The Secret Museum 

or, Small Wonders from the American Collection

While walking through the hodgepodge and (to my taste) pretty unremarkable fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum ("American Art": side-by-side exhibitions of furniture, commissioned portraits, Abstract-Expressionist painting, bejeweled flatware, and a few sculptures of bronze, marble and wood—though separate sculptures, and not all those materials within a single sculpture1), this happened:

A couple approached, then unlocked, then opened a small knobless door situated discretely between two (boring) paintings—"Mrs. Sylvester Gardiner, née Abigail Pickman, formerly Mrs. William Epps," (1772) by John Singleton Copley2 on the left, and "George Washington," (1776) by Charles Wilson Peale3, on the right. This door was so unassuming that if I'd noticed it before4, I'd have taken it for a service closet.

Inside—I only saw it for a few seconds—was a small black pedestal, maybe waist-high, with a glass case on top and a single spotlight shining down upon it; and inside the case, centered within the spotlight, a small, abstract bundle of sculpted glass: fragile rays shooting out from a center and then ending in a hundred tiny droplets, so it looked maybe like a representation of pollen, or a snowflake, or, judging by the cascade of light that radiated off it, maybe a will'o'the'wisp, or a model of something powerful and subatomic. It was the most delicate, beautiful thing I've seen in this museum.

The couple took a quick photo, then closed and locked the door. A security guard pushed at it, to confirm that it was locked5 6, and then, their attention gone, it faded unremarkably back into the wall: it all but disappeared.

Then I noticed these secret closets are all over the museum.

And because mystery is more wondrous to me than answers, I never asked what or how or why.

---

1. The Brooklyn Museum's American collection is a sloppy survey of American art history which resembles your grandparents' attic, if your grandparents were friends of art collectors, but not collectors themselves, except accidentally, e.g., as the recipients of gifts. The following examples are all currently on display in the four smallish rooms that make up the American collection, arranged in such a way as to cause maximum confusion and frisson among museum patrons:

a. Emblems of the Civil War, 1888, Alexander Pope.
b. Giraffe Head, 1850-1900, maker unknown.
c. Green Yellow and Orange, 1960, Georgia O'Keeffe.
d. Chest of drawers, circa 1690, maker unknown. etc.
e. Water jar, 1700-1750, Unknown Zuni artist.
f. New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 2, 1899, Thomas A. Edison.
g. etc.

2. One inscrutable puzzle of mimesis is how the bearer of such a storied epithet could be rendered so inert in portraiture; but such was the style of the day.

3. Not the Gilbert Stuart portrait that we remember so fondly from elementary school, nor quite the other Peale portrait which graced our middle school, but this graceful albeit thin-headed one.

4. I hadn't.

5. As did I, once the guard stepped away.

6. It was.

I Think We're Turning Japanese, I Really Think So 

"My art process is more about creating goods and selling them than about exhibitions." - Takashi Murakami

The Whitney Biennial at The Gap; Takashi Murakami in Your House

If you were planning to go to the Whitney Museum's Biennial exhibition of contemporary art, take solace in these two facts: you still have another week to get there, and if you miss it, you can always pick up Biennial-related paraphernalia at your local Gap. The clothing retailer commissioned thirteen artists1 to create limited edition, Whitney-branded t-shirts, which are surely not the finest work from this talented set of artists, but are easily the most affordable: you can buy one for about the same price you'd pay, well, for two tickets to the Whitney Museum.

A generation ago, pop artists offered commentary on our consumerism by making it the subject of their work; now the corporations seem to be commenting on the art, instead, by plastering it onto t-shirts, $20 coffee mugs and $40 wall calendars.

And while museums have spent the last decade knocking down the walls between their exhibition halls and their gift shops (even going so far as to open up museum store franchises in malls, sans museum), artists have started to meet the museums halfway, by moving the marketplace into the exhibitions. Takashi Murakami's current retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum features a fully-functional Louis Vuitton boutique, designed by the artist and included as part of the installation, to sell Louis Vuitton bags also designed by the artist, also part of the installation. Writes Dick Hebdige in the official exhibition catalog, "A credit card or cash is all it takes for anyone who wants to walk away with a Murakami."

