Apparently, I have lost the ability to sleep. Each night, completely wiped out, I crawl into bed, and then the rage about the genocide in Gaza that I have mostly suppressed during the day seeps out (from my bones? my gut?) and takes control. Sleep vanishes. Usually around 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning I drift off, but then wake up after an hour or so. This has been going on for a while.
It weirdly feels as though I am overly caffeinated, even though I am off caffeine. It’s that sense of being slightly nauseous and wide awake, almost painfully awake. I can feel the blood pulsing in my hands. The feeling brings me straight back to the winter months of 2017. That year, I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, living in a slumlord’s apartment in southern Maryland, but working in the building closest to the US Capitol, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. IM Pei designed the building. Because he liked the texture that the open window blinds provided, Pei stipulated that they should never be closed. That meant that the ceiling-to-floor window in my fourth-floor office framed the Capitol Building and it was never out of view. It was a painful view because that year Trump was inaugurated as President.
That year I protested, joined marches, learned how to deal with violence on commuter trains, participated in a vigil at the White House. I forgot how to sleep. And I spent time with art. Readers of this blog may have read my very first post, a piece on Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (I couldn’t find a journal that would publish it, so I created the blog, dumped it there, and promptly forgot about it until the pandemic, when for political reasons I started to write public-facing prose again). The gallery in which the Stations was installed became for me what a friend described as my personal cathedral. I spent a lot of time in the gallery, just sitting there quietly, trying to feel human again, jotting down random thoughts about the artwork.
So here I am, seven years later, sitting in the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, yearning for the Stations. I wonder if I can find similar grace, stilling my mind for a short time, and for a few moments calming the sharp, stabbing anger that I feel, anger towards Biden and Netanyahu, American diplomatic terrorism at the UN, the idiots flying celebratory pro-Israel banners during the UM graduation ceremony (as if the genocide were a sporting event), the police enacting violence against students, American liberals (and everyone else) talking about failures of humanity and doing nothing, Republicans telling protesting students to go home and “do their homework,” the US Department of Defense denying that what we’re seeing isn’t happening.
What is the capacity of art to do that work of consolation? Because it doesn’t feel right now like it can. And for me, to return to the train of thought about the gallery as a cathedral, the prospect that art cannot console amounts to a loss of faith.
Still, I have found one room in the museum that for now is providing some slight ease. I wouldn’t call it a gallery. It’s more like a large closet. I think it’s intended to be a study room. The walls are glass-fronted cases. They’re filled with ceramic objects from cultures across the globe and across time. Outside of the obvious––feeling multiple senses of time embodied in the beat-up things on display (Han tomb figurines, for instance, or Inuit bowls) ––and hence, a kind of comforting durational quality that is about life extending past this prolonged crisis, the higgledy-piggledy display opens up and to the eye. Things are haphazardly grouped together. There’s no emotional logic to their placement, no curatorial narrative, no labels, no uniformity of scale or colour or texture, no hierarchy, no artificial cultural groupings. Even though each cup or bowl is in proximity to others, each holds its own space. As visitors trickle through, they do what I do: pause in front of a vessel or tool, look with absorbed intent, notice the chipped edges, smeared glaze, the fine lines, impressed patterns. They chose to engage with the things most alive to them.
For me, the feeling of consolation is realized in that moment of engagement, when a lumpy pot or glazed figurine says: I see you.
staring at the ceiling 
I had no liberty to seek contemplative spaces. Temples seemed made for others. Rothko Chapel in Texas….too far. Art galleries change exhibitions every three weeks or less. So I made places to contemplate and drop out. I never expected to find commercial or academic success in recent years but There existed places to go. Society is unbearable sometimes. And person feelings around personal emotions devastating. Thanks for writing about that truth. You have a way of making a person feel less alone. Art saves lives, one less alone person at a time. I wish I could do more but I fear time is running out.
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why did you choose to feature this body of text Lisa?
I’m struggling more than ever to see what I can do to be useful in this world.
at one time in what I felt was a particularly useless period of my life, I chose to make two venues for two particularly inspiring local artists to retreat to and use in any way they chose for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, I used resources from my life to place those two large venues in various public contexts. Each of the two artists have the only keys. The power to make work for permanent life long exhibition in those venues was offered . ( rather than a two or three week exhibition ). It was the best I felt I could do at the time. The spaces each are lockable but the two artists could lend the key to their contemplative spaces to anyone they want.
interestingly I found that the curiosity that anyone including me has about what is going on inside is perhaps greater than anything that actually has been done within.
over the years, my sense that I might easily become homeless on my failing as an artist or an educator caused me to make several “venue” sculptures.
at first they were wide open to anyone to have a non-denominational free and hopefully welcome place to detach from life and contemplate, meditate and regain balance beyond the social environment that many churches or temples try to provide.
later, it seemed to be important to make those spaces lockable.
I don’t believe they are remarkable or worthy of great attention but I am certain that to “put them on” to lose one’s body and have an experience in contemplation as you describe with “Stations of the Cross” by Newman and the “Rothko Chapel “ simply are as unavailable to me and most people as the Dome of St . Peter’s in Rome….
but shouldn’t we all have some place to contemplate? Occasionally I have gone to Christian churches or temples and been able to feel otherness. But usually I feel conscious that I don’t belong or must soon vacate, and that gets in the way of really resetting my heart and soul to being recharged. Is that something you can relate to?
something is needed to provoke an altered state ? What art does this best for you , or, what art doesn’t at least to some degree?
I ask only because I feel so much uncertainty about our era.
I did find quite surprised to read this above text. And wondered what on earth compelled you to feature Anonymous’s words on your site where your writing is as good as any on art that I’ve ever read…?
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Good morning, thanks for sharing, and thanks for your generosity. I hope the original post to which you and another reader have responded is still visible. I won’t edit or remove comments unless they’re hate speech or bot stuff.
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