Somewhere to Carry This
BY EVA RECINOS
Samira Abbassy, Figment. As She Rears her Head, acrylic and gouache, 9 x 12 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
SOMEWHERE TO CARRY THIS
EVA RECINOS / MARCH 2021 / ISSUE 6
I’ve always felt so small in museums.
Not just literally, as I craned my neck up to gaze at sculptures and paintings and installations. Conceptually, too. Like the decades or, even, centuries represented by each piece expanded around me. And I was a small speck on this timeline, one small speck.
I would like to feel that small again.
I have grieved and celebrated and hoped in the same space. These emotions have filled my one-bedroom apartment and each one sneaks up on me while I’m eating and sleeping and working within the same square footage.
I can’t take my sadness anywhere else, so we sit silently in the same space and I try to pretend it’s not there when I go to sleep. I have nowhere else to take it.
In a museum gallery, if I needed to let a tear drop, I did. If I felt frustrated or angry or confused, I did. And then I could leave. I could know that the lights would go out and tomorrow would be another day, another exhibition, another layer of history. These spaces were almost always silent and while at first that was intimidating, it became a relief. My shoulders untensed, my jaw set into a soft, closed position, my hands gripping a brochure or in my pockets, loose. There are rules and expectations but I forgot that, sometimes, I found comfort in those.
Where can I find these moments of stillness, this awe from large spaces, this reverence for silence?
How do we put down our damn phones?
The experience is individual yet collective, much like the grief we feel now. During the last year, I’ve learned to recognize the pang of seeing more and more bad news on Twitter. I often have to close the tab, squeeze my eyes shut, take a breath and feel a stranger’s sadness ripple through my own. And then I have to get back to what I am doing. I close that screen and turn on a bigger one and watch shows and marvel at people in public spaces — some shoulder-to-shoulder with friends in a crowded bar, others strolling through an art exhibit with a glass of wine in hand.
So much of LA has been about skirting around others’ presence. It’s so different from voluntarily sharing space with them, how I used to do in those museum shows.
How do we take a collective breath?
In Yxta Maya Murray’s recently published novel, “Art is Everything,” the reader follows Amanda, a performance artist dealing with the doubly-painful experience of going through a break-up and losing her father. In one chapter, she visits an Agnes Martin exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a place I worked in for two years.
Amanda experiences the many questions and emotions that flit through my own mind during museum visits.
“Knowing that you have been seen and named by these paintings does not relieve you of your poverty or loneliness, it just clarifies those sorrows…”
Last year, I wrote about an exhibition that I virtually “visited” featuring the work of Esther Pearl Watson. From my desk, I dragged the mouse around until I got to the wall I wanted to see. I tried to imagine what it would be like walking through the space as a whole. I zoomed in to catch the details of each piece, like the moment in real life when you might squint and get closer to a work.
Watson juxtaposed small paintings of everyday sights during her commute with black cloth banners showing the numbers of people who have died from COVID. The numbers increase as these pitch-black pieces punctuate the rows of bright and colorful scenes.
Even “walking” through the space and seeing these pieces, I wondered if it all felt too soon—at least for me. I’d seen these numbers online, on social media feeds and in articles. But even virtually standing in front of them felt different. Those pieces felt like what Amanda said when she talks about how art “clarifies those sorrows.”
Amanda continues: “Actually, LACMA should be zoned for participatory convulsive wailing and not just for selling Klimt posters. Museum docents should smile with empathy at sobbing patrons and explain Stendhal Syndrome to the tourist groups taking pictures on their phones. Because art can strengthen the cortisol-flooded heart but also crack it wide open…”
Stendhal Syndrome came from Marie-Henri Beyle, also known as Stendhal, a French writer in the 19th century. When, in 1817, he gazed up at the fresco of the Visiting the Basilica of Santa Croce, its beauty completely took over his body. He walked out feeling unsteady on his feet, and with heart palpitations. The term became official in 1989 and it is still relevant centuries later.
“Art performs a difficult consolation that’s part group hug and part curb stomp,” Amanda tells us.
In January, a memorial of 400 lights around Lincoln Memorial signified 400,000 lives lost. Even seeing it through photographs—so many bright pieces surrounding the reflecting pool—was enough to take my breath away.
It does hurt to see these things visualized, the grief and the loss, but more often than not I’ve left a museum also thinking: civilizations have gotten through so much. These artists got through it. They transformed it into something else. And they left this behind.
It’s too early to ask but I do wonder, what will we leave behind?
I also look to museums, of course, for beauty. I know they’re not perfect. But I remember, many times, my reactions to the art that really affected me.
What will it be like to feel myself gasp with a mask on when I see something that moves me? That gasp will catch and the cloth will move just slightly, and I’ll have to move on because I’ll likely be visiting with a timed ticket.
Amanda brings her grief and her breakup pain and her self-doubt about being an artist to the Martin exhibition. Art gives us somewhere to take things, and to leave them there.
Once, at a museum exhibition, I was fighting a lingering cold. I got one of those bad cough attacks. The kind where it feels like something went down the wrong pipe—that acute pain makes your eyes water and the tears roll down.
I thought, in that moment, that people might have assumed I was crying. That I was so moved by the art I couldn’t hold it in. I doubt I’ll be able to cough during future visits without getting a look or two.
The last year or so has made the writing feel so small. There’s so much else going on. But I remember, often, the feeling of being in a large space with art I’ve never seen before. The invitation to get closer, to slow down my breath and blink more slowly and really let my eyes travel over a canvas or a framed piece or a film.
Once, at another museum, the guard let us know we needed to exit the galleries because it was closing hours. It was the final day of the show and a woman asked, “So, that’s it right?” and the guard nodded. She started clapping. And we all started applauding—for the artist, now deceased, for the show, now closing, for the experience, now a chapter in each of our lives. We clapped, and as a chill raised on my arms, I felt a constricting in my throat. The sound echoed through the gallery, each of us slowing down and turning to leave.
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her reviews, features, and profiles have been featured in Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Artsy, Jezebel and more. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, PANK, Electric Literature, Blood Orange Review and more. She is currently working on a memoir in essays.
Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran and moved to London as a child. After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, she showed her work in London for ten years before moving to New York in 1998. There, she established and co-founded the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and EFA Studios. She currently has a lifetime tenure at EFA Studios. During her thirty year career, her work has been shown internationally in the UK, Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Her work has been acquired for private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the British Government Art Collection, the Burger Collection, the Donald Rubin collection (Rubin Museum, NY), the Farjam Collection, Dubai, the Devi Foundation, India, the Omid Foundation, Iran, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery Collection. In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired The Eternal War Series #2 for their permanent collection, and in 2015, the 12 panel painting was shown alongside pages from the Shah-Nameh manuscripts to which it refers, in the Kevorkian Room, Islamic Dept. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her exhibitions have been reviewed by numerous publications including by Benjamin Genocchio in the New York Times, Ariella Budek in Newsday, Nisa Qasi in the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.