Another hair-rippingly stupid article from WaPo:
NASA’s LCROSS mission Friday morning was a scientific success, according one of the agency’s top officials, but it was anticlimactic for those watching the Internet feed or attending a special viewing on the big screen at the Newseum in downtown Washington. The moon didn’t blow up — or even flinch, as far as anyone could see.
Is this really what they call science reporting? Really? Really?
Another damn special section on art museums. Some choice insipidness follows:
There are no rules, per se, about what the Newseum will and will not include in its daily digital display of newspaper front pages from around the globe. Incendiary opinions? Sure. Blood? Likely. Breasts? Constantly.
Oh how witty of you.
Blake Gopnik writes the same article that’s been written for five to six decades now on how museums are busting out of their former borders:
Sitting in a stylish hotel restaurant in Washington — he’s become known for breaking out of the museum, even for meetings — Koshalek, in his standard banker’s suit, fills a pad with Venn diagrams to get across his ideas for a Hirshhorn whose programs and effects disperse in ever wider circles.
Finally, in another predictable passage on how museums are pulling from their collections now instead of hosting expensive traveling shows:
Everyone else is taking staycations these days. Why shouldn’t our museums?
I die.
Franco Zeffirelli on the Met’s new version of “Tosca”:
“It’s like having married a woman who’s still beautiful in your eyes, still wonderful, and for some legal reason they replace her with another one.”
Excellent. Also, as an aside, I’m still alive, now living down in D.C. with Ruth and Bonnie. Updates to follow as soon as there are any important updates to be had.
It’s been up for a while, but I also finally got around to listening to the latest episode of RadioLab, this one called “After Life”. The second segment “Metamorphosis” was very poignant, with an unexpectedly logical underpinning.
O'Keeffe, "New York with Moon," 1925
I went to the non-library section of the Clark the other day for the first time in months to see “Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence“. Aside from its frankly dull title, it was a perfectly diverting show. I’d never really seen much of Arthur Dove’s work, and his choice to use metallic-colored paints in some frames was almost unavoidably eye-catching. It was like a more tactile version of the semi-abstract semi-cubist Murphy paintings on which I cut my teeth as a first-time docent at WCMA.
Like Murphy, Dove was merely very good, not brilliant. Aside from a handful of exceptions (River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green [1923] was the only one that pulled me back for a lengthy second viewing) I felt the canvases didn’t stand up to lengthy consideration. What you saw first is whatever you would get, and as you got to the last room featuring Dove’s small watercolor meditations, what you got was pretty sparse, even cartoonish.
Dove, "Fog Horns," 1929
A side effect of the show’s focus on early O’Keeffe was the cloud of muttered inquiries as to the dearth of flower paintings. Anyone seeking the O’Keeffe they were used to had to go all the way to the last room – everything else was from the 20s and 30s, and was accompanied by vitrines holding art criticism books from the same period. Presumably these were present to augment the show’s argument that Dove and O’Keeffe were really the seminal American abstract artists, with a room each devoted to the schools of Freudian or formalist analysis that were broiling at the time that the two artists were painting.
Using text objects is difficult in an exhibition, so it’s hard to fault the Clark too hard for making an attempt. But whereas in the aforementioned Murphy exhibit WCMA could bring out a passel of letters to and from Sara and Gerald that really brought the visitor closer to the family, “Dove/O’Keeffe” professed to bring into light the larger circle of artists and critics in which Dove and O’Keeffe operated while exclusively showing the art of…Dove and O’Keeffe! I left with the vague feeling that the two existed on some desert island for that decade – this despite the wall text’s trumpeting of the story of the others who surrounded them. The only Stieglitz photographs to be found were acrylic prints embedded in the wall text – how easy it could have been to include some real prints! All in all it felt rather more like a monographic (or at least monotonic) exhibition than I’m sure curator Debra Bricker Balken intended.
O'Keeffe, "Sunrise," 1916
Everybody Eats
Neat interactive graphic on NYT visualizing how different surveyed groups report spending their time.
Daniel Siedell writes another post of note, reflecting on the well-established (to my eyes, at least, being an art historical child of the double-aughts) rift between formalism and, for lack of a more specific generalization, contextualism. For the non-jargon inclined, formalism is one way of looking at art in which one considers a painting, sculpture, or what have you, as a powerful object in its own right that can be enjoyed (or at least experienced) fully without needing to know anything about its creator, contemporary viewers, or the politics of its commission. Siedell considers the implications for religious art:
They will extract an image from a painting, like a cross (or, in my own case, a chocolate Easter bunny), and perform an iconographical analysis. The problem is that such analysis doesn’t actually require the particularity of that cross and its function in that painting. It thus becomes merely a visual catalyst for religious and spiritual reflection that exists outside the work. We thus can find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which the work of art is actually powerless to do anything except move us toward something else, toward religious or spiritual meaning, for example, that exists outside or beyond the work.