For that matter, shopping might be the only way to participate in the work: Murakami's show is about the sale of souvenir schwag, and if you don't go home with a sticker book, mousepad, or skull-shaped throw pillow (at least ironically), then you're not actively taking part in the experience. Lucky for us, then, that the artist and the museum are happy to oblige.2

---

1. Ashley Bickerton, Chuck Close, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Hanna Liden, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Marilyn Minter, Kenny Scharf, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

2. Another interesting confluence between "high art" and bald commerce was orchestrated by Google this month, when they too commissioned a set of artists—including some from the set who made t-shirts for the Gap—to design "themes" for the iGoogle portal. Most interesting was Google's definition of "artist": they included, side by side, artists such as Koons with clothing designer Dolce&Gabbana, the soft rock band Coldplay, and cyclist-turned-brand name Lance Armstrong.

The Most Authentic Art in the World 

In 1940, four teenagers in the south of France fell into a cave and discovered its walls were covered with what might be the most authentic art ever made—paintings that pre-date any "art scene" by more than 15,000 years.1

Almost nothing is known of the pre-agrarian painters who covered the walls of the caves in Lascaux during the last ice age. They took time out of their short, brutish lives to climb deep inside a network of uninhabited limestone caves, and to paint human figures, glyphs, and animals on its walls. Whatever the purpose of the paintings, the work was not decorative: the caves would have been accessible to very few, and only visible through use of the earliest-known artificial lamps, found scattered throughout the site at Lascaux.

Why do people make art? That is the question that rings out through the Lascaux caves and echoes to this day. Why does anyone take the time out of their short, brutish life, to make something that might or might not ever see the light of day?

---

1. However "authentic" these cave paintings might have been, our modern-day experience of them is decidedly not so: to help preserve the original work, the French government commissioned replicas of the Lascaux paintings for the walls of another, nearby cave (called Lascaux II), and the original cave was closed to the public.

Technology and the Theatre (pt. 1) 

A Technological History of the American Theatre

Indulge me for a minute.

Let's put aside the "isms" (naturalism, expressionism, absurdism, post-modernism) that generally make up our understanding of the history of modern theatre. Let's talk instead about technology—about "technological materialism," about the history of modern theatre, vis-à-vis technology.

For example:

Electrical lights replaced gaslights and saved many theatres (and cities) from burning down. The steam engine allowed the Moscow Art Theatre to tour its productions and affect the way the Western world understood acting. Film caused an existential crisis in theatre that continues to this day. (The invention of Bacardi and Alizé opened up sponsorship opportunities that carried the art form into the 21st Century.)

The introduction of new technologies changes theatre, not in only in the obvious practical ways (flying cars in Chitty Bang Bang), but also more broadly, because the technologies change a culture: they change the way that people relate to one another and to their world.

They affect our understanding of space and time.

I'll venture the most important technological innovation in 20th century theatre is the airplane. The ability to travel rapidly from city to city allows us to form opinions about Theatre, with a capital T, rather than simply about isolated ephemeral happenings in our corner of the world.

And the telegraph, and then the telephone, and then the television, allow us to share those opinions with other (sometimes faraway) people. Our understanding of what "far away" means is altered by these technologies.

That's premise #1: technology changes the way we think, particularly about space and time.

* * *

Here is premise #2 (and I hope it's an easy sell): the most important technological innovation of the late 20th and early 21st century is the Internet. More broadly, let's say the most significant innovation is digital media, and then connecting those digital media to one other via networks.

Digital media + networking = the Internet as we now know it.

The networking of digital media is often compared to the invention of the printing press in the sweep of its scale. It is hard to be too hyperbolic about its importance—though partly because we still don't fully understand what changes it will affect, because we are still in the midst of those changes.

