"and if I remained by the outermost sea"

I made it to the New Museum today for the last day of After Nature.


[by William Christenberry]

I had wanted to see it for some time for a couple reasons. First, it's an exhibition based on poetry. About time. So often the relationship works in reverse: poets write about museums and paintings and photographs and artists. And here's an exhibition that uses a collection of poems as a jumping off point.


Second, it's an exhibition based on the work of W. G. Sebald. I love his work. I save it up. I cherish it.


[by Brian Burkhardt]

Third, I think the exhibition ties in nicely to one Real Art Ways will be opening on Saturday, October 4. Archaeology of Wonder has work that punches you in the gut in a way that's similar to some of the work in After Nature. See for yourself.


[by Werner Herzog]

"and let thy feet milenniums hence be set in the midst of knowledge"

I had just said to Jillian that I communicate better when conversation occurs through some medium. Later, I told another person that it's easier for me to talk when I'm holding a book in my hand.

So, it was a delightful challenge when someone asked me why I have cried (repeatedly) at the British Museum and I struggled through several media to explain myself.

I wanted to touch it so badly. The feeling was almost irresistible. I think it must have been a combination of the heat, my isolation (I hadn't talked to anyone in a week, at least), and the enormity of the museum. I could almost see the statue breathe, and I started to cry.

My first response to the question was to explain what I find ideologically problematic about the discursive structure of the museum. I rambled my way around some issues, in particular, that I have with the representation of African "art objects" during modernity, namely that their presentation of cultural and ritualistic artifacts would seem to suggest that African modernity did not occur. I meandered around the idea that display and possession are linked, and that it can be difficult for people to be aware of how the desire that engenders shapes their responses to what they see.

This was a thoroughly incorrect answer to the question, but I didn't figure that out until the next morning.

Books create in me a feeling of comfort and support that it is difficult to imagine going without for very long. I almost always carry a book (sometimes as many as five) around with me. And so, when I got back to my house, I curled up on the couch with The Bear and stacked all my museum theory around me. [I realize the defensiveness of a position like this. Living in a city like Hartford, with its fierce and unapologetic anti-intellectualism, has made me not insensitive to the image of the intellectual protected and shrouded, even blinded, by books. What I actually feel is something distinct from this image, though.] And so it was with comfort that I thumbed through books thrice-read, with thrice-scripted marginalia.

I found this:

once removed from the continuity of everyday uses in time and space and made exquisite on display, stabilized and conserved, objects are transformed in the meanings that they may be said to carry: they become moments of ownership, commodities.

- Spencer R. Crew and James E. Sims

It is reading exactly this kind of thing (combined with an upbringing darned through with Marxism) that makes me a bit indignant and irreverent around museums:

I came up with a formula that I imagined summed up the reasons behind my lachrymosity:
1. See Sims and Crew quote.
2. The observation of resituated and condensed culture.
3. Experiencing some degree of wonder at the incandescent unfamiliarity of the objects.
4. Experiencing horror (or something like it) at the combined semiotic and actual (physical) wounding of the objects.
5. The (again) irreverent and automatic (bratty) perception that the collectors, and the museum itself during certain eras, were pilfering bastards. [I realize this is a harsh judgment, and one that is the result of consuming a fair number of incendiary conversations throughout my life about ideological apparatuses...]

"Good," I thought, "I've neatly wrapped up and contained the precise reasons for crying at the British Museum." I should know by now to be wary of good, to be wary of neat. I spent much of the very early hours of this morning reshaping what I had thought via text message - a rather astounding mode of composition!

I've talked before about the deceptively simple clarity with which ideas come to me in the very first moments of waking. Salman Rushdie mentioned it the other night - that writing happens best in the early moments of consciousness, before the paper, before emails, before any of it. It was in these collected moments of clarity that I realized I hadn't answered his question at all - not even remotely. Here's what I thought it was this morning:

When we enter a place like the British Museum (especially now with its new, kind of postmodern vaulted atrium) I think the smallness of our bodies in the face of this gargantuan repository of culture and history (the high ceilings, the vast and encyclopedic collection) cognitively primes us for tears.

And that was it. And, in another way, that wasn't it at all. As I mulled this over - after coffee, after emails - I noticed a half-knot forming in my throat (a sure sign, if ever there was one, that there is more going on than what I am putting into words). I had been thinking all week of that summer I lived in New Jersey, remembering (I had chosen not really to think about this time critically) all the remarkably foolhardy choices I made that summer, shaking my head, slack-jawed at the shape of those months.

