“What drew me to criticism, before I knew how to call it criticism, was its assertion that ideas mattered in life, which was not, in my experience, always a given,” writes Megan O’Grady in her new collection of essays. How It Feels to Be Alive: Encountering Art and Our Selfhitting shelves April 21. O’Grady—an art critic for The New York Times and a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder—writes here about artists from painter Agnes Martin to photographer Carrie Mae Weems to Pope.L. And in each case, she tries to explain why their ideas have been important in her life and experience of separation, motherhood, living in a growing America. Art, he writes, “raises unanswerable questions,” evokes “power, joy and defiance,” and “suggests new kinds of questions and belonging.”
Fine art is often seen as an elitist profession for an elite audience—an aesthetic experience only accessible with multiple advanced degrees and a wad of cash. But O’Grady tells the Observer that in his own life, he’s found, “we need creativity.” Most of us need it, almost as a form of life—even though I grew up, I’m certainly still growing up.
Many people find music, books and film more accessible than visual art. One of O’Grady’s goals in placement How It Feels to Be Alive out in the world to show that his interactions with fine art and high-level artists have been powerful, personal and moving in a way that people often associate with low culture. His description of his first viewing of an abstract painting by Agnes Martin Friendship-a kind of golden grid-almost a memory of a popular pop song:
“The richness of the gold soothed me, made me feel full of strength, as if I was looking at the sun rather than starting to destroy my life. The painting drew a window on the wall, but it did not allow me to see through it; it was the threshold of something too big for me to enter at once… I was shocked when I found myself crying.”
O’Grady emphasizes, however, that emotional immediacy need not predict intellectual engagement or revelation. In a long, searching story of representation, self-representation, mothers and daughters, she talks to Carrie Mae Weems’. Kitchen Table Series (1990) and your photographs and photographs by the French Impressionist Berthe Morisot. Musicians helped him realize “how hard it is to have your own opinion when you know everyone else’s opinion of you.” He goes on to explain, Weems’ series, “tells the fictional story of a woman, played by the photographer herself, and the various roles she embodies, such as mother, lover, friend, herself.”
Many black female artists have spoken about how powerful it was to see an artist representing black women in such a direct, respectful and understated way. O’Grady is white, but she writes in her book that “something about seeing the mother and daughter in their mirrors made me sit down.” As a young woman, O’Grady “identified more with the daughter” in Kitchen Table Series than mother. In particular, she was impressed by how the mother “modeled her daughter about what future feminism was about,” and that the modeling was both conscious and unconscious. That’s an understanding, O’Grady said, that has continued to haunt her as she’s raised her daughter.
O’Grady’s complex assessment of the power and dangers of independence is reflected in his approach to confessional aspects. How It Feels to Be Alive. In the book, he notes that when he first started writing creatively, he kept himself in the background—he wasn’t a person or a presence in his writing. But over time, he felt that associating with him, or representing himself, would also have value. Talking to artists, or walking with Papa.L in Ferguson, where he created art about the water crisis, “these experiences were very important to me,” he says.
When talking about the artwork’s impact on him directly, O’Grady says, “What I hope is that readers will read it, and not have the same experience that I had, but be inspired to think about other things in their lives, a book or a work of art, or something that might make them see something different.” Putting himself into his work shows how an artist like Weems puts himself into his work. When she shows herself, Weems allows her audience to think about herself and her identity in relation to art. O’Grady tries, in his own way, to give that gift to his students as well.
These gifts—of awareness, of unity, of confusion, of possibility—are what our current regime has made it clear that it does not want us to have. O’Grady finished the book shortly after Donald Trump’s reelection, so he doesn’t discuss much about his attacks on arts funding or his involvement with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But in our interview, O’Grady points out that curators tend to target art early and often. Art, “makes people feel things, and makes people angry and angry.” Trump’s research “shows how important art is. I think sometimes in our capitalist society, sometimes we forget how important it is.” O’Grady also says that, despite the current series of growing issues, he doesn’t want his students to feel like they have to do political work or that art has to be something “used for political means.” That seems like a political statement, too, in a way. Authorities want all art and speech to work for the state, which is why the Trumpified Kennedy Center is suing artists who refuse to perform and use their skills to confirm or glorify the president.
Making beauty or meaning that does not acknowledge political authority can be a form of resistance in itself. “The history of art is full of stories of people defining the world for each other on their own terms, making room for each other in a world that didn’t,” writes O’Grady. Reading How It Feels to Be Aliveit is clear that in making space for art, O’Grady wants to make space for us all.
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