Suffice to say it has somehow affected how we do most things.

* * *

But (and this is premise #3), it has not significantly affected the theatre. There's no end of discourse in the theatre community about how technological advances might affect the field—one gets the sense they want it to affect the field—but traces of this change are hard to see.

So I'm looking for them. That will be the subject of the next sections of this essay...

continued ->

Inexplicable, Moving 

During a recent trip to the Guggenheim Museum, I decide I'm done with modernity. Whatever that means.¹

The Guggenheim was showing collection of photos from Central Europe—abstract explorations of shape and light, the rise of the machines and the fall of humanity (and all of those other Art Themes).

I've long considered myself a "purveyor of modernity," genuinely interested in all of those pretentious things they teach in art school about form and structure, about art as a forum for man to explore his relationships to the machine in all its incarnations (and everything else in our accelerated culture...). I'm good for nothing if not for appreciating modern art—the suburban white-boy version of Lee Dorsey: "Everything I do is gonna be Pomo." In other words, I'm an art snob. I actually like these things. Or thought I did, until this trip to the Guggenheim, which I found to be tiring. "Oh. Those old collages, catch-phrases, and abstract shapes, again?"

The museum's other exhibit was a collection of Richard Prince paintings and photos, which I found even more tiring: enormous clever paintings, and photos he'd taken of magazine ads. Ho hum. So much canvas, so little soul. ²

By the end of my visit, I felt as though I'd been walking uphill all day. ³

Exhausted, I returned home, ready to toss aside modernism and post-modernism, structuralism and post-structuralism, formalism and post-formalism, and anything I knew or thought I knew about art and aesthetics. All of it, top to bottom, left me cold.

Then I saw a block of light shining through a window onto my stairwell and it stopped me where I stood. I found it inexplicable, moving, and as expressive as the arcing arm in a Michelangelo. Expressive, and expressing what, I did not know.

Which was exactly what I loved about it. ⁴

1. This is a direct quote, of myself, to myself, when I asked myself what I thought of the photography on exhibit: "I think I'm done with modernity."

2. The exhibit was titled "Spiritual America." Whether the irony was intentional or accidental, it was ironic nonetheless. (And therefore post-modern.)

3. Ha ha.

4. These shapes made by angles, lights, and stairs seem integral to the design of the art museums themselves, and by far my favorite thing at the Guggenheim was the Guggenheim itself: I stood at the top of the long round ramp, looking down, realizing the probably-obvious: that the building was art; the shapes it made out of ramps and stairs and the resultant strange croppings of the paintings on the walls were art; that the people looking at the art (now framed in my view by the ramps and stairs) were art; and that I, looking at them while they looked up at me, I was art too.

An Introduction to Art  

Painter Monique Prieto offers a survey to a would-be critic

I apologize. I don't know a thing about painting.

Monique Prieto is patient.

I look at the four canvases leaning against the walls of her tidy Silverlake studio. Flat, brightly-colored shapes of blue and green twine bend their way up from the floor, sometimes stacking on one another, sometimes reaching free. "They look, er, less anthropomorphic than your earlier work," I try.

She raises her eyebrows. "Less anthropomorphic?"

"Or maybe more." I'm struggling. "Like that wiggly shape there."

She nods supportively.

"Looks like a Schmoo."

It's maybe a less sophisticated critical vocabulary than Prieto's used to. After all, art critic David Pagel has already tagged her "one of the most accomplished and promising artists of her generation." Artforum, in its September issue, puts her at the head of a revival of formalism, comparing her to the likes of Jackson Pollack and Morris Louis. Critic Christopher Knight goes so far as to credit her along with other CalArts alums Laura Owens, Ingrid Calame and Heidi Kidon with a painting boom that is sweeping not only Los Angeles, but the world at large.

"Sorry," I mumble.

