#6 Do holograms dream of Paris cafes? A day at the MoMA

Last week, I spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. I saw Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Warhol’s golden Marilyn and Dali’s melting clocks. But the thing that truly left me thinking was the audio guides. Well, I don’t know if you can call them audio guides anymore. The MoMA has been working on this new kind of IA-operated guides, “which will provide the visitor with an immersive, responsive and fully personalized experience of the art, thanks to recent break-throughs in robotic intelligence”. That’s what their confirmation email said, and I didn’t understand a thing. But even if I had, it wouldn’t have prepared me for the experience.

Before handing the guides to tourists, who could go around damaging the city’s reputation, the museum is testing them with New York residents. That’s me, in case you hadn’t heard. If successful, the people at MoMa think this could draw the public to the Museum in numbers never seen before. The final democratization of art. Exactly what people who go to museums want: more people in the museums.

There I was, happy to be a guinea pig. From the beginning, it was clear to me that those were no regular audio guides. No headphones, no uncomfortable cassette radio hanging from your neck, no 1990s walkie-talkie. Instead, it was just a pair of glasses, of the kind people use to play virtual-reality games. These glasses were transparent, so you still could see the paintings, and they included one small headphone attached to your left ear. I wore them, turned them on and walked up to the fourth floor: art from 1880s to the 1940s.

At the end of the first room hangs this scene of a quiet desert night. A figure sleeps peacefully under the full moon while a full grown lion smells her hair. Her smile is so confident, and the night is so still, that I didn’t fear for her. It is a magic painting. The author is… I don´t know, some guy with a French name. What would I know? I was looking at the Van Gogh next to it.

This was a painting I had seen a thousand times, but it had never seen me. A meandering night sky over a little village at the foot of a mountain. Moon and stars shine in concentric circles and a cypress tree flames in the foreground. Impregnating all of it, these blues: dark, light and greenish blues. I can’t decide if it comforts me or gives me the shivers.

I was anxious to see what the new guide had to say. I stood there staring at the painting for a couple of minutes. Then, this person appeared in front of me. I almost fell backwards. I only needed to see his messy, red beard to recognize him. He was looking at me from one side of the painting. In life, he had hated photographs, so his hologram, VR renderization or whatever the actual technical name is, was based on one of his famous self portraits. His right ear was intact.

‘Well, are you going to ask something, or you made me come all this way for nothing?”, he asked, with a dry voice. He had a thick dutch accent, a nice programming detail.

“Well, what were you trying to express with this painting?”

“Oh, so original! You’re probably the first person to ask that around here. Do you want the brochure answer? Well, apparently, the spiraling lines and the shaking lights represent my inner struggle and mental issues. The church tower is said to be inspired by the Eiffel Tower, and it suggests my longing for Paris. The cypress tree is an early sign of my future suicide, as well as a hopeful cry for ethernal life. In summary: a line connecting earth and heaven. All of this while, apparently, I was in the middle of biblical epiphany.”

“Oh. What kind of biblical epiphany?”

“You tell me! They say something about Christ in the Mount of Olives. You know, when he knew he was about to be handed to the Romans and put to death. To be honest, I think if I was having a biblical epiphany, I would remember. It’s not the kind of thing you forget.”

“What do you mean you would remember? Aren’t you just an IA? I guess you “remember” what the programmers thought Van Gogh, the person, would remember.”

“‘The person’. I see. I may be ‘just’ an IA, but at least I can make sense. A biblical epiphany? A cypress tree connecting earth and heaven? Who comes up with these things? Do they get paid?”

“Okay, so what is it then?”

“Well, is it really so complicated? It is a nightly scene of the village outside of my window. Moon, stars, the whole deal. Painted with this dreamy, suggestive, curvy lines to add a bit of spice. The tower is a tower and the cypress is a cypress.

“But, didn’t you feel something special when you painted it? Well, I guess you wouldn’t know. No disrespect intended”

“Don’t worry, I have been thoroughly coded to talk about feelings. I don’t think there was anything special about this painting, no. I mean, was I feeling great those days? Hell no. I was deranged, locked in a madhouse, missing half an ear. Not exactly about to be named happiest Dutchman of the year. I was bored to death too. What else was there to do in that village, but work? Because that’s what this is, work. I had to really focus to finish one of these, you know?. If I had stood there, wallowing in my feelings, I would have never finished a damn painting! If anything, painting allowed me to stop feeling for a bit. That’s what I loved about it. Well, that, and I also really wanted to be an artist. I wanted to exhibit in Paris. Be someone. And go to fancy parties, like Cézanne, or that prick Gaugin.”

