Elkins says he wrote to many famous art historians and most of them treated the crying as "irrelevant, incommunicable, misguided, ignorant" and more. I am desolate to read this. But I am amused to read what other historian said to the author: "It will close the gates of Harvard to you forever", adding, "of course, that doesn't mean much anyway..."
I have found Robert Rosenblum's words about the weeping to reflect exactly what and how I feel towards art and the extreme emotion generated by it. He writes about his choice of artworks that prompted his emotion: "In each case, it was a response to my first view of the work. By the time of the second, I was already invulnerable. I suspect we art historians, in particular, wear too much armor".
In that sense, I can recall having wept -a very heartbroken weep- only once in front of a painting- in The Wynn Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada, when I confronted for the first time "Le Reve", the rapturous and subtly pornographic portrait of Marie-Therese Walter Picasso painted in Boisgeloup, 1932. It was the feeling of anxiety and realization of being there after years of studying, seeing, looking at, imagining what provoked the tears, not the picture itself (which is shiveringly beautiful and powerful, but not, in other circumstances, a likely agent of lacrimae for me).
If not tears, I have had certain moments of "physiology", as Robert Rosenblum accurately describes, in reaction to "what I guess we might still call Beauty, or some other kind of magic in art", he says. The incomprehensibleness force of art that moves us and touches us with mistery and emotion, whether Beauty, Sublimeness, Astonishment, Overwhelmingness, Pureness, Infiniteness or other quiet undescriptible feelings.
The Abstract Expressionists are favorites in provoking powerful emotions to the viewer- of course Rothko, who wanted the spectator of his art to weep, but also Barnett Newman and his linear purity, Clyfford Still with his fields of pure color and Jackson Pollock with his torture soul reflected in canvas affect the viewer. I was closest to tears and certainly shocked and overwhelmed by all those feelings and more emanated by the Ab-Ex room of the Art Institute of Chicago, probably shed some mystical tears standing upon the Rothko.
Those same emotions and the silence of my bared soul, my being human exposed to the grandiosity of the open desert certainly knocked my brain and changed me forever, affecting me greatly. The Great Basin Desert in Nevada and Utah and its sublimity as explained by Edmund Burke: "the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". Prompted by fear of the unknown, the infinity of the nothingness/everythingness. "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it".
Edmund Burke never visited the desert of the American West, but he perfectly captured the feeling of the horror sublime, as reflected in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, in which the open sea and the feelings it provokes in a monk staring at it are the equivalent of my persona standing in the middle of a vast, endless desert feeling thoroughly overwhelmed, breathless. Vastness, vacuity, infinity, solitude, silence. In a sea or in a desert, the sublime. The highest emotion ever conceivable by the human mind -even in all its incomprehension. Not to be understood but felt, strongly, painfully.
Of course the desert is art, and if not it the Sun Tunnels that lay in it, an earthwork by Nancy Holt that facilitates that sense of human fragility one feels in the open desert.
Going back to art (visible and tangible), and to contemporary art, a number of experiences, mostly recent, can be considered within the tears, even if I did not actually shed them. And if life is art and art is life as German-extremeño artist Wolf Vostell stated, many more would be commented (though far more prosaic)
My first visit to Dia:Beacon in January 2004 crossed me with the bright light of the frozen Hudson River on the way there, then with the meditative silent and purity of the minimal art installations sheltered in that necessary temple of contemporary religion, that of Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback, Walter de Maria, Robert Ryman, On Kawara. A place to believe in the power of art to affect, move and touch. My mind and perception changed after the Dia:Beacon experience, only to be shocked days later by the Malevichian white infinity of the Farnsworth House surrounded by snow in Plano, Illinois, an otherwise very dull, small redneck American place (first the shock of rural America, then the shock of one of the greatest architectural masterpieces ever created, all in the same place)
The Mies van der Rohe masterpiece of minimal poetry had been bought at a Sotheby's auction and saved from eventual destruction only a month before our visit, thus neither the property nor the road showed any announcement of the jewel. The search was not difficult and my wife and I spotted the house between the tree-fence, almost haunting and menacing. Like a space alien landed in the middle of the woods by the river, the perfect geometric-shaped structure levitated over the field forming a Suprematism image of white on white, pure absolute, architecture and nature. We managed to get in crossing the frozen Fox River, and the unique sensation of being in front of the Farnsworth House was overwhelming and heart-stopping. It was just five minutes (we were supposed not to be there), but five minutes that are deeply stuck in my mind and heart forever. That decisively inner and spiritual moment ranks among the very best of my magical mystical trips in America and artistic pilgrimages.
There were no tears but durable, positive emotional scars in my heart, soul and mind. Later on, already living in New York City but only months after the Dia:Beacon, Farnsworth House and Great Basin Desert mind-expanding experiences, a visit with my wife to the Harlem Heights Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan brought us both to tears, heartbroken by all the Beauty summoned inside a serene space traversed with light and the unearthly sound of a grand organ where we were the sole visitors. Positively overwhelming emotion prompted by pure Beauty.
Yet another emotional mystical moment charged with powerful feelings was the unexpected gathering of a Native American tribe in front of Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to sing a Chant for the Fallen Warrior. My first contact with the Indian roots of America resulted in a spiritual journey with tears and my soul touched, moved profoundly. The overwhelming power of the music emanated from the drums and voices of the Indians, all dressed in full costume- feathers, painting, clothes. A vivid, intense mind-blowing voyage into the spirits of the earth. They truly communicate.
Years ago, an exhibition in Madrid of Sebastiao Salgado, "Exodus", with photographs of the pariahs of humanity escaping from hell to nowhere brought me to tears, in the middle of a mental crisis that had made me to interiorize very painfully the human suffering as mine. Not the art but the message is what broke me down, or maybe both, indissoluble; I understand that Salgado uses photography to throw a message to the people, "look what happen, what do you do?". I cry, what else can I do? Of pain, impotence, shame.
Last but not least, I remember very brightly my first visit to New York, March 2001. My biggest and most passionate dream, fulfilled. Approaching Manhattan from JFK, the majestic skyline illuminated and shining with pride and vanity ("look at me, I am New York") shows up suddenly and I gasped, breathless. The fabulous grandiosity of New York City was there. I didn't shed a single tear in that visit, but I got affected so badly and profoundly that New York got to be my one and only obsession. I had to make it mine. Now that I am a proud New Yorker in body and soul, I still have those moments of speechlessness where I can just look high at the sky between the skyscrapers, smile, maybe shiver, and say "I love you, New York". I truly madly deeply love you forever.
