The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art by Lance Esplund (review)

Lance Esplund and I seem to have received the same gift for our 13^th birthdays: a massive book on the art and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. I never knew books could be like that: large format, metallic inks, lush reproductions, splendid design—perfectly representative of the genius described in its pages. The book installed Leonardo at the top of my list of favorite artists and historical figures. Esplund, on the other hand, was unmoved. He perceived the uniqueness of Leonardo but felt a "secret shame" that the work didn't excite him. Although Esplund loved music, plays, and drawing as a child and studied art history in college, he didn't get art until a road trip to Minneapolis where he saw Paul Klee's Howling Dog (1928). The idiosyncratic colors, the frenetic lines of a dog howling at the moon, the childlike, comical feel of the painting—"Howling Dog opened me up to what was possible in a work of art."

That possibility—the building of a relationship with art—forms Esplund's premise in this captivating book. Esplund, whose art criticism and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Art in America, Harper's, and elsewhere, encourages his readers to approach art as if it were a first date. Sure, there might be anxiety, flirtation, and seduction, but there must also be "trust, self-awareness, and self-confidence." The same kind of reciprocity and face-to-face interaction can only take place in front of an artwork—a much-needed reminder in our heavily mediated age.

Esplund first introduces some basics, a sort of mind-body primer that outlines the complexity and richness of the experience of art: "Color, form, space, weight, rhythm, timbre, and structure are felt as much as they are seen." Since Esplund intends to guide us through an exploration of modern and contemporary art, where convention and tradition are regularly subverted, it is fitting that he sets emotion on par with theory: "Modern artists encourage us to appreciate not only the uniqueness, timbre, and poetry of the individual artistic voice but also the qualities born out of our subjective responses." He also issues a series of cautions: we should resist the instinctual urge to read and name what we see in art, whether representational or abstract. We have long been literate moderns, after all, and when confronted with a baffling or mysterious image, our first resort is to try to explain it away. Further, fixated as we are on images transmitted to us via media that prioritize realism, we tend to judge an artwork on its accuracy or representational fidelity—to seek the truth of a work of art in how well it replicates the real world. Esplund counsels otherwise: free-associate, let your mind wander, and indulge your emotional response before allowing rationality to take over. We must remember, Esplund insists, that artists are poets working in a metaphorical and imaginative space where ideas are transposed, recast, and revivified. We also have to be open to the games artists play: the con game of Duchamp's readymades, the existential parlay of the Abstract Expressionists, the mute masses of Judd and the minimalists. We have to be willing to take up any kind of conversational gambit art offers.

At the core of the book are 10 "close encounters" in which Esplund demonstrates why he is one of the most exceptional critics writing today. Working with one work each by a range of artists—The Cat with a Mirror I (1977–1980) by Balthus, Two Sunflowers (1980) by Joan Mitchell, Growth (1938) by Jean Arp, Perfectly Clear (1991) by James Turrell, Signs in Yellow (1937) by Paul Klee, The Generator (2014) by Marina Abramović, Torqued Spirals and Ellipses at Dia:Beacon (1996–2000) by Richard Serra, Untitled Leg (1989–1990) by Robert Gober, White Balloon with Blue Light (1992) by Richard Tuttle, and The Winchester Trilogy (2002) by Jeremy Blake...