[Essay] What’s the Story?: Art in Search of a Narrative

Have you ever wondered about what is going on in a painting? What that daydreaming figure is thinking about? What story the artist is trying to tell? Have you ever spun an elaborate tale or envisioned what that conversation might be between those two very angry-looking people across a room?

I have. We all have. And we all do all the time. We all try to uncover stories and meaning in visual imagery wherever none is provided for us.

Accordingly, I have always wanted to stage an exhibition that casts viewers in the principal role of narrator. One of my favorite close-looking activities with my college students or with Museum visitors on tours is to work together to “unpack” a work of art based on the visual clues provided by its artist. However, most museum shows do not leave room for viewers to take charge of the storytelling or to see art history through their own individual lenses.

Many times when you step into a museum exhibition everything is laid out for you. You are often presented with one curator’s “definitive” perspective on every work on display. You are told what is going on in that cryptic painting or what the artist’s thought process was behind sculpting that sad look on his ballerina’s face. Yet, much of the world’s greatest and most engaging art is open-ended; indeed, much of the joy in looking at art — and learning how to look at works of art more effectively — is discovering or imagining the untold, unwritten, and unknowable backstories of the lives illustrated within and through them.

Accordingly, this Fall, the Polk Museum of Art presents an original exhibition that empowers each viewer to be the storyteller. What’s the Story?: Art in Search of a Narrative asks visitors to take the reins, to fill in the blanks, envisioning the unwritten – and unpainted – stories in works of art that engage precisely because they are without definitive answers or prescribed storylines. Featuring more than thirty works from the Museum’s permanent collection, this show places viewers into an essential storytelling role, invited to use their own imaginations to look beyond the canvas, providing creative answers to the questions the art itself poses but can never reveal.

Countless works in our collection hint at such stories hidden within them or at scenes that exist beyond the scope of their compositions; works of this kind are what we call “in want of” or “in search of” a narrative.

Closed versus Open Narratives

If we look not too far back in the history of art, we would discover that most artistic creations followed fixed and familiar narratives. Artists based their artworks on existing stories, myths, belief systems, and writings, such that their illustrations in whichever media they were using fleshed out visually a narrative that was already understood and known widely. Think of all of the scriptural scenes and “recognizable” religious figures you have no doubt admired in Medieval, Renaissance, Islamic, and Indian art. Consider all those ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sculptures depicting gods whose traits and mythologies were instantly recognizable and widely understood.

Open-ended narratives in art were a peculiarity for much of art history, but once artists began to dream up their own stories — not ones passed down to them or based on existing canon — the pact between the artist and the viewer could never be the same again. Whether the artist’s imagined story was epic in scale or, more often, mundane and of everyday life (what we call a “genre scene”), viewers finally joined in the process of “completing” these works. It was now they who were tasked with supplying the answers not provided or assured by the artist.

Thus, while What’s the Story? will be a true academic museum exhibition, curated to help you hone your close-looking skills by prompting the questions you should consider, the stories these works tell and the emotions embedded within them are yours to discover. There are no wrong answers here, as long as the visual evidence suggests the storylines you imagine. After all, the way we see art is impacted by the way each of us sees the world and by the lives we have lived.

Each Our Own Storyteller

When you step into What’s the Story?, you are encouraged to rely on your own unique set of observational skills, encouraged to see works of art through the prism of your own personal experiences and creativity. Figurative paintings, photographs, drawings, and even sculptures give us spectacular glimpses at moments frozen forever in time. But it is left to us, as viewers, to imagine what transpired immediately before or what will transpire immediately after the illustrated scene.

What’s the Story? takes the inherent questions we all ask about works of art as its starting point. What led up to that confrontation? At whom is that dog barking just off canvas? Where is that family heading? Will that couple live happily ever after?

In addition to leaving stories open-ended, many artists painstakingly select the expressions on their figures’ faces, too, often almost begging us to dive into the characters’ psyches to uncover what they are thinking, to create funny captions, or to want to insert cartoon “thought bubbles” over their heads. While we can never get inside the head of a painted figure, we can look at her expression or the clues surrounding her to envision her most inner thoughts or feelings.

The unseen and unseeable psyches of figures in art present a fruitful plain for viewers’ imaginations. In a work like The Apprentice (magazine cover image), for instance, the artist William Entrekin has left the narrative purposefully open. A frequent question viewers ask when they look at this painting is: what is going on here? What’s the story of this young girl sitting not on but beside an empty chair? What significance does the precariously placed shovel beside her hold? And what is she ruminating over — for that matter, what is she feeling — as she returns our gaze? Is she upset about something? Is she simply shy?

Each of us will create a different backstory and set of reactions to this painting. This inclusion of us as the viewers is at the core of engagement with art. So many works of art depend on us to complete them, a privilege their artists grant us and the premise upon which What’s the Story? takes its inspiration.

Take Lila and the Raven, too, an enigmatic work by Kathryn Freeman that seems to carry the themes of adolescence and American suburbia to newly ominous levels. Both psychologically dense — just look at the mien of our presumed title character standing at center — and defiantly banal — this could be any street anywhere — the painting demands the investment of its viewer. This is not a work of art merely to be admired for its use of color or the skill of its artist; the experience of this painting is built conditionally on the part its viewer must play to solve its riddle. There is a story here, however unspecified, that cries for narration. And note the title: why is only one “raven” singled out in the name of the painting when the scene is replete with ravens?

The possible answers are endless. And that is the point of an exhibition like What’s the Story?; each of our own stories, backgrounds, and sets of life experiences are unique and inform the ways in which we view the world — and the ways in which we view art.
Storytelling and the desire to tell stories are embedded deeply in human nature. We use our imaginations because it is in us to want deeply to know what is going on.

A novel exercise in viewer engagement and close-looking, What’s the Story? poses some important existential questions: How do we see the world through the lenses of others? How do our own lenses change the way narratives are told? Much power lies in being able to glimpse the world through another’s eyes. This is at the core of empathy, and empathy is at the core of art — and of the experience of viewing and enjoying art.

With What’s the Story?, this Fall, the Museum aims to include every visitor in the narrative, not only in the telling of it but also in finding their places within the world of art.

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

What’s the Story?: Art in Search of a Narrative will be on view October 10, 2020 to January 17, 2021 in the Dorothy Jenkins Gallery and Gallery II.