The Art of “Quiet” Exploration
While it’s incredibly far from being a unique observation: we are hit with a digital wall of voices. The conversations we have daily feel louder and noisier than ever. Make the mistake of searching one thing and suddenly an algorithm is pulling you down a black hole: feeding you miracle solutions, contradicting advice, a dozen competing brands, and divisive opinions for the next week… or for as long as you keep clicking in search of your solution (by the way, hi, glad you clicked my link from whatever blackhole you’re currently sucked into).
We’re incentivized to make decisions faster to dull the multitude of voices. We seek solace in solutions like ChatGPT, serving a singular, concise answer in the format of a friendly but one-sided conversation instead of an endless feed. Decisions become easier for a moment. Does anyone else ever feel compelled to respond to their chats with a thank you message for the relief?
When we switch apps and look toward our networks, hoping to engage in “real” interactions, we’re met with everyone’s greatest hits: their amazing successes, projects, and curated voices. We might start comparing. Imposter syndrome might take hold. We take those dead-on-arrival impulses to reach out and sheepishly avoid our networks until we have something amazing and polished to perfection to put forth, maybe even running back to ChatGPT to ask “Hey, can you make my [very mundane task load] look shinier than it feels for a [high engagement] [insert metric goal] [insert social network] post?”
By the way it says, “Absolutely! If you share some details about your current tasks or projects, I can help craft a post that highlights your hard work in an engaging way. Just let me know what you’re working on!” to which I responded, “Thanks, I’ll get back to you or someone.”
And I think in this instance I’m going to turn towards someone: Broncia Koller-Pinell.
When in Vienna last Spring, The Belvedere had recently rolled out their exhibition Broncia Koller-Pinell: An Artist and her Network. As an overview: born in 1863, Koller-Pinell began formally studying art at 18, actively practicing until her death in 1934. During her prominent career in the flourishing art scene of Vienna, she was as actively involved in informal discourse with her contemporaries, including Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Heinrich Schröder, as she was in formalized member-based associations, like the Succession. Thus, the exhibition showcases not only Koller-Pinell’s work, but unravels the decadent brocade of her social life as an artist through the work of her peers, featuring still lifes of her family’s ceramics via Schiele, and portraits of her family via several of her peers (both commissioned and casual studies) and her home’s interiors via Schröder. In the case of Schröder, both artists produced a piece studying the same rooftop cityscape from the window of their shared studio. Beyond this, we see an artist in development. The work of Koller-Pinell maintains its well-honed signature perspective but bravely experiments across multiple mediums and is in constant conversation with emerging styles. Across this body of work, you see an artist that is so captured by the art of production and the freedom of exploration that, at this breathtaking distance, she appears uninhibited by even the slightest notion of failure.
So, let’s back this up. Where does this apply to our contemporary influx of noise in the modern corporate stratosphere?
If we pull greater lessons from her
freedom of exploration, this can mean…
The freedom to forgive yourself for results that fall short of your expectations.
The freedom to relinquish the vision of perfection.
The freedom to open yourself up to change and embrace the possibility of what is yet to come.
The freedom to accept and recognize that every effort toward the whole body of your work is the work… even the mundane, thankless tasks. And, moreover, the freedom to feel excited about it.
This isn’t an attitude that is cultivated overnight or in a silo.
As you examine the work of Koller-Pinell and her peers, you can almost see Koller-Pinell in her sitting room, casually sketching portraits with her friends, a daily exercise to upkeep their ability to get visual material in-the-eye-out-the-hand sharp. You can see her and Schröder eagerly vying for time at the window on a cold winter’s day to ensure they capture the right light values before the light changes. Maybe even a friendly competition is started to see who can get the initial sketch down first. Across the visions of these moments, there’s banter, conversations, long discussions about their lives, their peers, their work, the state of their industry, immersing themselves in new and exciting ways of working, even when it feels daunting, ever-changing, restrictive, or cyclical. With Koller-Pinell having been part of the Succession, Kunstschau, seeing the integration of several groups into the Bund, the formation of the New Succession (which was a sub-group of the Bund, and founded in her apartment by Schiele), I’m sure there was always something to discuss, especially when compounded by the fact that the institutions largely lived or died by the leasing of the exhibition space and the rampant politics that led to the acceptance of work or membership status. While that comprised a different world with different issues, it all compares to the tension that arises from the pace of transformation we experience daily.
The works stand as evidence of continuous, palpable, human conversation and progress but— overall, they’re indicative of building trust in your network, which doesn’t immediately translate to posting every effort for mass consumption. What Koller-Pinell and her colleagues knew was that bringing your work into a diverse environment of trust and close-knit conversation imbues it with greater context, protecting it from snappy, laser beam, critical judgments, and pushing it toward valuable, well-grounded critiques— a more comfortable conversation, a quieter regime of sharing; freeing yourself from the noise and garnering realistic, implementable solutions. This is not the fear of failure, comparison, metric-centrism that the digital masses and their endless networks can elicit.
