The Arts in NYC Fall 2012

Going to the Museum of Modern Arts (MOMA) was quite surprisingly a thought provoking and enlightening experience for me, because I have never really been a fan of museums or paintings. Therefore, I had decided to only walk through the 4^th floor where the paintings on abstract expressionism were kept, the only topic that I had a little understanding of.

The first painting that I saw was a Mark Rothko one. To be able to see his paintings in real life was an altogether different experience than on camera or through the Internet. I remember the first time I saw a Mark Rothko painting on my computer, I thought anyone could make these rectangular blocks, but yesterday I realized that his paintings are more than just rectangular figures.

For example this painting seems to be mere blocks of different colors, but watching the painting in real life gave me a new perception on how to penetrate and understand those paintings which normally I wouldn’t really notice. With an orange background, the painting had rectangular blocks of other colors such as purple, black, green etc. Standing right in front of the picture actually transported me into another world and to some extent I began to understand what Rothko actually meant when he said that people break down when they see his paintings. For me this painting was not just about how perfectly he blended the colors or how seamless his technique was. Our life is full of ups and downs and these colors represent the different phases in our life. I saw the painting from a personal view, like the painting was actually made just for me. The black was all those parts which reminded me of my failures, the parts that I did not want to remember, the parts I wanted to eradicate from my life. The green seemed to depict the happy moments, the lush moments in my life, the ones that I wanted to repeat. Within a moment I could visualize different scenes from my life according to the colors that the painting exhibited.

The next painting I saw was a Jackson Pollock. As I approached the painting, I saw a pack of people already there listening intently to a museum guide who was explaining how Pollock’s technique was different from those of other abstract expressionists. The museum guide kept talking about how he didn’t use any kind of brush for his paints but just dribbled it on the canvas and this fact turned out to be really intriguing for me because in my stereotypical approach paintings are something which need to be worked on critically and with lots of scrutiny.  Before coming to the museum, I was worried about not understanding the meaning of the paintings, because like most regular people I didn’t really discern a particular meaning in the art. However, yesterday I realized that it was not about knowing the real meaning of the painting, or of knowing what the painter felt when he was making the painting, but actually it was about what I felt, about my feelings and the emotions that I get when I look at a particular painting. There are no right or wrong perceptions about the paintings; they are just hung there for the viewers to look at, to relate to, to make them feel that they are not alone in this vast world of apathetic people.

As I moved further in the museum, I saw this painting, and it instantly caught my eye. My first reaction was that these were two celebrities, not wanting to show their faces to the public, but as I gazed in the painting the next thought that popped in my mind was that they were no celebrities, but normal people like us wanting to hide their flaws, not wanting others to see or hear their dark secrets. Everybody has two sides, one that is shown to the world, to the people around them, and one that is hidden, that the person does not even want to identify with his own self.

Overall, my experience of MOMA was definitely one that broadened my perspective of how I saw and interpreted art, and this realization has helped me to shun my fears of visiting museums, and hopefully next time , I will not only focus on one form of art and try to discover other forms as well.