Staring at One Picture for Thirty Minutes

I went to the Met and spent thirty minutes staring at a single work of art without breaking eye contact. This is what I saw there.

Adam: You did what?

Adam: I stood in front of a picture at the Met and stared at it for thirty minutes.

Adam: Why exactly?

Adam: If you know the expression, and we do, “It’s better to climb one mountain a thousand times than a thousand mountains.” Instead of walking around the Met past a thousand pictures of beached rowboats and women harvesting, I found a single image and stared at it without breaking eye contact.

Adam: For a thousand minutes?

Adam: Very funny. Thirty.

Adam: Did you go with a picture in mind?

Adam: I didn’t, but I headed to the Asian Wing, my favorite gallery at the Met. I wanted to find a picture that was a combination of image and a shadowy room where I could conduct my experiment in semi-privacy.

Adam: That must have been interesting, you staring at a picture in a trance and having people walking behind you. Was there a guard? I know you embarrass easily.

Adam: Later on there was a guard coming in every few minutes to check on me. I didn’t turn, but I felt him there wondering if I was okay.

Adam: What did you do once you found your image?

Adam: I took a picture of the scrolls and the placard description. I set my phone timer for thirty minutes, and plugged in earbuds. I didn’t start with any plan on how I’d approach it, beyond setting the timer.

Adam: You didn’t say what picture – scrolls – you settled on.

Adam: It was one of two 18th century scrolls by Soga Shōhaku. The scrolls featured “cranes and bamboo, set against a backdrop of pines.” I picked the graphically simpler of the two scrolls.

Adam: Do you think it still counts as “staring at a painting” if it is a diptych and you never checked in with the right-hand side? Never mind. Why did you pick the crane?

Adam: I have a bucket list dream of “staring into a picture for so long the room around me becomes the location.” I imagine wandering off into a world behind the painting. I’ve always been moved by Asian landscapes with their lonely old men and winding paths and pagodas on far-away mountains. They take you somewhere.

Adam: If I remember, the thinking was that you would stare as intensely at Cranes as anyone had since Shōhaku himself. The idea of getting down to the same brush strokes was also very appealing to you. You wouldn’t just skim and look for an autograph and shuffle over to the next painting…

Adam: Exactly. I’d dive all the way into a picture as far as I could get to be right there with the artist.

Adam: What did you do while you were traveling around the scroll?

Adam: I picked random spots and looked at the strokes and colors and at the background daubs. I tried to notice everything I could notice, and I let the picture guide me around. It was completely directionless. We’ll come back to the crane’s eye, but mostly I drifted around the image.

Adam: Do you remember how we asked ourselves questions?

Adam: I do. We were churning them out. “Which parts were the darkest and why? How did they balance out with each other? How was the image plotted out geometrically?”

Adam: Yes. Because if you look closely enough at a brush stroke, it’s a hop, skip and brush jump to the feeling of the brush pauses and dabs. You can imagine a speed and pressure and the time between strokes. I’m not saying you feel your hand move, but there’s something there, too. I admit that I tried to do this, too.

You can make a picture hyper-real. You can have this sensation with the subject of a picture, too. I had it with the crane. I could imagine the actual bird right there, feeling its knuckly legs, the scrape of its hard beak, the feathered mass of its belly moving away from my grasp. Look deeply enough and you’re on the edge of something. Let’s call it “Liminal Zen.” I like that.

Adam: What else did you see traveling around the painting?

Adam: A single line that creates the crane’s neck in one clean stroke. The feather tuft at the top of the crane’s beak. The sharp line of tongue. The red chop.

Adam: How did the journey end?

Adam: In the best way, really, because I thought I was at about the fifteen minute mark when my phone alarm went off. I’d lost track of time. Fifteen minutes disappeared. That felt like success right there.

Adam: You were going to explain something about the descriptive text in the lower left.

Adam: Of course, I don’t know what it says, but I know what it might say, or what I’d like it to say.

Adam: Which is?

Adam: It is about the eye of the crane. The crane’s eye is a simple, near circle with a tiny dot at the center. There’s nothing else oval- or circle-like in the entire piece, and if you stare at that image for 30 minutes, you keep getting led back to that eye. Up close, it’s not really much of an eye at all.

Adam: Listening...

Adam: I think this is true of real eyes, too. When you get close enough to them – to one of them – and get right into the retina of a real world eye, the illusion of “someone in there” breaks. There isn’t actually anyone behind an eye, which is weird, but true. In general the sense of what’s “living” disappears on very close inspection. It’s like repeating a word or even your own name until it’s nonsensical.

Adam: So, to sum it up your 30 minutes philosophically: get right up against the brushwork of anything there is nothing behind it.

Adam: Sounds like you felt trapped.

Adam: I think if you dug deep enough you might. I only had 30 minutes.

Adam: You were going to say something about the text you couldn’t read.

Adam: I wouldn’t be surprised if it says something like this:

“Eyes aren’t windows to the soul. They are paintings of windows to the soul.”

Adam: That sounds very lonely.

Adam: I agree, but lonely in a way where you want to go tell someone immediately afterwards.

Adam: Well, I’m glad we got to be there together.