Albrecht Dürer self-portrait (1500, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
Every group I take through the museum brings a slightly different take on this debate, even as (for the most part) they do it unknowingly. One of the most blatant examples occurred earlier this summer when I gave two tours to the Williams Summer Humanities and Social Sciences program, a group of a dozen or so from the incoming class of 2013. They come up here for a few weeks and get an intro to the kind of critical thinking that will be demanded of them starting in their first semester. Our first tour was a close look at a handful of pieces in the Rose Study Gallery that engaged with American commercialism and racial issues. Now this group was coming in with a mandate to do social analysis, and I didn’t even say a word before they ran up to the three pieces we had out and started ferreting out all kinds of references. We dove in, but at one point I asked them to pull back and consider the works formally – how did medium, composition, etc. change the way they experienced the piece? They froze up, and started pivoting back to the earlier mode of discussion. The next week, on a more general tour of the museum starting at our Sol LeWitt wall drawing, one girl immediately asked what the thing meant. When I asked her to try out an answer to her own question, she was frustrated that there weren’t any obvious contextual handholds “like the art we looked at last week.”
Did I screw up in letting them dive too quickly into things like social context? This particular group came pre-programmed to look for social history and meaning – should I have pushed them to hold off until they considered primary artistic elements? Or is it a fallacy (albeit one originating with Erwin Panfosky) that formal understanding should or must come before some kind of “iconological” understanding?
Then again, other groups this summer have been perfectly responsive to the formal joys to be found in an object you know nothing about except what you can see. One precocious kindergarden girl this week remarked, after I had to bodily block her for the third time from touching the Louise Nevelson we were looking at: “Um, um, excuse me! Could you please not stop me next time I try to touch the sculpture?”
So you remember that air-guitar cover band I saw rocking out across from Tunnel City a year and a half ago? They were back today, except with real instruments making some kind of transcendent noise outside of St. Pierre’s Barber Shop as part of Williamstown’s new(ish?) summer programming movement “Sundays at 6″. I love it when the tween-set performs hard rock – I would propose some kind of mandatory minimum age for trying to cover anything by U2, but why ruin a great show? I feel like they should have played at commencement or something.
The WCMA interns have also been busy this weekend with Prendy Madness, otherwise known as the season opening of Prendergast in Italy and the Summer Family Festival. Despite a characteristically abrupt Berkshires thundershower right in the middle of Friday evening, everyone kept their spirits up – see above. Saturday was long, but a lot of fun. I manned the watercolor tent, which meant I got to eat all the gelato I wanted while occasionally replenishing water dishes and intercepting nervous parents who didn’t believe that yes, in fact, their children could use watercolors with very little direct supervision and it would not result in the end of the world.
What comes next?
Two weeks after my Hawaiian adventure, I was finally ready to indulge in some sushi again. Erin visiting up for the weekend was another good excuse, to be sure, as was the fact that I’d just finished marching in the Williamstown 4th of July parade.
This was New England small-town in all its glory. Seven massive tractors, a pep band consisting of four of the North Adams Steeplecats on drums and another five trombones all played by eleven-year-old girls (no, not kidding,) along with what would seem to have been every fire truck in the township. This all with a strong dash of Williams College as evidenced by the presence of Venetian-mask-clad museum interns waving signs and throwing candy, all directly following the african drum group consisting entirely of (very sweet and sincere) middle-aged white people.
Beyond this, the start of summer has been nice. Much like the collegiate frustration of almost every semester having to pick up and move your life to a new domicile, the internship grind of some new, high-end job every summer had become taxing on the morale. Now my post at the museum is just another two-month internship, but after volunteering here for two years, I already know where the paper clips are. And on the first day I could just get down to writing – it was positively luxurious.
Of course I sorely miss living with Poker F, since as nice as all my other underclassmen friends are up here, one can’t extract much sincere sympathy from them while sitting in the coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon surfing job listings. But the weather is finally turning pretty (edit: or not – a thundershower just came through) and I’ve already scheduled my long weekend on Cape Cod. Because they don’t do fried clams in Waimea.
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