She laughs graciously. "Part of what I like about the work is that it's accessible, and that someone can walk in and not feel like they have to know a lot to be with the art, and get something from it. I like the idea that my kids or other kids or anybody could enjoy it and not have to know the history of art."

I don't know the history of art. But I feel, under her tutelage, I might be off to a good start.

* * *

In Monique Prieto's autobiography (written when she was twelve, and growing up in Hollywood), there's a final chapter in which she records her dream of the perfect life: "When I grow up, I want to be a painter who went to CalArts." Her actual experience there from 1990 to 1994, when she received her MFA, was less than dreamy. "I was mostly miserable," she chuckles. "I didn't feel like I fit in. I'm sure everybody feels that way. It was just overwhelming. I was really naive about the pressures of the program."

The art world had been going through some changes. "Traditional artistic practices like painting and sculpture were regarded with extreme wariness," writes Knight in the Los Angeles Times. "Attention shifted away from discrete art objects and toward ephemeral ideas video, performance, conceptual art, earthworks, installation, photo-based art and other fresh new genres."

In other words, painting was out. "I knew there was animosity toward painting at the time, kind of brewing, but I didn't know that CalArts was probably the center of it as I foolishly flew into the center of the storm. Making an object of some sort, and especially a painting, was highest insult, maybe not the best thing to be doing at the time." She remembers her first year, hiding in her studio, working like mad but like a hermit, literally painting in secret. She never did show her work, that first year. "I just laid really low until I found a couple of people I could talk to, and then I had my first show the next year."

She credits Lane Reylea and Charles Gaines for finally giving her the courage to crawl out of her studio. "They would talk to me about painting as if it were a normal thing to do. Once I found a couple people, I felt very encouraged and didn't feel so bad or dated. Tom Lawson became dean the same year I started he also kind of brought the shift back, helped the program be a little more embracing, a little more generous. Each year got a little better..."

By her last year, Prieto was already using some signature techniques to explore color, composition, balance and harmony in abstract ways, without entirely leaving representation behind. Her colorful shapes invite descriptions that are, er, anthropomorphic, partly because the shapes do represent something, a scenario between things or people, or a sentiment. "I'm trying to make a picture of something very poignant going on in the relation between things, so I hope people do make those kinds of connections."

The curators at ACME Gallery in Los Angeles made them, and they showed Prieto's paintings in 1994, not long after her graduation.

ACME's upcoming exhibition of her work, opening April 23, is their fifth in as many years.

She describes her relationship with ACME as coming out of an "extraordinary" set of circumstances. "Before I'd even left school, as far as I could tell, I wasn't going to have a career in art. My husband and I had purposely planned to have a family, so I was pregnant before I graduated. And that was fine with me, a jolly decision on my part. I didn't know I'd always wanted to have kids, but at that time, I started to feel, hey, I've always wanted to have kids.

"So when the show offer came up, since I was already focused on one thing, pregnancy, I didn't let it get to me that much. And especially after having the baby, it was very clear what was important in life, which was my kid and my husband. You can recognize something in your life as an opportunity to gain perspective, and for me, childbearing was it. You get these opportunities to see things differently.

"All kinds of things can change your life in a split second. I was just lucky to recognize this as an opportunity to stop worrying about the 'art world,' and to focus on making art." She laughs again, and wraps up my art history lesson for the day: "Have babies," she says, "and make art."

Monique Prieto is showing at ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, from April 23. She's expecting her third child In July.

Don't Quit Your Day Job  

Some of you may have noticed, from the scattered images over the last couple of weeks, that I've taken up painting and I'm terrible at it. I did this at the ten-year-old urging of a painter-friend of mine, and also because generally, I'm trying to do more and more things that I'm terrible at.

(So far recently, I think I've been a great success at being terrible.)

Let me make the job of future curators easy, and name this current period of my oeuvre: "The Paint She Be Misbehavin'." It's too thin, too thick, too crooked. My brain tells my hand to move the brush one way, and the paint winds up somewhere else.