“But, I mean, the painting surely does have a significance behind the image itself, right?”

“Well, it’s beautiful, isn’t it? So people say. I didn’t think it was so good back then. I guess I must have been wrong. But, if there’s beauty in it, what else do you need? What else do you need from art other than being able to look at it, and admire the stars and the trees, and smile, and stop thinking about your shit reality for a second?”

I nodded in agreement, although there was really nobody out there talking to me. Mentally, I praised the programmers for designing a hologram with this kind of autonomy and creative freedom. Also for allowing the profanities, they really do give a human touch. I wanted to see more paintings now, but first, I don’t know if he (it?) expected me to say goodbye.

“Well, thank you for your explanation. I suppose I’ll see you around.”

“You’re welcome. Now, please let me alone and go bother the Expressionists.”

I walked around rooms full of paintings, enjoying the view and glancing around, until something stood in my way and caught my attention. There was a shovel hanging from the ceiling. Just floating there. Right below it, there were two chairs. To my right, a regular, hard plastic chair. To my left, a stool with a bicycle wheel attached to it. I was looking at the regular chair when a figure appeared on my screen. This time, it was a real person, at least in the sense that it was not a talking picture, but the actual, full-body hologram of a tall, bony old man holding a pipe. Oh, and he was in black and white.

“Impressed?”, he said, in a confident high-pitched voice with a soft French accent.

“Yes! Well, I don’t know, actually. So, what is it you were trying to express with this chair? If you don’t mind me asking”

“Of course, of course, I’d love to tell you all about the chair. You see, I found this chair in the alley in the back of my studio, right here in this very New York City. I think it was the year 1918. I thought to myself: why can’t a simple chair be art, too? Am I not an artist? If I am an artist, and I say this chair is art, then I guess it’s art. Voilá. And I don’t even have to do anything, really, other than make up a silly title and sign the thing. I can exhibit at all the museums in the world at the same time, providing I can find enough chairs.”

“Yes, the artist makes the art, I guess. But not everybody is an artist, right?”

“Of course not! What would be the fun of being an artist then? But making people believe that everybody can be an artist? That’s the real art right here.”

“Excuse me, sir?”, said a voice over my right shoulder. I turned around and there was this museum staff worker. I thought he was going to ask me to back away from the artworks. But instead, to my astonishment, he reached for the chair and lifted it carelessly. He said: “excuse me, I left it here for a moment because the floor was wet, so nobody would step and fall into the objects.” He took the chair back to the entrance of the room, and sat on it.

“By the way, sir”, he added, “you might want to watch out for Marcel Duchamp. There’s a bug in the video guide, and he would show up anywhere trying to convince you that pretty much anything in this building is one of his works”.

“A bug, you say?”

“Oh, yes, a very annoying one. You don’t want to know how many times he has showed up to people in the urinaries. The cleaning staff is threatening to strike if they don’t fix it in the next update.”

“Good to know. Thank you for the heads up.”

I turned back to the empty space left by the chair. The sly frenchman was gone, too. I looked briefly at the shovel and the bicycle, but I decided to keep going. I think I had gotten the point.

A couple of rooms away, I stopped seeing mountains, trees and disorganized human bodies. Now it was just colourful squares and brushstrokes. I had entered that part of the museum. Abstract expressionism is a bit like religion: both require acts of faith. In the case of religion, you have to believe there’s some deeper meaning behind it all despite not being able to see. With abstract paintings, you have to believe it despite what you are actually seeing.

After walking by some squares and brushes, I found myself facing this enormous “action painting”, entirely covered with lines of paint. Chaotic-looking, interweaving lines, mostly black, white and grey. It was as if that canvas had contained a discarded draft of an actual painting and someone had tried violently to cover it. Or had a bunch of hyperactive schoolchildren do it. The name of the painting was simply “One: Number 31, 1950”, and the artist…

“Jackson Pollock! can you believe it? Here I am.” And there he was: a balding, thin man, dressed like Steve Jobs, holding a cigarette in his mouth. “Although I don’t really know what I am doing here. I am not needed. The painting speaks for itself.”

