Jill Dawsey in front of Peter Coffin’s Untitled (Rainbow) in The Smithson Effect exhibit at the Utah Museum of Fine Art

In a contemporary art gallery it’s not uncommon to overhear people utter phrases like, “I don’t get it,” or “Huh. That’s just weird.” Some of these people ultimately throw up their arms in frustration and stomp out of the gallery muttering under their breath that contemporary work doesn’t deserve to be called art. This raises questions of how accessible contemporary art should be to the general public and why it is or is not deserving of the extra work it might take to understand.

Even people whose chosen profession is related to contemporary art will admit that they have been befuddled by certain pieces. Jeff Lambson, Curator of Contemporary Art at Brigham Young University (BYU) Museum of Art shares: “When I first saw Damien Hirst’s ‘Asthmatic Escaped,’ I didn’t appreciate it because I didn’t understand it. Once I knew more about Hirst’s work and discovered this piece was actually about Francis Bacon, who had asthma, it took on new meaning and I thought it was a wonderful piece.”

Like Hirst’s work, a lot of contemporary art does not convey a message that is immediately obvious. It requires a little digging, or sometimes a lot. And perhaps the first step in approaching confusing work is letting go of the expectation that it can be understood at first glance. Jill Dawsey, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, says, “It’s hard for me to think about contemporary art in prescriptive terms. I’m not sure if art should be easily understood. Should science be easily understood? Should poetry? It seems to me that some of the most rewarding things in life are not obvious or immediate. In our culture, so much is spoon-fed to us, and it’s ultimately not very satisfying. I suppose I should speak for myself. I don’t find it satisfying. I find it mind- and soul-numbing. There is so much that we as humans don’t understand. When something seems easy, I don’t usually trust it. If something is very easily understood, there’s nothing to learn.”

Dawsey concedes that understanding contemporary art is a challenge, but she offers, “I think that people expect art in general to be transparent, self-evident. To some degree, this is a reasonable expectation. Art anticipates a viewer; it wants to communicate. But that doesn’t mean that it will communicate slowly and loudly, with precise enunciation. It’s not the job of an art object to make itself understood. I’m not saying it should be self-obfuscating, either. Art is like any other discipline – and it is a discipline, with its own vocabulary, conventions, discourses, institutions, etc. – in which people are looking at one another’s ideas and achievements and building on them. Art is the product of many, many conversations between artists – and their publics – across time and space.”

Micol Hebron sitting under Daniel Luchman’s Mobile Distraction in the Salt Lake Art Center’s Expanded Field show, photo by Jared Christensen

The layman contemporary art fan has probably not been privy to those conversations but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still room to participate. The Salt Lake Art Center recently hosted a panel discussion titled “The Role of Sculpture in Today’s World” where winner of the 2010 International Sculpture Center Student Awards, Davey Hawkins, spoke to an audience about his winning video piece that appears in the Art Center’s current show Expanded Field. Micol Hebron, Senior Curator at the Salt Lake Art Center, says, “One of the winners (Hawkins) in the sculpture show right now, it’s a video piece and people were really uncomfortable with the idea of video as sculpture. But my question is what happens if you just accept video as sculpture? What happens if you say, ok now my understanding of sculpture has to change, it has to expand, and how does that affect what I used to think and how does that affect what I will think moving forward?”

It might be an uncomfortable shift to go from thinking of sculpture in terms of a classic work like Michelangelo’s David to changing your definition to include video work alongside the traditional masters. In some capacity that is the role of contemporary art: to help shift perspective and engage people not through what is already known but through the possibility of something new, something that makes you question things at a deeper level than you might have before.

“The artifacts of cultural production that are really making statements or exploring new ways of using material, or that are finding new ways of saying something or finding new things to say, are of course going to be uncomfortable for some people, and I don’t think discomfort is a bad thing,” Hebron says. “I think sometimes that can poke people a little bit and encourage them to respond or to state their own opinions or to ask questions.”

