Agnes Martin Stops Time

Appreciating a work of art is in some ways like an act of meditation. One has to stop before the piece and observe it without the distraction and the noise of the day to day. One has to see the piece fully in order to experience it fully and this requires time, the stopping of time or the ideas of taking the time required for the experience. I am in a museum wandering through the rooms looking at the collection liking this and not particularly liking that, gazing, grazing visually and the experience is pleasurable and then I enter a large room with perhaps ten Agnes Martin paintings all in white with lines marking the picture space, subtle, quiet, understated lines, but lines that impose themselves on the picture space, lines that become the picture itself, and there is something so understated in what she has done, something so unaggressive, something so not calling out for attention. The ten paintings put their hands on my shoulders and make me sit down in the middle of the room and observe and open myself to the experience of what I am seeing. The work is so minimal and so authentic and personal and there is a purity of intent or purpose that makes so many other things I have seen feel like tricks of the trade, feel like product, feel like they were created to garner attention or to seduce. There is none of that with the Martins. They just are and they simply exist as a physical manifestation of the artist’s vision or the artist’s own argument with “what is painting.” And in their purity of purpose make me consider all that I have seen before and all that I will see for the remainder of the day. It is a great experience for me and one rife with surprise because it is really the first time in lets say twenty years of looking that I really got Agnes Martin or was moved by the work she did.