Chekhov's Mistress

Art is Where You Get It

by Bud Parr

In discussing the latest issue of Conjunctions, Ron Silliman brings this point…


There are of course many more ways than one to read a text simply front to back the way you were taught in preschool. Just as there different ways to go to a museum or to look at a work of visual art. It’s perfectly reasonable to go to a museum and to sit in front of a single painting or sculpture all day long, just as it is to walk rapidly through gallery after gallery, letting the paintings sweep over you in waves & clusters. That is at least as valid as the zombies you see at these palaces of visual culture with the Official Story literally hanging from their neck & plugged into their ears, wandering from numbered work to numbered work, missing everything else. Or trailing a half-trained docent. Is there anyone who goes to a museum just to look at a single detail – a corner of a Rothko, or the way the registration of paint doesn’t quite fit the lips in one of Warhol’s Marilyn multiples? I don’t see why not. One can learn a lot this way.



It’s a nice validation of the way I read, museum and live. I recently started going to MOMA (museum of modern art) again after not museuming since probably before my son was born. I never have much time to devote to such things, which has, accidentally really, led me to go the museum and look at one piece of art (I used to go to The Met specifically to visit one of a handful of paintings I liked, like The Death of Socrates), or to breeze through, gathering impressions, as the way I recently waltzed through the Jeff Wall exhibit at MOMA. If I limited my museum going to stultifying afternoons with Philippe de Montebello strapped to my earbuds, I’d never go. I realize this may be more of a practical matter than Silliman was talking about, but in truth, it is the realities of life that have stripped away the way I thought I had to get my art. In art of any kind, I’ve learned the experience is where and how you find it.



Same thing goes for books. If I limited myself to only the books I could leisurely read from LOC listing to colophon, I’d absolutely go mad. Instead, I read swatches from a lot of books, draw impressions on the writing and story, often try to get other people to read them as a proxy so to talk about it, if it’s good. And then sometimes, I sit on a sentence and enjoy how it works; that singular beauty as transcendent as a golfer’s hole-in-one or a guitarist’s perfect riff. Or get immersed in a long book to the exclusion of all others for a while. I guess this idea is how blogs fit into my reading too.



Today I watched an elaborate funeral in Chinatown with brass band, videographer, pall bearers wearing yellow smocks (?) and large white headbands. In the midst of all that there was a family grieving such that they could barely stand. Their facial expressions were horrible, yet I couldn’t look away; I kept thinking of the kind of cathartic hysteria that funerals provoke, necessarily so. As an observer (and not grieving except for the sadness I felt empathetically), I got to see another culture right here in my own city, totally unexpected, and see beyond the pomp to the sort of thing that you’d see at any funeral. Both the beautiful sadness of human tragedy and almost folkloric tradition unfolding there was memorable. This to me was as much mimetic art as anything prepared for museum or collector and its ephemerality made it just as valuable to me as the permanence of an installation at MOMA. 

posted March 06, 2007

comments

Sounds like a compelling experience, Bud. Food for living and writing deeper.

    – Robert (03/15  at  11:41 PM)


Bud, you may want to check out Siri Hustvedt’s book of essays, “Mysteries of the Rectangle.” Nine or ten essays on paintings, all really coming from that same perspective--i.e., sitting with one painting for a very long time. Her essay on Giorgione’s “The Tempest” and two essays on Goya are particularly great.

    – pgwp (03/22  at  05:00 PM)


Thanks for the suggestion on Hustvedt (sorry it took me a while to reply, was on vacation), particularly because I’ve wondered how to write about such a thing - writing about music and art seems daunting to me.

    – Bud Parr (04/02  at  08:56 AM)


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