the kiss

Standing in an insufferably stuffy, overcrowded room, closed in by humanity on all sides, I never felt more alone. In such an environment it seems much more likely to catalyze a claustrophobic episode than an out of body or “religious” experience. But that is the most apt way that I can describe my time on the second floor of the Upper Belvedere, confronted with Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.

Perhaps it was simply the heat radiating from all those people, or the walls of that enclosure that pressed our bodies together. Perhaps it was the incessant babble inevitable when so many amateur art critics are caged together–“Oh, now isn’t /that/ pretty?” or, “I like the one upstairs better”. Perhaps it was nothing more than the sugar in my blood, but I felt faint in the presence of that gilded masterpiece. My head was light, and the feet that once rested at the end of my tingling legs no longer existed. I just hovered there over the crowd, lost completely in the world that Klimt created, a world all my own. The dull din of the room died away and the image seemed to swim towards me. Every inch of that delicious canvas presented a sumptuous treat for the senses. Though physically my experience was arguably only a visual one, I felt that every aspect of my being was stimulated with some strange energy flowing through my body. I felt at once drained and refreshed, and even after the fact, I could not really pinpoint what about the painting exhilarated me so.

Thomas Merton put it best, saying “art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Wrapped in the painting, I felt as though something was being revealed to me about humanity, about love, and even about myself. I was discovering, uncovering, but I was also floundering amidst the subordination of my identity and of my reason to the work itself. I could try, in vain, to explain it, but such revelations can only be communicated by the experience of that canvas itself. As Michael Vitale tells us, “art is what's left over after you've defined everything else”.

Finally, the mundane reality of the heat and the crowd tugged me back down to earth and I reluctantly turned my back on The Kiss and descended into the wonderfully cool foyer, my mind feeling at once as though all rational thought had been siphoned off indefinitely, but also an electrical, yet vague excitement that I had just understood something of consequence. In the gift shop I was elated to find a poster of The Kiss, and excitedly placed it where it would be immediately visible from almost every inch of my living space.

Yet as time wore on, my satisfaction with the poster steadily diminished. I loved the poster for what it represented, the experience of the actual artwork, but the flat, two-dimensional image on my wall lacked the life and the vivacity of the actual painting. Taken by itself, I wasn’t even sure I liked the poster at all.

The experience of the actual artwork was something so incredibly different, with a life all it’s own and impossible to reproduce either in a print or in prose. Uncovering this essential rift between the reproduction of an artwork and the actual work itself has made my fine arts experience in Salzburg much like those original works: irreplaceable, beautiful, and hard to fully do justice.

***

Art is a reflection. It reflects the viewer. It reflects the artist. It reflects all of the swelling streams of culture, history, art and science that have converged at this precise point to bring this work to the fore of the artist’s inspiration. My goal in creating this piece was two-fold: I wanted to create something that captured my experience of this particular artwork as something much more than two dimensional, something with a life and movement of its own, as well as to represent the ways in which art is significant to humanity, in a broader sense, as a reflection of humanity itself.

One thing that was distinctly lacking from my print of The Kiss was dimension. Though the actual work is indeed two dimensional, it features wonderful gilding that makes the image appear to dance and move. The gold background works to project the image from its surface. In my version, the mirrors, the gold foil, and the copper are intended to foist illumination and light to the forefront of the viewer’s experience. Finally, the three-dimensional aspect of my work aims to capture the viewing of any piece of art as a complete sensual and intellectual experience. My experience was the polar opposite of flat, of limited, of explicit. The vertical planes of the mirrors try to express this extension of the depth of my experience by projecting outward from the work.

The mirrors also represent the element of reflection that I think is the core value of artistic expression. Plato dismisses art in Book 10 of the Republic as “twice removed” from anything real. First to exist is the inspiration for a work of art. This vision or concept in the mind is the purest form of art that can exist; the artist is merely the witness to this event. The work that she subsequently produces is only an imitation of this original artistic vision. By the time that I, the viewer, encounter the piece of art, my interpretation of it is only the bastard of a shadow.

I agree that each time art is interpreted and reproduced, it loses some of its original nature; however, this does not mean that it loses any of its significance. The significance of an artwork is provided by those who witness it, not merely by those who produce or reproduce it. The mirrors reflect, almost literally, the way that the value of an art work changes and distorts through each interpretation, each recollection, and each perspective, yet it never fails to bring forth a light to those who perceive it.

Art can reflect political, social, or religious leanings of a particular time. It can reflect an artist’s experience of a split second, or their entire life. It can reflect broad, deep revelations on the nature of life or the human condition. It can reflect you. It can reflect me. It could be all or none of these things. It is not something that is mine to tell for each of us brings to the canvas different histories and philosophies, but still, to each person, art gives a way to express that remainder of our experience that we can never quite articulate. It is the excitement of blood in our brains, the nagging bite of loss at our heels, the butterflies in our innards. It is the sense of belonging, of alienation, of love, of loss, of bitter triviality, of unfathomable importance; namely, art reflects back to us the common denominator of our humanity, making it accessible and vital to us all.