My latest attempt at socialization has completely failed. I was convinced initially that I really had to become happy by more contact with the outside normal world of human beings.
I was seduced by a website that advertised the more intellectual sort of folk (Ok not MENSA or anything too weird) and wrote to a girl who seemed like she might have some things in common with my (previous and preferred) kind of lifestyle. I didn’t want any men, no need of that, just friends. Expected some older and stuffier and well-schooled tweedy boring sorts. I thought I could brave that if they were really thoughtful. This event was attending a museum with a group of unidentified people — but it was a museum I could easily get to after a leisurely dinner, which was incentive enough.
Things that most often happen to me when this sort of event is planned:
1) Me: I arrive too early and feel like a dork while everyone else is milling around and I’m scanning the bodies with no idea whether to ask them if THEY’re the ones I’m supposed to be meeting with or not - “Are you from the website? (Name of which escapes me?)” all the while wondering if I look as dorky as I feel.
2) The Art: I look around and get disappointed with what’s already in the museum and immediately want to leave. Unless the artists have a really good line of bullshit that I can logically follow in their artistic statements, I’m going to give this hastily slung-out crap a big thumbs down.
3) The group: is either well beneath my age range (did you do that graffiti on the ass of your baggies, or is that just a new grab from Melrose Ave?) or
4) Oh MAN I’m not into, like, Country French décor with ducks, ok? And I will ALWAYS see over my steering wheel.
5) There’s a great looking 30s or so woman in black! She looks interesting! Unusually dressed! Wicked dyed hair and glasses!
Oh, …she’s …. out the door.
6) “Excuse me, please stay behind the line.” repeated every five seconds by little pit bull guards in blue suits. The ones who look like Philippine grandmas are the worst of the lot. Has someone fraudulently persuaded them they’ll be promoted or something?
7) Gregarious Greg arrives. He’s from the group, and he’s definitely looking to hook up with some single babe and ply her with wine at a nearby restaurant soon. Um, well, I’m neither single nor babe. And you’re waay too tan.
Gushing Impressionist Woman arrives. She raves about how she LOVES art, she eats and breathes and sleeps it. Her favorite artists are Monet, Renoir, Marie Cassat, and of course Vincent Van Gogh. She just LOVES the colors they use. They go so perfectly with her living room, and in fact, pretty much everything she owns. (See No. 4.).
9) Skinny Art School Duo arrives. Boy and girlfriend — He’s inevitably in shredded jeans, hightops and striped or band-advertising t-shirt with various leather and plastic wrist bands, and usually cap and sunglasses and messenger bag. Her in dyed hair, nosering, rings and feminine sleazewear on top. The bottom half of her inevitably looks just like the bottom half of him. They loll about, eyelashes batting like giraffes for a while, look bored, and disappear into thin air.
10) The M Couple wanders through. The two wealthiest people in the entire museum, generally grey haired, dressed in understated fine sand or tan fabrics, hailing from places like Manhattan or Marin or Malibu. One wonders whether they truly know anything about what they’re looking at, but to them it might be irrelevant, since they’re just deciding how they like these, based on what they saw in the Prado or the Ufizzi or the Louvre last month.
So pretty much 8 out of 10 was happening last night. Not the attack-personnel problem though, much to my surprise and pleasure. (In fact, I actually saw two guards — who definitely didn’t have the speech nor air of being American college graduates — frankly discussing their opinion on the works to each other. Now that’s what’s SUPPOSED to happen, I thought.)
The group people finally assembled and it was easy to see I was not going to have a good time. The first woman who latched onto me with incessant questions was small, with a strangely pale, surgically altered lopsided look to her face. She was dressed well, and seemed to carry herself with a lot of clout and interruption, but she couldn’t pronounce my name, even after I repeated it twice, and it went downhill from there. She asked about Joan of Arc, as in “what was she famous for.” I, not understanding her question, made a joke about her potentially being the first well-documented dyke in Western History, but then she made it clear by her next question that she really knew nothing much about her.
“?!??”
She knew she’d been killed, she knew she wore armor, but she didn’t know why nor who did it. I was bit in shock, but oh well, I breezed on, and began telling her about the interesting transcripts from Joan’s trial, which information was then was interrupted by the arrival of Ms. A. Just as well.
Ms. A was supposed to have been my Asian lifestyle connection to this group. She was about as Asian as tennis shoes. By that I mean, she had an accent, i.e. perceivably from Taiwan or China, but she was basically a white girl other than that. Her comments about the art we saw were laughable. Unless there was a recognizable flower or tree or window in the work, it was all pretty much lost on her. This was actually a loss to me. I would have liked an Asian companion to do Asian stuff I miss with around here. Alas, it was not to be.
The guys were basically non-verbal. No point in being around there…. I just don’t have time to deal with that anymore. I’ve already got one at home.
