomes near-impossible for the visitor to contemplate the work trust their own interpretations of history memory.
My issue with this contemporary need to politicize art is that it panders to ideology, which inevitably pits one side against another (it doesn’t matter that I happen to agree with Báez’s politics; as a museum-goer, not giving museumgoers the option to ignore the ideological lens through which the artwork is created betrays one of art’s most important qualities: its ability to transcend political, social, and cultural divides).
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Of course, nobody at the Louisiana is forcing me to read the lengthy explanations next to Báez’s glorious paintings, but when the text explaining a piece of art takes longer to read than to witness the work itself, museum curators betray the deepest truth about authentic artwork, which is that ideology artistry exceeds precedes explanation.
Such is the truth conveyed in Báez’ colorful brushstrokes and mythological creatures painted on top of old colonialist maps, a medium that in itself tells the viewer all they need to know about the artist’s particular opinion about reclaiming a colonized past. Until it is explained by academics, her work defies classification without relinquishing its own identity, and this truth is most evident in a painting depicting la ciguapa, wherein a shapeshifting, mythological female creature that is near-impossible to hunt because of its backward-facing feet conquers the space of an old colonialist map.
see the painting: Untitled (A Map of the British Empire in America, 2021)Much la ciguapa, the beauty of Báez’s work resides in its fluidity and defiance of description, which is why it’s such a distraction bummer when the artist’s voice rings out in the exhibition room, "La ciguapa is a creature that cannot be controlled or contained.” I can see that, one wishes to speak into the void. Perhaps that’s why the artist drew la ciguapa stomping all over a colonialist map.
To echo Rilke’s words from up above, the joy and beauty of art resides not in the brain but in the heart, but it seems that at the Louisiana, at least for this exhibit, the esteemed sanctimonious gatekeepers powers that be have forgotten this truth in our identitarian cacophonous age of market-driven desire to identify, classify, and politicize everything.
But what if we let the work speak for itself? Aren’t there are already enough armchair academics and pandering podcast personalities? Exiting the Louisiana Museum, walking the manicured pathway slicing through the soft greens, once again at peace contemplating the Sound, I can’t help but want to amend Rainer Maria Rilke’s wisdom for a metamodern epoch: “works of art are of an infinite solitude, and there is nothing so useless as criticism explanation.”
