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The Art of Healing
John Haberin New York City
Honoré Daumier, Asif Mian, and Art Therapy
So now I know what it is like to live in a world without art. Covid-19 has meant months without galleries and museums—and without the challenges and the comforts. For me as a critic, it has meant the loss of a professional or creative outlet. It has meant losing a large part of myself and a sense of who I am.
Sound familiar? It looks suspiciously like another price of a lockdown for some, withdrawal from therapy. Maybe you have better things to think about in a pandemic, even if you still have a job. It may, after all, be deadly. Still, The New York Times reports, museums are marshaling their resources for something new, art therapy, with help from as dour an artist as Honoré Daumier. Should it fail to be therapeutic enough for museum visitors, Asif Mian can at least hope that it will help him after losing his father. How real, though, is the solace in art? 
Domestic tranquility?
Just what is art therapy after all? It is not all that new, although contemporary artists like Hayley Barker have embraced it. It may have you picturing a grown-up learning to express joys and terrors when words are not up to the task. It allows, proponents argue, patients to outgrow or to accept their feelings, much like talk therapy. Does it also sound awfully like art class for pre-schoolers? It could allow them to think again like a child.
Several museums are counting on it, including the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum, and the Museum of Chinese in America. And they are doing so in direct response to art after Covid-19 and cautious gallery reopenings in Covid New York. The article opens with an immigrant who has more than enough on his mind between the disease, the job market, the violence that drove him here, and Donald J. Trump's striking out at people like him. He may also have trouble communicating in English with a therapist. Instead, he and others can turn to a variety of media, from colored pencil to Zoom. Other institutions have writing and dance workshops.
Skeptical? You may have hopes for him, but you need not expect much in the way of art. I myself feel creative enough, thank you, on good days, and I would not have a clue what to do with a blank sheet of paper other than to make a paper airplane. Without skipping a beat or noting the difference, the article thus shifts to something else again: maybe just looking at art is therapeutic—or downright soothing. The Rubin Museum, which specializes in South Asia, now has "meditation podcasts," while Rebecca McGinnis of the Met has "a running list of artworks that can help visitors soothe their post-Covid anxieties."
The article leads with one such from the Met's collection, La Blanchisseuse (or "The Laundress") by Honoré Daumier, from 1863. McGinnis calls it an image of domestic tranquility. It shows a woman guiding a child by the river (at the Quai d'Anjou, near Daumier's studio), while he in turn leads his mother. As a laundress, she could well be an "essential worker." What could be more tranquil and domestic than that? Daumier, who championed the poor and working class, would surely agree—or would he?
In reality, an essential worker these days could be in desperate need of domestic tranquility or safety. And this mother carries the wash in her free hand, juggling her double duties. Judging by the low-angled sunlight, she and her child have risen before dawn or labored after sunset to do so. Daumier's oil feels almost like a sculptural medium, plunging them in darkness and, for all their labors, fixing them in place. It bathes the imposing skyline across the Seine and the river itself in a harsh yellow light that is still more unsettling, as if they were molten lead. It pierces the dappled luxuriance of nineteenth-century Paris—from Edouard Manet in Luncheon on the Grass to Claude Monet on a weekend getaway to Pierre-Auguste Renoir at the opera and to Georges Seurat in public parks and private gardens.
Is the child, then, like the laundry an avocation or a burden? The painting is close indeed to Le Fardeau (or "The Burden") at the National Museum of Wales, again depicting a mother, her child, and a load to carry. At the Met, the child seems barely able to make it up the stairs, while the mother is bent over as well from the need to help. Wherever they are going, as haven or as duty, seems far away. If Daumier wanted domestic tranquility, he could have left them in one another's arms at home.
Case closed
Asif Mian is in need of closure. You would be, too, if you had lost your father at age twenty—and if the killer had got clean away. But then what if father and son were estranged at the time of the murder? Even if the case were closed, you could never reach a family resolution. The only paternal voices that you could hope to hear would be in your head—or in a work of art. With "RAF: Prosthetic Location," Mian is looking and listening.
Only one catch: he has begun a dialogue at the Queens Museum not with his late father, but with the killer, the RAF of the show's title. Maybe he wants to discover a substitute father still out there, or maybe he identifies with the killer himself. After nursing a grievance with his real father for so long, he may never overcome a sense of responsibility for the death. For all he may care, father and son would not be talking even today. Then, too, maybe searching for RAF sets free his imagination as an artist.