BUT THERE WAS THE ART: OH was there ever. It was actually true art this time. Not derivative crap, not fast and frantic attempt for glib Schnabelesque fame, not arte povera without the povera, it was the best of the old groundbreakers, the members of the Societe Anonyme. Not the stuff people hang over their couches, but the REAL stuff that’s the visual equivalent of say, “Difficult Listening Music”, as Laurie Anderson used to put it. Undaunted people leaving the 19th Century behind.
It was Duchamps at his most quizzical, and (I couldn’t believe my eyes) AGAIN, for the second time in my life, the valise. He had a few valises of little objects signifying each of his works, and little replicas of various objects and paintings that all unpack like a suitcase pop-up display. I actually felt a warm glow when I saw it. The first time I saw that work was in Japan, up the last flight of stairs, in a museum in Kyoto. I couldn’t believe here we were again, face to case, travelling through all those years together, travelling out of Marcel’s hands, so far away ago, to me again, here, AGAIN. We’ve got to stop meeting like this, I said gleefully, touching the glass that surrounded it. No one even told me to step away. I just sat there and looked at all the familiar objects again and the thin writing and sepia of the boards and the leather, and just felt like “ah.” Friend Duchamps.
But WAIT, there in the corner was hanging on a wall, a wood construct by none other than Kurt Schwitters — of course I would have loved to see his tiny little collages he used to make from found scraps on the street, but HEY, it was a real Schwitters. You almost never ever see his work at all. As I looked at it, I suddenly saw that one of my teachers had totally been influenced by him. How about that. I hadn’t known. It is likely the only Schwitters I may see again for years, or perhaps ever in my life, there are so few.
But OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THIS SCULPTURE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM!! FUCKING BRANCUSI !!! I have never seen a Brancusi in person. I don’t know why, there must have been lots of his work. But this was totally Bird in Flight.
Then I looked at another clear case in the center of the room, an amazing piece. In early plastics, both solid and clear, a tiny standing sculpture that looked…. so ….. incredibly monumental.
The tag read “Naum Gabo.” NAUM GABO!!!! I was literally doing little hops in front of the pedestal. The guards must have thought I was insane. But I mean if you had shot this work with a camera, it would have registered to your mind’s eye to be about 20 feet tall, that’s the way he proportioned it so perfectly, and every angle of every side was perfect, a wonderful, engaging composition of shapes and space and color on every plane or point you looked from.
Gabo was like that. I adored his work even as a child. I saw it in the Art Institute in Chicago when I was no more than 10, and it made me want to work with transparencies, plastics, resins, fiberglass, wax, …. and none of my works in that series of substances turned out to be the vehicle for me. Because I discovered I could not be him. He is calculating, thoughtful, thoughtful, precise and more thoughtful. I could see hours and days and months of planning and rearranging in his works. They were perfect. Nobility oozed from them. He was royalty in cellulose to me. The piece in Chicago so long ago had been made of arcs of clear plastic bowed circles, placed upright against each other, with strings of gut or acrylic spanning them like a tiny perfect alien bridge. I made bridges later in classes. He made shapes that I loved so much that his vocabulary pours out of me from time to time…. like wine in an old Joni Mitchell song I suppose. I walked around and around and smiled like an idiot for quite a while.
I looked around again, and Aha, why there’s a Calder, and a good one. And wait just a MINUTE. Wait a MINUTE.
MONDRIAN? Like THE ONE that I’ve seen all my lame life???? That was it. red, blue white. black lines. Mondrian.
Kandinsky! I don’t have time, I’ll have to come back for those. Miro too, and Leger.
One huge dark canvas on the wall seemed to stride out in geometric three dimensional copper metal from the background. It WAS metal, and it was a jumble of spoolish and spindle shapes summarizing a female form. Archipenko, I read on the tag. CLAP MY HEAD! Oh! Of course…. the whose work one I saw the movie of years ago. He was one of the first stop-action animators who took his sculptures — made of wonderfully graceful metal shapes — and made them dance in a ballet on a chessboard. I remember all the pieces on that chessboard. These shapes. Here I was in front of it at last — or another in the series of thoughts.
I could go on for each piece but I think most people are not like me, so suffice it to say when I got to the next rooms of some other much more recent rooms of plain old photos, I was just full. No more needed. And I sure didn’t need the people. I headed to the bookstore and, finding no books on the objects I liked, went home.
Driving along in the night, the shapes of the buildings and the lights in the city were just echoes of pieces of a giant artbox of some construct Louise Nevelson might have liked to build in scale model. She was another one I liked, because one day, while walking home in New York City, the color yellow on the seats of two chairs in a shop window actually totally healed her of her depression, she was so drawn to color. I understood that experience completely. I thought I was the only one? But no, here Louise was talking about it in her biography.
And as the buildings in the dark and the blonde colored lights in the trees buzz by, I am FULL….. and so sure that I am…. and I am HAPPY the way I am. I know who my friends are.
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