Review

Attention

Culture

29 August 2023

5 min read

Seeing slowly takes time

In a culture of immediacy there’s a lesson to be found in the art of Georgia O’Keeffe. Alex Hughes reviews a recent exhibition of her work.

Alex Hughes

Alex Hughes is Archdeacon of Cambridge in the Diocese of Ely.

A corner of an art gallery displays three pictures to one side and one to the other.

The Museum of Modern Art New York's Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition.

MoMA.

Over the past few months, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a gorgeous exhibition devoted to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). The exhibition’s title, “To see takes time,” comes from an account O’Keeffe gave of her creative impulse:

‘Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. … So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.’

Despite O’Keeffe’s hopes, studies have shown that the average attention visitors give to gallery exhibits is between 15 and 30 seconds. Veteran art dealer Michael Findlay laments this attention deficit and urges the discipline of ‘seeing slowly’. Findlay argues that the best way to look at art is to strip away much of what we think we know or have been taught to think about it, and then give time to our eyes to search and absorb what they can see, and to our hearts and minds to experience and assimilate its effect. This parallels O’Keeffe’s process of patient looking, returning to the same subject again and again, to discern and refine whatever qualities seem most significant and worthy of depiction.

It isn’t necessary to enumerate the contemporary contextual pressures and tendencies that militate against seeing slowly; suffice to say that we are immersed in a culture of immediacy, which expects the payoff from any investment to be quick and obvious. Not only does this affect our ability to appreciate art, but it also goes against much spiritual wisdom from the world’s religious traditions. Certainly, the Christian tradition of prayer would agree that to see spiritually takes time, like to have a friend in God takes time.

All seeing is a matter of relationship, as John Berger wrote in a groundbreaking study of visual art:

‘We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.’

Berger was particularly concerned about the way in which the ‘male gaze’ views the female form - an insight of enduring, urgent importance, which can be broadened to highlight the different characters of relational looking. In this regard, Martin Buber made a helpful distinction between an ‘I-It' mode of seeing, in which individuals treat others as objects, reducing them to mere things or instruments for their own purposes, and an ‘I-Thou’ mode, wherein people engage with each other as unique and sacred beings, recognizing the other’s inherent worth and treating them with reverence and respect.

Simone Weil offered an allied perspective on the dignifying quality of a certain kind of seeing - ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’ - and went even further:

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. … Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’

Weil’s writing is rich and seminal but also somewhat gnomic. What are the faith and love implied by attention, and how do they link to prayer? She doesn’t spell this out, but we might take a cue from Berger’s observation that,

‘We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.’

Choosing to look at one thing rather than another is part of the generosity of attention. Of course, people may choose to look at anything, for any number of reasons; but the kind of slow seeing advised by O’Keeffe and Findlay seems to presuppose a valorisation - a decision or intuition that the subject in view is worth giving time to. There is a determination in this kind of seeing to seek the kind of presence that gives space for a true and authentic encounter: an ‘I-Thou’ connection. The fulfilment of this hope cannot be known in advance, so it is like an act of faith, and the impulse seems much like the desire of a lover.

In a discussion of the detailed painting of some flowers, which are a very minor element in a much larger canvas, Alain de Botton remarks on the artist’s great care and devotion to the depiction of every detail, as if he has asked each flower, ‘What is your unique character? I want to know you as you really are.’ For de Botton, ‘This attitude towards a flower is moving because it rehearses, in a minor but vivid way, the kind of attention that we long to receive from, and which we hope to be able to give to, another human being.’

Though de Botton is avowedly not religious, his account of a human longing for attention, which others have elucidated in terms of a dignifying and deeply satisfying form of connection, resonates with what is often said by people of prayer.

There are different forms of Christian prayer. Patterns of speaking to God in words of praise, confession, petition and thanksgiving are fairly well known, but there are also practices that respond to the biblical summons: ‘Wait for the lord … and he shall comfort your heart’; ‘Be still and know that I am God’. These Christian practices overlap with the meditative and contemplative traditions of other religions, and also feed into the emerging areligious exercise of mindfulness. It would be false to say that the aims and ends of different traditions are identical, but they offer a collective invitation to try a different way of seeing – a way of seeing that can help us to transcend the ‘I-It’ perspective, characterised by a sense of detachment and a focus on utility, and to move towards the cultivation of meaningful, mutual connections and a sense of interconnectedness with the world and other people … and perhaps with God too.