The Four Thousand Years at BYU Museum of Art

Perhaps the question in viewing contemporary art isn’t whether or not you like it or whether or not you understand it, but instead: What does it make you think? Any response to a piece of art is better than none at all. And one that elicits discussion long after the viewing is over is perhaps the best kind. There are many examples of this kind of work around the state, including Adam Bateman’s recent installation at BYU, which may be a little more comfortable for people to respond to because it recontextualizes something familiar. The work, “The Four Thousand Years,” is showing as part of the BYU Museum of Art’s latest exhibit, The Matter of Words. The piece is a gargantuan cube shaped from books, their spines all turned inward so only the pages are visible, arranged in waves of intriguing, hypnotic patterns. This piece is comfortable and accessible because as Lambson says, everyone has a relationship with books.

Another work in The Matter of Words, by Harrell Fletcher, includes photos of Bibles opened to densely-highlighted passages. Without understanding the work’s back story a viewer could have trouble understanding the piece, and Lambson says the museum has already had quite a few complaints about the work, which some people have seen as blasphemous. Yet that was not the intention of the Bible’s owner or the photographer who has presented it as art. The piece began when Fletcher encountered Veda Epling, a homeless woman who was frantically marking a Bible; Fletcher felt compelled to commission her to mark up the pages for him. Lambson notes that for many people it is common practice to highlight or underline bible passages.

Other pieces, while they might be less controversial, are still tricky to analyze. Keith Hoyt’s work at Expanded Field is a large shipping container that is made entirely out of wood. “He’s playing with our expectation that he’s representing an otherwise utilitarian object with fine craftsmanship, so now it’s made in an unexpected material and it’s no longer functional; it’s completely aesthetic,” Hebron explains. She continues by saying he is playing with the idea of the ready-made and asking us to consider the possibility that all things around us could be art, and if that were the case how would that change the way we look at those objects? It’s a question similar to the one posed by famous contemporary artist Marcel Duchamp who put a urinal on display as art almost a century ago.

Carefully examining a work, understanding its context and construction, can help a viewer build an interpretation of the piece, as Dawsey shows when she discusses Tacita Dean’s piece, “Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake.” “I can imagine this piece might be initially puzzling to some viewers. One enters a dark gallery to see a single still image projected on the wall via a slide projector. The image depicts a landscape, and a body of water, which may be recognizable to some as the Great Salt Lake. But beyond the sky and the lake, we can see no activity, nothing of any real consequence. Why might the artist present this empty, placid sky and lake to us? Exhibitions tell stories and make arguments, and I hope the fact that the viewer enters this space from another gallery full of images of ‘Spiral Jetty’ will offer a clue. Why use a slide projector? We are shown a single image–why doesn’t the slide advance? Why use an antiquated form of technology to begin with? Asking questions like this, one may get the feeling that this piece has to do with time, and place, and that it’s more concerned with what is absent than what is present. One may begin to understand that the artist is interested in things that have disappeared, gone missing–things that are lost to us. For a long while, before the water levels dropped, the ‘Spiral Jetty’ seemed to be one of those things.”

These explanations from prominent curators at BYU, UMFA, and the Salt Lake Art Center serve as a useful starting point for approaching works of art that may not be understood at first glance. You can always look for interpretive materials like accompanying brochures or cell phone tours that enhance the experience. Lambson observes, “Our institutions: BYU, UMFA, the Salt Lake Art Center and Central Utah Art Center have a great relationship. Each of them is trying to grow the community of artists and those who appreciate art. It’s a collaborative effort.”

As these institutions cultivate an audience and offer tools to help interpret the artwork, it seems the most important tool is an open mind that is willing to explore. As Hebron says, “I think one of the best things you can do is bring a friend and talk about it while you’re there, have someone else’s perspective to bounce your ideas off of, and there isn’t a right or a wrong way to look at art. The only wrong way in my mind is to ignore it. But as long as you’re looking and responding and asking questions that’s the most important task of a viewer, to be engaged. I don’t want everybody who comes through here to be an immediate convert but I do want them to foster a sense of curiosity and inquiry and open mindedness. Just give it the chance to stimulate your brain a little bit and see what happens.”

Dale Thompson

Dale Thompson has a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College and an Masters degree in communications from Westminster College. Her writing career includes work for a local theatre, journalism in Park City, and freelance contributions for various nonprofit organizations.