When Art Takes Hold

Every now and then an exhibition of art works in a museum or a gallery manages to offer images so rich and potent, so highly charged with affect, that they stimulate an upsurge of memories and feelings in their beholders. While never precisely the same as those that inspired the creation of the original works, such memories and perceptions relate to the works in a variety of ways as they stimulate fantasy and recollection. When this happens, we walk through the gallery more slowly, caught up in a contemplative state of mind, captured by what we see as though the objects were speaking directly to us, reanimating buried aspects of our personal pasts, reattaching us to lost percepts. At such times, I want to claim, the art works in question take hold of us, grasp us, and teach us, although precisely what they teach us is elusive and hard to name: they alter something in the way a therapist does, perhaps. Ernst Kris writes persuasively about such phenomena in his justly celebrated essay on aesthetic ambiguity (1948). There he speaks about the communicative function of art and offers the notion of the potential of a symbol to set mental processes in motion. Artistic communication, he holds, entails the active participation of beholders who actually re-create works for themselves in their own terms in the presence of the works rather than react passively to them. Similar ideas have been previously articulated by John Dewey (1934).

Standing in the Feldman Gallery of the Jewish Museum of Maryland on Lloyd Street in Baltimore, once the old Jewish quarter, eerily lit this afternoon, I am watching the gallery undergo a transformation. Two men with workmen's aprons and movable spotlights are setting up an exhibit called “Weaving Women's Words,”1 a show of art works in diverse media based