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

Film & TV

21 February 2025

5 min read

A tale of two Romes

The Gladiator sequel’s dream of equality is baloney but telling.

Matt Lewis

Matt is a songwriter and musician, currently completing an MA in theology at Trinity College, Bristol.

Chariots thunder into a Roman amphitheatre.

Scott Free Productions.

I left the theatre quite disappointed by what I had witnessed. The original Gladiator, the Ridley Scott masterpiece, remains one of the most captivating historical epics in cinema. Every time I watch it, I feel I am stepping into another time. The sequel, by contrast, baffled me by how out of time it was, jarring me out of the action by its historical inaccuracies.

Whether it was the sharks in the Coliseum or newspapers a thousand years or so before their invention, these moments reminded me I was not witnessing an entirely truthful representation of Roman society. Perhaps I am asking too much - a movie is after all, a representation, and may tell us more about ourselves than the era it portrays.

But Gladiator II’s biggest anachronism isn’t newspapers or sharks, but the presence of Christian values in a pre-Christianised Rome.

The backdrop for the film is that the evil and insane twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, have spread chaos across the world, relentlessly conquering foreign lands, imposing their will on others - in other words, doing what Romans usually do.

Against the emperors are a group of Romans who are tired with all this conquering and violence and want to build a new Rome. Throughout the film, they remind the audience constantly of Marcus Aurelius, the historic Roman emperor from the first film, who had a dream - ‘the dream that was Rome’. Rome would be a republic. But not just any republic.

Lucius, the hero of the sequel, in his final speech to the Roman army, sets forth what this dream could look like: ‘A city for the many, and refuge to those in need.’ The entire legion lay down their arms and cheer triumphantly for the dawn of this new Rome.

All of this is starting to sound rather close to home. Perhaps Lucius should march to the US border next.

We can imagine offscreen, Lucius walks into the Roman equivalent of the World Humanist Congress, to write a charter to declare the worth and dignity of every individual, and their right to freedom.

Anyone watching who didn’t know their history might be forgiven for assuming that this would mean an end to all the conquering, and the beginning of a just and equal society for all, regardless of gender, social status and nationality.

Unfortunately, this was not the dream of the Roman republic, even before ‘tyrannical’ emperors started ruling. Many of Rome’s biggest conquests happened during the era of the Republic. Likewise, democracy in Rome did not extend to all people. Slavery was rife. The dream that was Rome, was to have a group of men subjugate the world, rather than just one or two.

To be fair to Ridley Scott, his Rome has a little bit more nuance than I give him credit. Denzel Washington’s character Macrinus, the gladiator master, stands as a reminder of the hypocrisy of Marcus Aurelius’ ‘dream’. Macrinus was made a slave under Aurelius’ rule, bearing the brand of Aurelius’ visage on his chest, a reminder that he was Roman property.

The only real equality Rome has – Macrinus points out – is that a slave can violently overthrow an emperor. If equality is going to happen in Rome, it won’t be through reasonable persuasion, but violent revolution. And even then, equality won’t have the final say, but rather the oppressed simply becomes the next oppressor. This is the true spirit of Rome: the survival of the strongest.

Gladiator II reminds us that the values we find self-evident today, that Ridley puts into the mouth of Lucius and the other protagonists, were not self-evident to Rome. The dream that was Rome is a dream that we have. But how did we come to have this dream?

We have been shaped by this history in more ways than we know.

There was another revolution, that Gladiator II does not portray (at least not explicitly). This revolution explains why we look back on history wanting to see ideals of equality and justice. The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, atheist and nihilist, writes about it in his work The Genealogy of Morality.

Nietzsche describes a war that happened between Judea and Rome. Rome was undoubtedly defeated, Nietzsche claims. Now, before we might accuse Nietzsche of further anachronism (the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD70 come to mind), Nietzsche is in fact speaking of a revolution in values.

He saw that the Roman ideal of ‘the prerogative of the few’: a small group of strong men imposing their will and subjugating others as the master race, was overthrown by the ‘prerogative of the many’ in the ‘slave revolution’. This revolution was brought about by a Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth, followed by his group of unlikely revolutionaries.

At the centre of this movement was one central image: a man dying on a Roman cross, a punishment meant for slaves and criminals.

God in human flesh dying as a victim of oppression, was an image that gave power to the powerless.

Nobility was no longer be found in inflicting suffering, but in enduring it for the sake of others.

Historian Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind:

‘The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them … that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth’.

Holland traces this revolution and the ways in which this counter-narrative slowly seeped into Western culture, implanting a concern for the powerless. The welfare state, universal human rights, movements like #MeToo all find their source in this world-rupturing event.

Holland writes elsewhere: ‘The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.’

We have been shaped by this history in more ways than we know.

Our generation suffers from cultural amnesia. We forget the reason for how we reason today. Our desire to see Rome (and our own nation, for that matter) become a home for the many and refuge to those in need, is a desire that has been shaped by Christian values.

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