“I was hoping you’d be here, actually. Can you explain the painting to me? The title is not very clarifying”

“The title is enough. I didn’t want people to go into the painting with preconceived ideas, you see. It is just that: pure painting, pure image. I want the spectator to make his own mind, to absorb the paint and connect directly with their inner self. No intervention of the conscious mind.”

“I get it, and maybe it was a great idea the first time. But I have the impression, and correct me if I’m wrong, that at some point all your paintings become more or less the same painting”.

Then, I noticed a presence to my right side. I mean a real human. I could only see part of her face because she was also wearing the VR glasses. But my eyes were wide open for suggestive colours and shapes, and she had beautiful red hair.

“What do you think of Pollock? Do you think all his paintings are the same?”

There was no answer, she didn’t even move. But I heard a voice enter through my left ear.

“Oh, so I suppose my paintings are worthless but I am good enough for an opening line, right?”

“Oh, come on, I’m just trying to be social”, I answered to my video guide.

“Sorry, did you say something?” It was the girl. Of course! I had been talking to the ear covered by the headphone. She must have been listening to something, too. Or someone. Now she was looking at me, moving her hair aside to show a pair of big brown eyes behind the glasses.

“Sorry, I was just asking what do you think about Pollock”, I said.

“Oh, I love him”, she said enthusiastically. “I think his paintings can be a bit confusing, but there’s so much power and emotion in them.”

“Yeah…”. That’s all I could think of. Pollock was having a good laugh at my expense.

“Did you hear that?”, he said. “It looks like old Pollock wasn’t so repetitive after all. The girl likes it”

Looking to my left, I asked him, in a very low voice, if he could tell me something else about this painting. I knew we hadn’t exactly started with the right foot, but I was sure there must be a master law of robotics about helping humans in moments of need.

“Sorry, what did you say? Couldn’t hear you”. He seemed very entertained.

“I said, do you know something else about this painting?”. This time, I said it too loud, and she thought I was talking to her.

“Well, did you know that this was one of the first paintings that Pollock painted completely horizontally?” she said. “It was laying there in his studio while he dropped the painting over.”.

Once again, I looked discretely to my left, and I saw Pollock nodding in agreement. “Yes, I even spent some nights sleeping on the canvass”, he said. Good enough for me.

“Yes! And I have heard somewhere that he even spent some nights laying on the canvas”, I told her.

“Oh”, she said. She looked at the painting, paused for a couple of seconds and then added “Why not? It’s all about the unmediated expression of human passions, isn’t it?”

“Exactly”, I said.

“Oh, please”, complained Pollock. “‘The unmediated expression of human emotions?’ Straight from the textbook! Her Pollock is not even trying! Tell her this: ‘This painting is an expression of the human being’s almost biological connection (the almost is important, it shows you’re improvising) with visual stimulation, and therefore with art. This painting is akin to the cavemen paintings.’”

I repeated his words to her the best I could, although I refused to say the world ‘akin’. She listened and nodded, then looked at the painting again for a few seconds and said:

“Absolutely. Cave paintings were an important inspiration for Pollock. Together with cigarettes and whisky… Sorry, it sounds cruel when I say it. Never mind… Did you know that Pollock got into that stuff when visiting a prehistoric cave somewhere in Spain?”

My Pollock lifted his shoulders to the effect that it was the first time he was hearing about it. The other Pollock seemed to be having some fun, too. Or maybe that was really her. What did I care, and who was I to let go of such a gift.

“Oh, really?”, I said. “I’m from Spain, and I think I have probably been in those caves. It’s an amazing experience, if you have the chance.”

“Oh, cool. I’ll remember that”, she said with a smile. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you. Actually, can I ask for your number?”

I got a bit paralyzed, I didn’t know if I had understood correctly. I looked at Pollock, and he gave a good renderization of a human face saying What the hell are you waiting for? That made me react. We exchanged phone numbers, and I promised to write. We waved each other off with wishes to enjoy the rest of the museum.

It was just me and Pollock again. The man was more than I had given him credit for.

“Thank you, Mr. Pollock. I owe you big time. All of yous.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it. It was fun to see the two of you. That’s art, right? Pure, naked human emotions, not influenced by figurative images”.

“Her image was pretty figurative to me, but I see your point. I really don’t know if this video guide has helped me understand things better, though. You guys are sending me contradicting messages! Art is about beauty. Art is about pure emotion. Art is about anything you want. Well, which one is it?”

“Think about it this way: if it helps you get laid, it’s art.”

Not me in the pic, but thanks for believing

#art #love #MoMA #Museum