Amalia Wojciechowski, assistant director and collections curator
Everything in New York is based on the idea of speed. A fast-paced city with an electrifying current, it’s a place meant for living quickly. Even when taking in art, it’s tempting to match the city’s speed. There’s always so much to see and so little time in which to see it. Nevertheless, on a recent trip for the Museum to New York, Director Matt Foss and I had a few unexpected opportunities to slow down.
The first opportunity came in the form of two paintings displayed at the Louis Vuitton store on 5th Avenue. Not usually an exhibition space, it boasted two Gustave Caillebotte paintings in its flagship store’s fifth level. Unlike most art spaces in New York, the exhibition featured only these two works, one on either side of the mostly silent and unpopulated gallery. Like the man looking out his window in Young Man at His Window, arms and feet akimbo, this pared-down display invited you to sit and consider—to gaze out and on the artworks and to really take them in like the man does his city view. Considering Boating Party, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the Museum’s own Caillebotte. The longer I looked, the more the odd cant of the boat up and into my space reminded me of the tilted counter upon which three partridges sit in the Woodson’s Three Partridges on a Table.
An exhibition of two paintings by French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte at Espace Louis Vuitton in New York. Photo by Paul Rho.
The second chance to look slowly was at a work by video artist Christian Marclay. Tucked into the hubbub of the Brooklyn Museum, the video work offers a respite from the visual cacophony elsewhere in the museum’s spaces. Encompassing decades of film, Marclay creates an endlessly looping video of doors spliced together from hundreds of scenes culled from cinema history. Characters run through hallways, put keys through antique slots, peer through peepholes, and knock on doors as the film examines how the commonplace can also be unfamiliar. I confess—I usually find myself antsy in front of these long-looping video works, ready to keep taking in everything on offer in other spaces. But this time, the film was a welcome invitation to stay, sit, and allow the odd temporalities of the looping film clips to wash over me—we stayed nearly an hour in front of the one work.
Christian Marclay, Doors, 2022. Installation view, Christian Marclay: Doors, White Cube Mason’s Yard, 2023. (Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London/© Christian Marclay)
This type of slow looking, so unusual for New York, is something I took home with me from this trip, appropriate as one of the first things back was a slow looking experience on a Thursday evening. In front of the Museum’s Childe Hassam The Haystack and Carl Brenders’ No Trespassing, Museum visitors and I took the time to slow down, consider, and simply look— finding, in that unhurried attention, a deeper connection to the works and to the moment itself.
Childe Hassam, The Haystack, 1885, oil on canvas, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Nancy Woodson Spire Foundation and Tribute Funds in memory of San. W. Orr, Jr.
Carl Brenders, No Trespassing, 2016, gouache and watercolor, Museum purchase with funds provided by the John and Alice Forester Charitable Trust
Interested? Join for the next slow looking event!
