How and why to understand ‘nonsensical’ abstract art?

Curators, auctioneers, gallery owners and historians tend to work with a contradiction. On the one hand, they are expected to work with elite clients who know the art jargon and history. On the other hand, they must make art accessible to the public and to draw the next generation of collectors.

This is tricky. If you talk to people not belonging to the artistic milieu, they find it tougher to relate to and identify with contemporary art. A very small percentage of them visit museums or galleries. They often stare at abstracts bemusedly and ask that oft-repeated query: “What does this mean?” Columnist Shoba Narayan, narrating her experience, recounts in an essay (‘To understand abstract art…’, The Mint):

“The last time I took a group of schoolchildren into a museum, an interesting variation of this very question came up. I was going through my usual spiel about Renoir and Raza, when one kid piped up with the question, ‘How do I understand this painting?’ It was a beautiful piece of abstract art by Ram Kumar devoid of anything figurative. There were no hooks from reality the viewer could hang his understanding on...”

So how do you really approach this artwork? How do you get it? The essayist has thought about this artistic dilemma for years and she now believes that she has found an answer to it. Do you really want to understand art? Then just try doodling. When you look at an abstract work and feel, ‘My five-year-old could perhaps have done this. And better,’ I tell you, ‘Try it,’ she notes.

Doodling, in fact, is what most of us used to do. It’s what children do before the work takes shape. While doodling an abstract, you grasp how difficult indeed it is to conceive because you’ve to make a call as to when it’s actually finished. You then realize that it’s not so simple to conceive something ‘nonsensical’.