Guywords on the Autonomy of the Arts.

What follows is most of an email I wrote to Reed in response to one he wrote me about going to the Frick house with a friend and their measured reactions to it, and more largely to 'visual art.' I don't dare paraphrase Reed so I won't say more than what he says (brilliantly) down there somewhere (a quote not a paraphrase) about the effects on him of looking at a painting or a photograph. The whole business got me to want to peer into this with a little more surgical care: "this" being the difference(s) between and among the Arts, how we think of and respond to them. 
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The quartet of pics here are Reed and me about to play Mozart at an art exhibit which featured my stuff back in July 12, what I refer to as Pollock's big painting at MoMA, a wonderful pic of my mother at the age of maybe 20 sketching on some New York beach (maybe Coney Island, 1937, 38) and a melange of images I put together last year illustrating something about the nature and uses of a "studio." Down not too far below you'll a link to a YouTube recording of viols playing Couperin's Barricades Mysterieuses, which - as Annette Funicello probably said about Frankie Avalon - slays me. Anyway, you know, more Guywords.

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What interests me - which you'll surely find of a piece with every Guyword you’ve heard or read from me - is the impenetrable autonomy of each of the arts. Not that we all don't and won't continue, in some mission to understand our experience of them, to compare their effects - what else can one do? - but comparisons however useful or inspired (is my love really like a red red rose?) don't take me far enough. And as you point out (the difference between time in music and time as implied in a painting, etc.) the ways we respond to them are fundamentally even biologically different.

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The light bulb went on when I realized, reading your Frick email, the degree to which visual art did NOT move me is very like yours. This would appear to argue against something I once held to be certain: that I mostly perhaps only loved the arts I could do – I experience them, in fact, as if I had done them. Strike the “as if” in the case of playing violin: I love the music I can play haptically at least as much as music I only listen to. I just came upon this regaling recording of the Couperin Barricades Mysterieuses all done by viols. It proceeds from pizzicati to bowed strings, stage by stage (increasingly less pizz, more bow), so that by the last variation and the summary repetition of the theme the music is entirely bowed, and the harmonies esp of the last variation, which do strike me as more probing and profound than the previous two, make me actually cry. The mode of playing is at one with the ‘mode’ and meaning of the music – and the bowed viols give voice to it with such a sense of rightness.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joa4QIw3kdo

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But, again because of your email, another lightbulb is lit, which is that the experience I was having in response to the music was so music-specific – I couldn’t imagine feeling anything like it reading words or seeing images. And now I think again of your having become over time so much more enlivened by prospects of taking photographs – and developing a real skill in doing them – and somehow assumed that your response to all visual stimuli had similarly evolved or changed (not to suggest that they “had” to) in an equally enlivened way.

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But then I read this from you –

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“Is this, by the way, the secret meaning of photography and even painting, the way specific real things suggest unspecified (though not for that reason unspecific) imagined things, or things imbued with memory and thought? The trick must be to get your private suggestions to speak to someone with quite different ones.”

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Which makes me think that there is a different kind of ‘work’ in responding to visual stimuli, especially those more complex prods to the eye like ‘serious’ photographs, painting, and other visual arts. (“Serious” as opposed say porno, or a photo of food, or a pretty sunset, which demand and receive essentially reflex response). It takes more work to see than it does to hear or smell or taste.

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A strange kind of work, too. Viz me & the big Pollock in MoMA. I was – how old? – late 40s before I felt I “saw” it. Struck me like an arrow. I was oblivious to it before then. I have walked through the Frick similarly unmoved, presumably with the same potential to be moved, though who knows what will ignite it if at all. I may through some imposition of my idea of a Jamesian gestalt enjoy the dimensional visual etc impact of the Frick house and its timbres (i.e. what’s in the house, from Vermeer to the ornate late 19^th century chair in the corner), that is apply a narrative to it, which indeed we do. In fact, as with reading (to make a specious comparison maybe), you have to work to find a narrative in a painting. Aptitudes (or talents) for a particular mode of response (yours for reading, for example; mine for the feel in my hand when I produce another of my baroque curves with a pencil) will probably dispose you to think kindly and more of whatever ‘art’ you’re good at it. And by the way get praised for. I think that’s very much in the mix.

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