Wait ... right ... there; contemplation is an art

In a gallery at the Getty, a woman stands like a Degas dancer, right foot forward. One arm falls against her side, the other crosses her chest and comforts the opposite shoulder. Another woman is beside her, her weight almost completely on one foot, the other is drawn up, its sole pressed against the opposite ankle. A tall man stands behind her, his long spine curved like an ill-formed lowercase r.

There are other people around them, maybe a dozen. Against the white walls and wood floors, they are motionless, an image whole and singular, like a painting. But although this is a museum, they are not the art. They are viewing the art.

People inevitably behave differently in art museums than they do in other places. Physically, it’s a unique experience -- there’s the standing, which is a bit like waiting, but there’s also walking, only it’s not like real walking, it’s more like side stepping or shuffling. The whole point of the venture is to look at something beautiful or powerful, just to look, not touch or double click or eat popcorn or even speak more than a low murmur to a friend. One might see a parent comforting a baby while gazing at the art but, really, there is no multi-tasking in a museum, which is what sets it apart from most places in this fast-forward universe.

Looking at art is at once personal and public, so there is sometimes a self-consciousness about the experience -- you are participating in a group activity; are you doing it well? Are you looking long enough at the “right things”? What do your reactions say about you? Is that terribly attractive young man really that interested in Manet or is he waiting for you to “catch up,” perhaps to strike up a conversation?

Watching the people in a museum is often as interesting as looking at the art. And if you hadn’t noticed this before, you will while viewing “The Passions,” a study in extreme emotion currently at the Getty. Local video artist Bill Viola shot the subjects of the 12 works at seven times normal speed and then slo-o-o-owed them down to show the subtle shifts and gathering power that move through people as they experience such things as joy, horror, fear, sorrow. To really see the changes, people have to stop and pay attention.

“I think it must be broken,” one woman said to her friends on a recent weekday as they paused in front of Anima, a triptych of faces whose changes were almost imperceptible. She turned to move on.

“No, look,” one of the others said, pointing. “She just blinked.”

And so the three women, who had fairly bustled into the exhibit with their handbags and gift shop bags and flapping Getty brochures, stood for five minutes, maybe 10, before moving slowly on. Before joining the tableau that gathered, and stayed for minutes at a time, in front of each screen. Beside each other in stillness. Like figures in a painting or a photograph by Thomas Struth.

“At some galleries you see people moving along like chickens pecking,” says John Walsh, director emeritus of the Getty and curator of the Viola show. “This show is shaped to encourage people to slow down, to trust their own eyes.”

Much of the work was born during Viola’s tenure as a Getty Scholar in 1998. As he walked through the galleries, studying the paintings, he was struck by the people, by the way they moved and held themselves, by their reactions to the art, by their interactions with each other.

“This was when the Getty had just opened,” Viola says, “so it was always crowded and often with the two most poignant groups -- the elderly and kids. And it was just amazing. People sharing a visual experience that isn’t about them.”

Viola says he wants people to be aware of themselves and other people, of their movements and emotions. He wants people to understand that their visual attention is one of the hottest commodities on the market and that we live in a world of images so fleet and crowded, they almost don’t register.

“The idea of ‘time is money’ is completely true,” he says. “And it has killed contemplative vision. These days, it’s all about the amount of images you can compress into a visual moment. So art and museums have an increasingly special place because, unless you are completely made of stone, you cannot race through unmoved.”

Among other things, Viola wants to remind people of the importance of the collective experience of art. A museum is full of paintings and statues, but it is also full of people who move along the edges of your vision, brooding, contemplative, connected now to you somehow.

Which explains why museums are such excellent places to fall in love. There is something romantic about the silence and the footfalls and the sounds of other people breathing and murmuring.

Watching people in a gallery is a bit like watching the subjects in Viola’s show. There may be little eye contact -- everyone is looking at the art -- but hands reach for shoulders and hips touch hips, torsos are canted toward rather than away. These things happen slowly, carefully. Elderly couples guide one another through the rooms, hands cupped beneath elbows and around the waist like trees grown together.”It is a state of wonder, isn’t it?” says Walsh. “A state of wonder that causes you to reach for another person. There isn’t the necessity of talking, but there is the need sometimes for contact.”

The Viola show was constructed specifically, he said, to force people to stop, to make them slow down enough to become aware of what they were doing, and how it differs from what they do in the rest of their lives.

“So much of art in the 20th century is about the presentation, about white-walled museums, purity and isolation,” says Viola. “But rarely has art existed that way, that is completely modern. The people are part of the art. Their connection. You can sit in front of a fire with someone and conversation stops but there is still a conversation, an energy between you. The same thing should be true in front of a painting.”

In Viola’s show, in the Ansel Adams and Sargent shows at LACMA, in MoCA and the Norton Simon, people move through rooms slowly. They lean against one another or embrace or watch someone out of the corner of their eye. They stand and they shift their weight from one foot to the other.

And their figures fill in the space in the walls between the art with art.