Art at the Cleveland Clinic

When my husband developed symptoms necessitating open-heart surgery, he and I began an extended stay at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Unlike my husband, whose visit was blunted by procedures, major surgery, and drugs, I had the opportunity to explore the Clinic’s landscape for ten days.

Cleveland Clinic is large. My imagination places it as stretching from the Delaware to Schuylkill Rivers and in as wide as the area between Race and Pine Streets — a regular Center City comprising seemingly endless buildings connected by over-the-street corridors.

As I wandered the various buildings looking for a Starbucks and discovering a dress shop, a cosmetics store, and cafés, I couldn’t help but wonder if the hospital was compensating for the basic hospital-dread by creating a hotel atmosphere. My husband is not a patient, but a “guest.” The hospital staff is not made up of nurses, but “caregivers.”

Going for the fifth star

I read somewhere that hotels must exhibit original art to qualify as a five-star hotel. The Cleveland Clinic, a.k.a. Hotel, has a collection of 5,400 pieces of original art that are rotated periodically. Tending the collection is a staff worthy of a small museum, with curators who develop the exhibitions and docents who provide tours. In addition, next to many pieces is the telltale earphone logo that indicates the visitor can listen to an audio tour.

The collection — none of it typical hospital fare — is impressive. It includes well-known artists, such as Frank Stella, Antony Gormley, and Alexander Calder the younger.

When I spoke with a docent, he amiably explained the importance of the collection in a health setting, echoing the mission of the clinic “to enrich, inspire, and enliven patients, visitors, employees and community” through its art program.

Institutionalizing art

But of course, this is not surprising to an artist. Instead, my question, as I explored the collection, is not what happens to the person when art is placed in hospitals, but what happens to the art when it is placed there?

Herein lies the concern for an artist. Art that is recruited for the function of humanizing a hospital runs instead the risk of being diminished in its authority because art, itself, becomes institutionalized.

I looked at the mysterious photographs of an empty room with curtains blowing, displayed in the ICU waiting room. I want to be absorbed into the photographs, but somehow the mystery of the photographs cannot compete with the intensity of a room full of anxious family and friends waiting to see the person who is in a critical state.

That art is a chameleon becomes obvious in viewing the work. Art has the talent in reflecting the feel of the place where it is shown. Place a Rembrandt over the toilet, a Bob Ross over the sofa, and the average person whose eye is not art-trained, will think that Bob is better than Rembrandt.

Likewise, we expect to see something on the walls of a hospital, and we expect it to be something purchased from a designer’s catalogue to match the furniture. I think of this when I see a woman slouched against the John Baldesarri in the lobby of the Main Clinic. How would this woman know that there is a difference between the piece upon which she leans and the photographs in Starbucks?

The Baldesarri piece is typical Baldesarri, but it must scream louder in order to be heard above the din of our expectations and the pull of the institution.

Careful consideration

The clinic’s selection is very considered; I suspect too considered. In recruiting art for hospitals, many rules must be observed and a screaming-anything is not part of the recruitment. In fact, art in hospitals is asked to function in a way that it is not asked to function elsewhere. It must be calm, positive, healthy, and familiar.

Research tells us what art is optimal for our getting better, and much of the art at the Cleveland Clinic is true to these guidelines. The collection consists of colorful abstractions and abstracted landscapes, and not very much in terms of figurative work. There are some strong photographs of women in hats by the photographer Julie Moos.

When I engaged a viewer, reading a label, into a conversation about the collection, he described the collection as “intellectual.” When asked what piece moved him strongly, he answered, ‘Well, none really. There is a lot of beautiful work, but nothing that would be described as profound.”

No historic perspective

We both concluded that one weakness of the collection is its chronological homogeneity. In addition to the prescribed calmness, colorfulness, and intelligence, it is from the same time period, roughly the last 40 years.

What makes art viewing in a museum exciting, and potentially sublime, is that there is a wide range of things to see; art is for anyone — either in style or in period. Don’t like Helen Frankenthaler? There is Hans Memling downstairs. The art collection at the clinic would benefit from presenting a range of periods.

When I pressed the viewer into further describing the collection, he used the words “safe and contained,” adding “no one would be offended.” Nothing sublime. As Kant suggests, the sublime sometimes carries the quality of the terrible and that is not in the prescription.

Minimizing provocation

But art is a personal experience, which can never be described in the reductionist terms of research-based prescriptions. Is it true my immunity will weaken at the sight of visual signs of pain, compassion, or anger? Am I so anemic that I cannot tolerate the sight of a Leonard Baskin figure?

Placing art in a hospital presents the dilemma of supplanting art’s potential to be sublime by the need to make it functional; functioning as the morphine drip to forget the pain and reducing some very good art to the same level as the lobotomizing magazines of no content in the waiting rooms.

Ronald A. Anderson, the Philadelphia lawyer, once told me he could not get rid of the pain from brain surgery until he embraced it, moving not away from pain but through it. Once he faced it, each day the pain was less until it was gone.

I applaud the Cleveland Clinic’s commitment to art and only hope that other hospitals follow their strong example.

Artist, heal thyself

But I also know that art is neither prescriptive nor consensual. I can envision the art in my own private imaginary hospital.

I’d have a Hans Memling. I feel the groundedness of Memling’s forms, where even the metaphysical Madonna has both feet well planted on the earth. It is not the religious subject, but the gravity of forms from which I am strengthened. Next to the Memling, I borrow the Leonard Baskin bronze from the Society Hill Towers — it is full of mystery and not afraid.

I have others: Käthe Kollwitz, Rachel Bliss, Morris Graves, Goya — artists whose work is full of sorrow and not afraid.

Unlike most hospitals, where there is no poetry in the waiting rooms, in my imagery hospital, I throw out the magazines and replace them with Rilke, Toni Morrison, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Elizabeth Bishop, or enigmatic Paul Celan. No new-age music to soothe me. Instead, I will gather strength listening to Haydn’s Mass In Time of War.

Sublime art does not detract from the pain; it goes through it.

Above right: Mayumi Terada. Curtain. Photograph. Cleveland Clinic. Above left: Leonard Baskin. Bird. Bronze. Society Hill Towers, Philadelphia, 1966