My painting so far is the kind of work that inspires comments like, "Don't quit your day job." Trouble is, I did quit my day job—mostly so I could set aside a little time to paint, and to be terrible.

It's really wonderful, so far, being terrible...

10 Acrylic Painting Tips for Beginners

Puer Aeternus 

or, the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood

There's a dormant neglected child inside me, wailing, beating on a drum, beating his way out. "You poor pollywog," this drummer boy calls me. "You piece of half-freak. You sad stuck-in-between, only partway misshapen. I am misshapen. I'm grotesque; I'm irresponsible; I'm disgusting; I'm selfish and careless and I cry and whine and shriek, and my shriek can shatter glass. And your world is glass and glass is made to be shattered...

"Keep me close to your heart (or I'll eat it)."

All the Paintings in the World 

I remember helping a friend move out of his one-bedroom apartment and finding a Picasso in his closet, leaned with a pile of other frames up against the back wall, and hidden below a few dusty blazers. The drawing was small but unmistakable—the scribbles and signature had been done by the Spanish master. Up until that point, I'd thought that my friend's most valuable possession was his rusted-out second-hand car.

"Yeah, it's funny," he said. "Sometimes museums call to ask if they can show it."

Funny is one word for it...

* * *

"Hmm," said another friend at the Brooklyn Museum this weekend, looking at a painting. "This is the first time I've seen the original." He studied it for a minute. "I don't like it as much."

As much as the poster.

"Me either," I agreed.

We moved on.

* * *

There's a new painter in a gallery I like, and the owner and I are talking about the exhibition:

"He's really—"

"The colors, the delicacy of them—"

"The way he throws them against one another—"

"It's so—"

"Subtle," we both say.

The owner smiles at me and leans in: "He really is a painter's painter."

His phone rings and while he takes the call, I look at a painter's painter's paintings. Then he hangs up and comes back to me. "What were we saying?"

I have absolutely no idea.

* * *

I've been thinking a lot lately about Art (the kind with a capital "A"). Maybe it's because last week, I got a letter from an alma mater welcoming me to what is apparently a small and exclusive club: the alums to have successfully repaid a student loan. (I guess the art business isn't what it used to be...) "Your contribution makes future art possible." Contribution?

It's a subject that is bound to come up whenever I see other graduates of the school—art, that is. Usually it comes up in the context of, "Was it worth it?": the first "it" being Art, the capital "A" kind; and the second being Debt, almost always with a capital "D".

What is the value of art?, is the question.

When it comes up, I often think of a painter friend of mine laughing while trying to rescue a whole set of watercolors from a sudden unexpected rain: he managed to get about half of them into his car before giving up, and just let the rain pour over the others. "All the paintings in the world," he said, "can't touch the smell of rain in the summertime."

---

The Aesthetics of Emotional Minimalism 

or, How to Disappear Completely

"Hey!" calls out a co-worker. "You're wearing a blue shirt!"

She's making fun of me. I always wear a blue shirt. Except when I wear a gray sweater.

"It's a good color for you," she goes on. "It brings out your eyes."

Blue does bring out my eyes. But that's not why I wear it. I wear it because it helps me disappear completely, a goal I've been working on for years, and one which I think I've very nearly achieved.

* * *

I just wound up watching Garden State again. I'm a sucker for movies about crazy people. In this one, the main character, Andrew Largeman, has been on a potent blend of Zoloft and lithium for all of his adult life, and it's left him completely numb: in the movie's opening scene, he dreams he's on an airplane that's about to crash. While the passengers sob and cling to each other in desperate fits, Largeman sits impassively sipping his ginger ale, in silent slow motion.

It frightens me how familiar this seems to me. And I'm not even on anything.

* * *

"Good morning! How are you today?"

Why do you always have to start the day with the hard questions?