They are aspects of my mother's particular means of problem-solving: isolation and unfamiliarity. She encouraged me to leave Connecticut that summer I chose New Jersey and she encouraged me to go away that summer after I finished my graduate program (a phrase that I use, decidedly, as a euphemism for another period of my life that I ended abruptly at around the same time).

So it was that with these intentions (seeking anonymity, removing myself from places on which I had impressed memories) that I headed for Europe. It was after about three months of isolation, of minimal conversation and interaction, of intensive writing and research, that I returned almost ritualistically to the British Museum. Day after day I would enter through the atrium, and each time the lightheadedness would hit me almost instantly. And, at some point during my meanderings, I would feel the undeniable clutch of throat that precedes tears.

I think part of it was that the world doesn't seem quite so enormous with another person bearing witness to your life. When you have had that and then, for whatever reason, you remove yourself from it, the scale of things seems to explode, so that even a pill, netted in its systematized place, can seem too grand to comprehend.

heft and hold shut your eye

Something changed for me the first time I looked at my world through a video camera. I've never been particularly good at remembering exactly when things happened. Sometimes I can piece it together based on cornerstones (many events in my life, for instance, are divided between Before Nora and After Nora), but really my memories are all kind of conglomerated.

I think this is partly why things like museums, archives, and libraries enticed me from a pretty early age - this notion of documenting things to tell stories to others, yes, but to your later self seemed like a good prosthesis to me.

It was my friend Sarah's dad who taught me first how to use a video camera. Cameras then (circa 1985) were heavy. It wasn't the easy eight ounces of metal and circuits and cables that comprise today's digital cameras—it was still the age of the Big. In the mid-eighties one wanted a ghetto blaster, not something called a "nano." It was Cadillacs and Jeeps, not smart cars and mini coopers. No. These things required a bit of muscle and a certain grasp on the skill of stability.

From a very young age, I watched classic movies, those films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s that some how or other always ended up telling the story of how to be a woman: when to demure, what contexts in which one should not wear one's gabardine, how to serve a Manhattan.



I can only imagine it was from one f these films that I got it into my head to walk across and back the room with Webster's Collegiate Dictionary on the crown of my head. I usually took some kind of a teetering, tentative sort of a path across the floor, arms never coming to a complete rest at my sides before they would leap back up to the edges of the book. In retrospect, it probably wasn't the best volume to have selected: it was heavy, thick, hard-covered, and, most importantly, its binding was broken, which made it slide around unreliable, some Buster Keaton spoof. But, at the time, it was the choice; I wanted desperately for it to lend a certain gravitas to the activity. You see, I was earnest even then. I was very keen to be taken seriously.



So, I had some degree of practice at stability. Nonetheless, video cameras then were heavy and unwieldy. You had to heft them up onto one shoulder and hold your neck just so, pressing one eye shut and the other to the viewfinder. It was a lot of coordination for a 6-year-old to manage.

Bob Cook was a natural teacher, storyteller, and community builder. These roles are perfectly exemplified in the way he taught me to use a camera. It was a method of connecting with people (could he tell how shy I was?) that seemed easier than holding a conversation. It was an initiation to and well-defined role within a group (documenter), a role that he often gave to any newcomers we happened upon. It was a way to approach our lives with a narrative orientation.

I've been recording things more these days. Clips are short (a drawback of digital recording) since I don't have an external hard drive and the quality is poor, but I have wanted keenly since Bob's death to make a better record of my days.

Here's Patrick at Real Art Ways the other night:


Here are the sounds of the majority of the spring evenings of my life:

to stand on something vaguely sinister

Like, I imagine, any person that holds a degree in Art History, I go to museums when I travel. I've found that the larger the museum, the more alarmed people seem to be when they watch me walk across a Carl Andre. I've made a ritual of it. I search out the modern/contemporary wing and I walk across the tiles. I'm sure other people must do it (do you?), I've just never seen it.



Maybe one of these days, I'll curl up in a ball atop one.

Each time, this act produces a knot at the back of my throat. Each time, I end up crying later in the day. I think it has something to do with the tension between minimalism and post-minimalism. It has something to do with Ana Mendieta, whose work I love and who is conspicuously absent from many of these museums. (The week she died, protesters held banners demanding "Where is Ana Mendieta?") And it has something to do with museums, in general, those odd refactories of cultural memory.

The most recent time, I was in Chicago, at the Art Institute. I was listening, on repeat, to Westfall, by Okkervil River.