It had better, for he has little else to go by. Witnesses report nothing beyond the murderer's red plaid shirt and the getaway vehicle's green hood. And Mian seems perfectly fine with that, for it is enough to start riffing. After all, he is seeking not just a perpetrator, but possibilities within himself. He starts not just to picture the killer, but to recreate the man's life. In the process, the artist himself may have found a home.
He teases apart the threads of a plaid shirt, as if teasing apart the mystery. They become a sketch after someone he cannot see, a snake, or a "karmic profile." They become a hair style or an entire limp body in 3D, like an empty suit. The killer no longer seems so threatening at all. They start to remind Mian of his place in other traditions, too, as the weave of an Afghan tribal rug. Now the killer has become a djinn out of Islamic myth, less an all-powerful devil than a trickster.
He offers a strip of ceramic tile as a glimpse of the man's bathroom or kitchen. A truck's chrome siding becomes barbells in a weight room. Is he itching for a fight? In two videos, he gets one, but as a never-fatal ritual. In one, Mian and another man stand well apart, up on a shelf, only slowly engaging each other. In the other, they wrestle their way into an embrace—like contorted flesh for Robert Mapplethorpe. He may not have found closure, but he may yet have found a prosthetic.
At the same museum, Kenneth Tam wrestles with his masculinity, his Chinese American heritage, and his inner demons. And Sydney Shen treats an installation as a free-form forensic laboratory, but with no obvious trace of a crime. Her lab looks suspiciously like an artist's studio, to the extent that it looks all that clear, with its horrors known only to her. She reproduces old medical texts, photos, and partially redacted testimony, while blowing up such forgotten basics as slides from an old-fashioned carousel projector but leaving them dark. A pencil is large enough to accept a teddy bear in place of an eraser, but do not dare to cuddle up. Even death and urban displacement can be a little too self-affirming.
Sentence and solace
Is art therapy, then, at all real—or even a museum priority? McGinnis, for all her obvious knowledge and skills, is the senior managing educator for accessibility, not a curator of western painting. The Met also has a stake in promoting its program in art therapy, which attracts its own funding. And The Times has a habit of dutifully parroting whatever its source says. (It reports on the latest claim from Trump in the same uncritical way.) Besides, an upbeat story sells, not least in a pandemic.
The problem, though, goes beyond the choice of a painting. The thought that uplifting images are effective as art or therapy is itself unreal and disturbing. Neither art nor therapy is out simply to discover the joys of the status quo. It can do that, because it is also about joy and discovery, but it is also about more. As a satirist as well as a painter, Daumier knew that. He remembers the downtrodden, and he will not leave them to their fate.
For all that, the thought has a long history, and it will not go away. At the very start of modern English literature, in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer identified the twin goals of poetry as what I have called the challenges and the comforts. He spoke of sentence and solace, meaning the moral and the pleasure in reading or deciphering it. They correspond in the late Middle Ages to another dichotomy, between allegory and surface meaning. A great story, from everyday life or myth alike, could for them carry a Christian message, much as the Old Testament when properly interpreted prefigures the new. Renaissance artists, like Jan van Eyck, do much the same with glorious surfaces and symbols—what a great historian, Erwin Panofsky, called iconography.
Even Chaucer, though, knew better—enough to know to undermine himself. The narrator who calls for sentence and solace is, after all, just another storyteller. In the prologues to the tales, the innkeeper who serves as host keeps objecting to a previous tale as unpleasant, immoral, or both and calling on another pilgrim to tell a better one. More often than not, they interrupt or stalk out. The contradictions keep multiplying as well. The most greedy and manipulative of pilgrims, the Pardoner, delivers the most moral of all lessons against greed.
Art ever since has embraced the contradictions, like Dutch still life with its window onto death and decay. And people have continued to demand uplift. If anything, the demands are greater now, at a time of identity politics. African Americans like Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley or Latin Americans like Tarsila do Amaral and other radical women are out to affirm a cultural identity, and they are pretty good artists for all that. They need not, though, have the last or only word. In a refugee crisis, the best political art can leave you most at sea.
I do not have the credentials to judge art as therapy. I myself keep looking for the challenges and comforts, online or in vain. I feel like Jennifer Bartlett in a hospital corridor, returning to art after surgery, knowing that she has not made it home. Could that be what gave her solace or indeed art? As The Times reports, the Met plans to reopen after the lockdown as a "safe place." It might do better to take people out of their region of safety.
The New York Times reported on art therapy on June 16, 2020. Asif Mian ran at the Queens Museum through July 25, 2021, Kenneth Tam through August 22. Related reports have looked at art after Covid-19 and museum reopenings, starting with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.