Friday #4: Monet-kind-of-day, Small Details

In sickness or in health, I go to the MAM. Today, both boys were barfing, and so I squeezed in a quick art museum visit later in the day. I had an hour to go the museum, take some pictures, find a story to tell you, and then get to Walgreens to buy diapers and Vitamin Water for sick children.

Walk with me...we have to be quick...

Look up as you go up the stairs...

Almost there...

Admission at last...sticker secured...

Another look up, the wings are open today...

Now, time for the Friday picture, I wanted something arty, perhaps a pic that shows my cute outfit. This reflective surface seemed ideal...but wait, who's that racing up towards me. Museum guard. She thought I was trying to take a picture of the verboten art on display on the other side of the glass (the featured "Treasures of Kenwood House."

Lamely, I explained, "No, sorry, I'm taking a picture of myself...for a project...." Trailed off, tried not to think of how I looked to the people on the other side of the glass...

I settled for a shot this way. Now, fully documented, I moved on to the art. Are you still with me?

Which way? Which way? Right or left after the mummy?

I saw a new AIDS Day exhibit in the East Gallery, but that's something that needs time, thought, an hour or more to consider. So, I turned left, sinister as usual.

The West galleries are full of old things. Paintings from the Renaissance, 17th century furniture, Triptychs, Icons, parts of wooden altar pieces, that sort of thing.  My eye was instantly drawn to a new piece on display: a huge, rather luridly painted nativity. (Indeed, sister, they have changed the art this week). Perhaps it's there now because of the approaching holidays.  I didn't take a picture of the whole thing, because it looks as you'd expect.  It was the absurdities of this nativity that caught my eye.

See the headless donkey, appearing from the rock to nibble on the Virgin with the Babe's blue cloak.
(At this point, David Bowie's song from Labyrinth, "The Babe with the Power...", is roling through my head...).

Disembodied head. Check.

I then hurried along, just a few feet away, to the blue gallery, a small rotunda of a room full of whimsical 18th century paintings. It is dominated by this mysterious headless philosopher, who has recently appeared at the MAM.

It stumps me. It needs a head. It is incongruous, and I would have investigated further, looking for a card of explanation, but another museum guard approached me at this point. 

He's a tall, black, middle-aged man in a navy blazer. I recognize him. He's the one that scolded me when my purse maybe-perhaps-almost bumped a painting during the MAM After Dark event. 

Shit. Have I broken another rule? Is this the day this girl gets thrown out of the MAM?

He's in good spirits though and asks me how it's going. 

"Good, good," I said, not wanting to be bothered. "Just looking at things that are absurd."

We agree that the headless philosopher is baffling.  

"Did you see the donkey from Shrek over there?"

Clearly he's referring to the disembodied beast of burden in the nativity.  

"Let me show you my favorite painting," he said, gesturing to this one a few feet away from the headless philosopher.

I'm not wowed. I just see a dude, with some commandments, simple stuff. (I don't have time to waste! Have to find today's art story!)

"Why do you like that?" I ask, remembering my manners. "Because of the subject?"

"No," he exclaims. "Look at the hands! The dirt under the fingernails! It's so real."

Indeed. Look closer:

He's right. That's a damn realistic hand. Time to slow down and look at small details (but I don't have the time today, hurry!). He ushers me out of that gallery, wanting to show me something else:  how much the "Last of the Spartans" looks like Conan O'Brian:

Fair enough. I remember when I worked at the Marquette Art Museum as a guard. When all I did for hours at a time was look at art and think about it, be reminded of things in the world by it, and want to tell someone about it.

And this reminds me of this blog's larger project: finding the intersections between life (namely my own) and art.

I say goodbye to the guard (see you next week, I'm sure), and hurry to another gallery where there's a Monet painting that reminds me of what I see every day as I drive along the Milwaukee Lakefront.

This is Monet's Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effects, ca. 1900 (dated 1903). This is one of his late-career serial paintings (remember the haystacks?).  His comment from the MAM display card:

"The motif is significant for me: what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me" (1895).

I leave the MAM and jump in my car.  I only have 15 minutes to get to Walgreens and get home before Adam has to be somewhere, but I had to get out on the beach and show you some things: 

This is the Milwaukee Lakefront today. The smoke from that stack was blowing just so today. And see the colors? And the bridge's arch? 

A Monet-kind-of-day, don't you think?

The woman in the photo below is not me, but I love the way her hair's blowing in the wind.

Tanker on the lake, boards on the beach. Lines that remind me of the MAM's steel grids. 

Messy nature rounding out this near perfect color palate....

