Art galleries – what’s not to get?

I was recently taken to an Art Gallery in Belfast by a city-dwelling friend who thought my wee parochial mind was in need of broadening. She reckoned a high-minded cultural excursion might be just the catalyst needed to spark a kind of cerebral big-bang. I agreed to go on the off-chance that she was onto something.

Maybe it would be unwise to dismiss her words as an empty insult, and maybe, just maybe, I was in fact harbouring an atom upstairs that was just waiting to explode.

We arrived at a weird looking building that seemed to be trying to make some complicated statement about itself in a language I hadn’t done since GCSE. It was a confusing specimen. From the outside it could have passed for a trendy tech office full of scruffy computer nerds, or maybe some outside-the-box law firm where all the staff wore suits and sandals.

It turned out that inside the inhabitants were of a diverse profile.

Young hipsters discussed how many generations-old their jumpers were. A brittle-looking businessman looked into the void of his laptop screen. A barista – bubbly in a kind of crystal-methy way – shot me a tweaky look that said ‘everyone in here is heavily caffeinated’. She was right, but I didn’t need her wiry eyes to tell me. Everyone clung to coffee cups.

I smiled cordially at Lady Amphetamine and we ascended the staircase toward the ART.

Before you walk the halls of this gallery alongside me, here is a brief and semi-exculpatory aside which fairness begs you bear in mind; entry was free, tea and coffee were complimentary, and apparently, this exhibition was to a particular TASTE.

Right, now all mitigating circumstances have been laid out, let’s begin.

A big information board mounted on the first wall of the gallery told us about the artist whose work we were about to EXPERIENCE.

We were about to step into the wet wet world of an aul seafarer by the name of Alfred Wallis. Alfred was a Cornish fisherman and artist (in that order according to Wikipedia) who died at the grand-old-age of 87, two years before the last battleship of WW2 was sunk. Alfie painted the sea. Alfie didn’t paint anything else.

We ambled around under the artificial lights, taking in the paintings in muted astonishment for a few minutes before the first wave crashed on our silent shore. I heard a question.

“What do you think?”

“Well if Alfie was as ropey with the fishing rod as he was the paintbrush, you wouldn’t want to be waiting on him to land home with the tea,” I replied, to my own amusement.

It seemed to me that some mysterious forces of miracle and fortune had contrived to allow aul Alfie’s art to make its way onto these walls. This was prized artistic real-estate, a fancy gallery in a culture capital, but it looked as though all Alfie’s paintings had been produced below deck as his ship passed through the eye of a biblical storm.

Alfie’s ships were flat and wonky and lifeless. His lighthouses looked uncannily phallic. And the fish, in spite of being underwater, were just as visible as the ship. They were also of the body-triangular-tail-and-eyeball variety. In short, it seemed like the whole exhibition would have been better placed on a big fridge door.

“It isn’t just me, sure it isn’t? Alfie was no Picasso, sure he wasn’t?” I said, almost rhetorically.

“Maybe it is just you, because I think it’s alright…” came the bewildering response. I thought my comments were categorically beyond dispute, bar maybe in the company of one of Alfie’s grandchildren. But my friend wasn’t one of Alfie’s grandchildren and she seemed to be saying she thought it was good…

With the smug, sarcastic wind knocked out of my sails, I took a step back and blinked a few hard, face-scrunching blinks.

With my eyes reset, I peered once again at the painting, searching for what I missed on my first take.

But once again it was words like ‘doodle’, ‘finger-painting’, ‘pile’ and ‘balls’ which raced into my mind.

“Is there something I am not getting?” I asked.

“Well they hardly hung his paintings on the walls of an esteemed gallery for a laugh!”

In spite of the rather forceful voice in my head imploring me to point out that an elaborate prank seemed to offer as good an explanation as any for why anyone would hang aul Alfie’s art in a gallery, I bit my tongue and retired into quiet consultation with another inner-voice that spoke in a more reasoned register.

After a bit, I asked, “Tell me this. How are you supposed to know, when you look at a painting, whether the art is good and you just don’t get it, or if there is just nothing there to get?”

“I suppose you can’t really. It’s isn’t maths. There is no formula you can just apply,” came the completely unsatisfactory answer.

And with that scrap of wishy-washy wisdom I was left to pick up the pieces of the day.

Was my not-getting-it a symptom of some artistic incapacity within me? Was Alfie’s work actually an expression of a simplistic genius?

Or was it actually useless, and is art just so subjective and vague that a persuasive pitch can convince a group of clueless critics that a heap of finger-paintings hold enough artistic merit to adorn the walls of a great gallery?

As it stands, I am no closer to finding the answer to this dirty dilemma. I’m at a loss on that front, but I am increasingly of the notion that my friend may have pulled an incredibly fly one on me.

It seems the way to find out whether it was me or the art is, unfortunately, to go to more galleries. Otherwise, how do I know if Alfie just failed to strike a chord, or if I have no chords to be struck?

Yes, looks like I’m going to have to trip around another few of these pretension conventions to put my uncultured mind at ease.