Just wanted to jot down a few thoughts before I they were forgotten. Sometimes I do think that is the purpose of this blog--to catch all those fleeting observation before they sink into the ethersphere, never to be recovered.
There are no photos allowed in the museum, so these will unfortunately have to be verbal notes. First, on seeing a roughly-hewn sculpture from the Easter Islands with a beautiful conch-shell attached with a rope, I thought--assemblage is not a modern art. It is, in some ways, the earliest art. One of our most primal impulses is to use our surrounding objects, the things we love, in a new form, to make the found truly ours by making it anew.
One of the hidden jewels of the collection--this is the first time I've seen it--is the Jacques Lipchitz room. The sculptor bequeathed his private collection to the museum, and it's hidden to the side of the Fine Arts department in an easily missed, intimatly darkened room that feels like a Victorian library. In the cupboards of hundreds of unlabeled small sculptures from around the world. The most beautiful to me was a leaping fish, made out of a single piece of driftwood. The fins, tale, and mouth had been beautifully carved, but the body was the untouched branch, with small shells and stones attached to accentuate its movement, and two beautiful stones for the eyes.
It reminded me of the sculptural garden rocks in the Astor Court at the Met--beautiful found stones, which were polished a little, put on a stand, and became a sculptural landscape. It's an idea of art as a change of context, as a way of looking, rather than a way of making. The object is allowed to be, is almost unchanged, except that we look at it differently. It is far less a violent relationship to material than carving (for all that Michelangelo spoke of freeing figures from teh rock), and more organic than painting and drawing--where we seek to construct something from within, rather than letting the material speak...
And yet it was the little touches of skill--the beautifully carved mouth with all its little teeth, that brought it to life...
On Museums...
One of the best moments in the museums new design is a window which connects the African arts department to the Modern Art. Through the corner of your eye, while looking at tribal masks, you suddenly catch sight of a Max Ernst sculpture and a Picasso painting. And the connection between African art and the development of modernism hits you, immediately apparent. It was far more powerful than any essay I had ever read on Picasso's influences.
And I thought, Wouldn't it be incredible if we could build an entire museum on this principle. A kind of panoptican where everything can be seen from a single viewpoint, and create actual structural links--windows, doors, passageways--highlighting the connection between related works. Reading art on an immediate level.
The University of Michigan Museum of Art has attempted to create something like this with its DialogTable --a huge touchscreen of all the pieces in their collection, in which if you select one, all related elements come up with it.
But powerful as it is, by using charts,texts, and different categories for search, it is already appealing to the verbal, symbolic element of the mind. It is reading art at a remove, rather than by direct apprehension...
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