I have a confession to make: I’m not particularly fond of going to art museums. I don’t feel this way because I think art is dull, boring, or worthless. To the contrary, I think art is an incredibly powerful means of expression. It pushes our intellectual and emotional boundaries, can convey deep messages, or it can simply exist and stand alone as something to be engaged with, admired, or contemplated.
When I went on field trips to art museums with schools, though, that never seemed to be the focus. The trips always felt like going on a very long tour, where I had to stick to the group’s pace. I would groan inwardly whenever the group lagged behind to look at something I wasn’t particularly interested in. The worst part, though, was not being able to go off and explore the museum on my own. It didn’t help that sometimes I felt a little bored looking at just paintings, and my sense of patience hadn’t fully matured yet.
It might come as a surprise, then, that I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in South Boston earlier today. And frankly, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I went to the ICA with a few friends and a professor from class. We spent a few hours exploring the exhibits, mostly on our own. As I wandered from room to room, several pieces caught my attention. In one room, a round table had numerous cut-outs of sculptures, from different periods and styles. In another, a giant cube made of pins dominated the center of the room. In another still, series of photographs flashed by, and each set had a different series of sounds paired with it.
Traditionally, I’ve considered art to involve only one of the senses. Painting and sculpture lay in the visual sphere, music fell in the auditory realm, and dance fell into touch and a kinesthetic category of its own. The exhibits that I explored today, though, showed me that art can combine and engage any and all of these senses. The colors, the sounds, and the textures of the pieces all contributed to creating an experience of the art itself, and not just a viewing of it.
I am a firm believer of immersing oneself into an experience in order to truly appreciate it. Sometimes it is not enough to see something. Engaging more than one of our senses in an art exhibit, or any other experience, deepens that moment of interaction. It attunes us more to what we are observing. Instead of simply seeing something, we are feeling it. And in turn, art can make us feel something, whether that emotion is awe, disgust, or confusion. That experience, in my opinion, is what makes art museums worth going to, even if it happens to be on a field trip.