The truth, old Roger liked to say, is that no one really understands contemporary art. “It’s already a miracle if the professionals understand anything at all…” he would sigh, lighting yet another cigarette behind the counter of his small gallery, which he had run for years in a remote corner of northern Washington State. A respectable place, of course, but still peripheral to the major art centers.
And it almost made us laugh, because he spoke as though there were actually something to understand. As though comprehension were a clear destination, a reachable end point. Yet the very idea of understanding, in contemporary art, is a slippery terrain: a semantic swamp where every step sinks into a new patch of quicksand. One does not advance through certainties here, but through approximations, attempts, hypotheses that last only as long as a gesture.
Roger knew this. Which is perhaps why he never spoke of “understanding” but of entering the work. He said that art is not something to be understood; it is something to be crossed, like a fog-drenched landscape where one glimpses more than one could ever grasp. The point is not to understand, but to accept that something will always escape us.
In fact, the lexicon of contemporary art creates a strange dynamic: while pretending to guide us toward comprehension, it often constructs a linguistic system that deliberately complicates the path. Criticism, curatorship, the institutional apparatus, even with the best intentions, amplify the distance between artwork and viewer, as if the artwork required a permanent preface in order to be truly seen.
And so, paradoxically, incomprehension becomes the very core of the aesthetic experience: not as a failure, but as a condition of possibility.
To understand a work of art does not mean to decode it, but to locate the field in which it challenges us. Every significant work introduces a fracture: a deviation from expectation, a slight disorientation that prevents the eye from closing itself into a comfortable conclusion.
Roger had his own way of putting it:
“If you understand a work immediately, it isn’t speaking to you. It’s only flattering you.”
This sentence, simple, almost naive, contains one of the most subtle truths of visual reading: art is not an exercise in translation, but a form of relation. And like any authentic relation, it is made of shadows, misunderstandings, and productive silences.
Unintelligibility is therefore not a problem to be solved, but a device to inhabit.
Its force lies precisely in its resistance to immediate meaning, in its ability to remain open, fluid, untamed by language.
In this new chapter through the labyrinth of art’s lexicon, we move not toward understanding, but toward the ways in which understanding fails and why that failure has always been the place where art begins to live.
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