Over summer, Julian and I went to Madrid for a few days. We took a redeye and landed in the morning. We dropped our backpacks at the place we were staying and debated a nap, but then we remembered how few days we’d be here, so we went to the Prado instead. We took a circuitous route through the museum, going in the order Julian remembered from the art history course he took when studying abroad here. I held us up for a long while on the third floor, weeping at the Portrait of a Girl with a Pigeon.
I had seen the painting online before. I had no idea who painted it or what the context was, but a few years ago, I saw it on my computer and I stared at it for a long time. At the time, I can’t remember it evoking a precisely emotional response, but it did make a lasting impression on me, one I’d stored in the recesses of my brain until suddenly I was looking at it squarely, caught off-guard, jetlagged and grimy in the Prado.
The painting is by Simon Vouet, and it’s from 1603. The girl sits, fuzzy in the semi-darkness, with the unpracticed and active posture that is true to a child holding something wriggly. Her eyes are crescented by her rising cheeks and sentimentally-sloping eyebrows– she’s smiling with an open mouth, zero teeth to be seen. It’s a smile that also looks like a wail, distorting her entire face. Her hands are in her lap, with dirt lining the periphery of her nails and knuckles, and within these dirty hands is a pigeon, nearly unintelligible in the darkness. It is overwhelming how recognized I felt by this painting. Because I make that face when I laugh or cry; because I would like to take every animal, even the dirtiest, and hold it in my lap; because the description next to the painting cites that this subject bears a striking resemblance to Beauty in another painting by the same artist, and that’s bizarre and entirely unexpected. Because the whole thing is bizarre and unexpected! Why did he paint her! Why was she so dirty, clutching a pigeon so tightly? Why is she dressed so nicely? Where are her teeth? Why am I crying???
I’ve never cried at a painting before that, and I haven’t since. Looking back, I’m tempted to overlay the emotional experience with other things, attribute it to the things that I know intellectually might be responsible: I was tired, which always makes me emotional. It was stupid hot in Madrid. I was on day one of a nearly-three-week vacation with my boyfriend whom I love, and felt impossibly lucky. All of these were true, but they were not the reasons I was crying. I was crying because of the way the girl was holding her pigeon, the dirt on her fingers, how she was looking at me, how Vouet must have been looking at her.
The ability to lose one’s grasp on the architecture of reality and exist instead in a plane of pure emotion is the domain of Art Tears, where we cry because of beauty. Art Tears are a phenomenon for which there can be no survival advantage because we aren’t in need of rescuing– a purely social mystery. Art Tears break the convention of crying as a signal, and are instead a Profound and Internal Experience of Radical Transformation due to the Splendor of The World!!!!!!!! (read in Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle voice). If you’re in need of another example, I offer you the baby who cries at Bocelli singing to Elmo.
And then there’s tears which have been made part of an artistic endeavor, and are now elevated to the status of being art themselves. These are the tears at play in Marina Abramovic’s 2010 exhibit at MoMA, “The Artist is Present”. Abramovic, a performance artist for whom the most expressive medium is her own body, stationed herself in a chair and invited patrons to sit opposite her, silent and still “like a mountain,” holding eye contact. The exhibit is lauded as “a milestone in the field of performance art”. She spent about seven and a half hours a day in the museum for three straight months, sitting and making eye contact with over a thousand people. It was so inscrutibly intimate that the question became not if the person in Abromovic’s gaze would cry, but how long it would take. This tumblr posts some of the most stirring photos along with the timestamp of the first tear. We can expect that these tears are provoked by the experience of connecting with a stranger, a kind of Art Tear, but in this case, that connection has been repackaged as art itself, and so, too, the tears. (Art Tears)^2.
Matthew Pelowski, a scholar in psychology from the University of Vienna, has argued that crying because of art is a signal of a personal transformation, a change relating to our sense of self which arises from a sense of tension between the world as we saw it previously, and the world as it’s being presented to us now, by art. We interpret this tension as a threat to ourselves– transformation is uncomfortable– and feel helpless in the face of a threat so intangible. Pelowksi believes that an individual’s ability to exchange a sturdy, steadfast sense of self for a full awareness of their experiences makes them more likely to be transformed. This teeters into the territory of Magic Tears, which we’ll get to later :) ooo lala much to look forward to!
The domain of Art Tears also covers the tears we shed in response to seeing something beautiful in nature. Not to be over-simplistic, but it does seem that generally, whatever the reason for tears might be, it’s always undersigned by a feeling of helplessness. Here, the inability to process or calibrate this experience with whatever dogmatic code we held previously– we didn’t know things could be so beautiful, and this, though lovely, tears a hole in our understanding of the whole world. We are helpless without the tools we had previously used to understand things, forced to find new ones. I think I’ve seen Fall as stunning as it can be, but each September overrides the one that came before. Likewise with a spectacular sunset, a first snow, an emotive animal. It can be stressful, too, feeling the urgency of appreciating something that is transitory and irreplicable in a photograph or memory. Helpless then, too, at the inability to aptly recognize a good thing. But, taking Pelowski’s word for it, if we can manage to keep our knees bent to a flexible concept of reality and self, we’ll remain amazed by the amazing. This gives me a lot to look forward to:)
For a cry, may I recommend:
-Leaving Atocha Station by Ben Lerner – one of my favorite books, which begins with crying in the Prado :’)
-This instagram account, where a man has become friends with a moose he’s named Lovey
-I’ve mentioned, but the Banshees of Inisherin got me good. I think you should go see it!!!
yooooooo