References

Elizabeth Turner and Marjorie P. Balge-Crozier in Georgia O’Keefe: The Poetry of Things (1999)

Michael Findlay, Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art (2017)

Peter Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

Martin Buber, I and Thou (English translation, 1937)

Simon Weil, First and Last Notebooks (English translation, 1970) and Gravity and Grace (English translation, 1952)

Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy (2013)

Article

Culture

Death & life

Digital

Easter

17 April 2025

4 min read

Do you have a right to be remembered?

Our desire to be in control might not survive our demise.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

A composite show a smiling woman next to a small illustrate of someone walking off into the distance.

Kristyna Squared.one on Unsplash .

“Madam, those that are about to die salute you.”

Words attributed to Roman captives and criminals fated to die before the emperor, were used (ironically) by Councillor Kieron Mallon at the last Council meeting of this term of Oxfordshire County Council last week. ‘Madam’ was the Council’s Chair, wishing everyone well. Elections are on the way.

Easter is also on the way, and in the period leading up to the commemoration of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, nearly 2,000 years ago, Christians are invited to think about their own mortality. ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return’ were words my priest intoned to me as he marked a cross with ashes on my forehead on 5 March, Ash Wednesday.

Ash already emblemizes a belief in rebirth, even before the power of the story of the Christ’s resurrection is considered. I for one felt immensely hopeful on Ash Wednesday this year. Having just secured a new place to call home, and one year into my job as Democratic Services Officer to Oxfordshire County Council, looking after the likes of Councillor Mallon, life felt pretty swell.

My priest and I spoke about the ways in which death and hope are joined at the hip. The ancient Greeks believed that a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of the one before it. So do we. I have found myself, so far this year, visiting people and places I strongly associate with former lives, from friends I lived with as an undergraduate to a town I went on holiday as a child to the beach where my late Granny’s ashes were scattered. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

More specifically, the Christian believes that ‘whoever loses their life for [Christ’s] sake will find it’, in the sense that true self-discovery arises when we let go of the ego, when we allow ourselves to be changed. Thinking about mortality, therefore, changes life, in so far as we are better equipped to surrender and salute the Saviour. That worldview has shaped public servants in years gone-by.

An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten.

I recently heard Dr Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, describe the desire to control everything in life as the ‘besetting sin’ of the age in which we live. The desire to be remembered, rather than reborn, captures it better in my mind. Mankind has always wanted to remain in control. Souls will always be reluctant to surrender. However, what we have now is a world in which people feel uniquely entitled to make impact.

People feel that they have a right to be remembered, but it is not so. An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten. Moreover, the past can be especially compelling when we have a window into a world in which people did not necessarily expect to make any kind of worldly impact whatsoever. Theirs was a happier place.

The twentieth century was described by Philip Rieff in 1966 in terms of the ‘Triumph of the Therapeutic’. He wrote, ‘Religious man was born to be saved’, but ‘psychological man is born to be pleased.’ ‘Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going’. Therapy enables that objective. But therapy to what end?

Counselling can be construed as a device to regain control. The counselled, if fixed, can go about trying to change the world, trying to make an impact, resuming the rather pleasing but never-ending mission to be remembered. For anyone of a religious sensibility, however, that is not the objective. Rather, new life is given only for the whole resurrection story in our own lives to be repeated.

Around the time that Rieff wrote his book, the historian Herbert Butterfield, a Christian, wrote this. ‘Those who lived when the world was static – when the silhouette of the ploughman against the horizon hardly changed in the passage of a thousand years – may have something to teach us, who only know a breathless, rapidly changing world and who seem to be having to pluck what we can from life while running at full speed.’

Social media has surely exacerbated this condition because it connects us to others at the cost of contemplation about what life – and death – really entails. It is a place where we try to evidence to others the impact we are having, where we write our own eulogies and our own epitaphs and have access to the whole world whom we expect to read the same.

Life changes to a much greater extent these days, in this place, than it did for the ploughman in the passage of a thousand years, or captives and criminals in the Roman world, including Jesus Christ who was identified as one such. However, if we can somehow create conditions to focus less on having impact in and on a volatile world, and being someone who ought to be remembered, we will find that we have more hope.

In turn, we will change the world for the better, but despite ourselves, and for me that is what this period leading up to Easter is all about. We may find that others who are about to die salute us too, for the good deeds we have done that may well be forgot.

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