* * *

I haven't had posters or decorations of any kind for at least five years. If people ask, I explain that it's because I move around a lot: objects—decorations—have gotten lost to nomadic attrition. But that's not why. Really, it's the same reason I stare at my closet for ten minutes each morning, trying to decide, "Blue shirt, or gray sweater?" It's the same reason I can't pick a restaurant, the same reason I go into near panic when it's time to get my hair cut. It's probably the same reason I move around so much.

I don't know who I am.

* * *

In philosophy, the study of aesthetics is considered a sort of kissing-cousin to the study of ethics, because both should follow logically from whatever you believe about the world, from your cosmology. This underlying belief dictates why you behave the way you behave, and why you like the things you like. It determines what is good and what is bad.

It's been said that I lack discernable moral focus.

* * *

When you don't know who you are, every outfit is a costume. Every interaction is a role-play. The only way to be yourself is to be generic, to be as friendly and safe and innocuous and evasive as possible, to dress in non-colors like gray. The only way to make the right decisions is to decide nothing.

The only way to be comfortable is to disappear completely...

---

Stories in Stone 

Part One: "Counterpoint"

I walked by it every day for a few weeks before I gave it a closer look—a square granite column just outside the "T" stop where I pick up the subway, about five feet high, in the middle of a small courtyard. It was carved on all four sides with what turned out to be a story, "Counterpoint," by Jane Barnes, about a husband and wife in the middle of a small squabble, while the wife played a piano piece by Bach—a short meditation on intimacy and also the distance that will always exist between two people. Or so I read it, since these things have been on my mind lately.

I couldn't help but be struck by the audacity of writing in granite, a medium which renders every word choice, every comma and turn of phrase irrevocable. No second-guessing, no last minute editing. I realized, after a minute, that this is no less true of any other sculpture, or for that matter any other work of art, even writing: once the presses begin to roll, the book or magazine is just as irrevocable. Just as frighteningly permanent.

Part Two: Spirit Stones

Boston's Museum of Fine Art has a collection of Gongshi, scholar rocks—naturally-formed stones collected (mostly by the Chinese) for their unusual shape and natural beauty, for over a thousand years. These stones, also called "spirit stones", usually have a porous surface molded by water and other erosion, and scholars in the East have used their intricate surfaces as an object of meditation.

The fractal-like nooks and crannies of the stones give them an almost infinite surface area, and Chinese scholars compare them to the infinite "inner cave" of the mind.

The bodies of the stones have eroded to less than they once were, and this, according to the Chinese scholars, has made them more.

Part Three: Permanence

In my walks through Boston, I found another set of etchings in granite columns: tombstones. This city is home to some of the oldest graveyards in the United States. Many of these headstones are extravagant, noble things—their owners maybe hoped through sculptural grandeur to achieve a kind of permanence that their bodies didn't offer. But I notice that rain and wind have wiped the faces of many of these stones clean, leaving no trace of who lies beneath: the names, merely carved in stone, weren't permanent at all...

Foggy 

Today, all the world's eyes are on London, and so were mine—but the London I was looking at was filtered through Claude Monet: the Brooklyn Museum is running an exhibit called Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames, 1859-1914.

Artists flocked to London in the second half of the 19th century, in part to find refuge from the Franco-Prussian War, and also to get a closer look at the ways the Industrial Revolution was reshaping Old London: the fog and colors that fascinated Monet owed no small part to the two-hundred tons of coal ash that were getting dumped into the air each day. Painters before and after Monet focused on the social and economic ramifications of all this industrial empire-building; Monet chose instead to aestheticize.

Aestheticize he did. I know it's popular or effete or both to say so, but this Monet guy—he can paint. These are probably some of the best-crafted paintings ever made, and if you're in the area, you should see them.

But, the day after these London bombings, it's hard to resist comparison: the smoke pouring out from the tube stations is also a kind of result of industrialization and imperialism. And it's hard not to wonder if we don't need to take a closer look at those socio-economic ramifications, after all...