The bridge on the bluff above the lake, directly behind where I parked my car...

As it turns out, what lies between the motif and me is very little indeed...

After some time on the beach, and some time with some art, I felt ready to go home.

Back to the world of commercial drugstores, deadlines, and sick kids battling each other over juice. 

But I'll keep this close...

See you next Friday.

Friday #3: 11/23/12 Black Friday and the Boys

Black Friday.

Try as I might, I couldn't help but plan this post a little bit all this last week.

It was going to be deep.

I was going to juxtapose the notion of spending my time lingering over art versus the madness of Black Friday marathon-deal-hunter-bargain-a-polooza.  I thought I'd even reflect on Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black 1963 painting, Abstract Painting:

But guess who came with me to the MAM this Black Friday to see Abstract Painting:

That's right. Adam was ill, and we needed an outing.  So LRP and EJP, two kiddos under the age of 5, tagged along for something entirely out of their usual circuit of home-school-park-pool-library-therapy. We also brought along one of LRP's (wonderful, amazing, brave) ABA therapists.

Big brother is non-verbal and has autism, and little brother is just downright 2. I didn't know what to expect.

And, you know, they did a marvelous job at the museum.  They weren't the only kids there, and if I hadn't mentioned it (and perhaps if he hadn't been gnawing away at a chewie necklace) you'd never know LRP had autism.  They were just 2 dudes utterly awed by the MAM.   EJP kept muttering, "wow" under his breath, and LRP was stalled by all the light.

Here's our weekly proof of presence:

We bravely marched into the gallery space. 

Again, the mantra of "wow, wow, wow" punctuated EJP's every step.

The joke I'm dying to make here is: "we put the mummy in mama's day at the MAM."

Then, time for something less concrete. Abstract art is actually quite exciting to toddlers because they can relate to the shapes.

"TRIANGLE!", EJP shouted, delighted at his cleverness and the echo in the gallery.

From there to the larger paintings in the back of the museum.

I have studied this painting countless times on my own, but today I got to tell my kids that it was made by the artist using layers of paint and then lifting them with plastic wrap to bring the colors below out. 

I love this blue painting so much. I will go back and investigate some other day when I'm not racing a 2-year-old towards it muttering, "we look with our eyes, not our hands, in the art museum."

"Amazing!" he yells over his shoulder, as he turns the corner into the next gallery. "Wow!"

And then we made some art of our own...

And then it was time to lounge in ultra-modern chairs. 

Liam was on the verge of a meltdown, and so his therapist and I agreed: better a short (30-minute), successful visit to the museum, then to push it and have a meltdown.

Final thoughts: I was telling my sister (who's a gotta-go kind of gal, who checks off lists when she goes to museums) about today's visit to the museum. She blurted out to me: "I mean, do they change the art every time you go? Won't you get bored seeing the same things over and over?"

I told her that most of the art stays the same, but every visit is different.  Last Friday, I was taking in weirdness After Dark with a girlfriend.  This week, I was coloring paper butterflies with my children. Next week, who knows?  

The motto of the MAM is "Where art lives...", and I think that's the end of today. I'm feeling a bit more alive after seeing some art and watching my children wonder at the heady combination of light, color, and creation.  

See you next Friday. 

Friday #2: MAM-AD: Girls Night Out (11/16/12)

I post this picture here to highlight two things: 

• Friday #2, 11/16/12, I went to MAM's After Dark party (sticker to prove it).
• Although I'm lame and didn't bring it, I have a camera. Next time, it comes with me, I swear. In the meantime, this blog post's images rest of the good graces of what I can snatch from Google Images.

MAM's After Dark series happens once a month, runs on a theme, and is a welcome relief to the usual bar scene. It's classy, its weird, the wine is $6 a glass and comes in small cups (but the Stella Artois is always a safe bet). It entices people from ages 3 in their jammies (really, I saw a sleepy toddler there) to people at least 80 (or older, I didn't ask). I'd not been to A-D since I was in college, 12 years ago (good lord that's a full elementary-middle-high school span there), when Adam and I went to a Halloween event.

When I saw the flyer for the "Girls Night Out" MAM-AD event, I called my friend, Liana, and we made it a date. (It was also a great way to get her out of the house while her husband and mine set up a surprise party for her). We're both stupid-busy these days, and our usual Girls Nights usually involve sitting in her living room with wine and plates of fancy green beans.

After we agreed to go, the biggest question of the week was the ever-important girl question: what to wear?

(Will we ever get too old to ask this?)

MAM after dark is kind of fancy, but also artsy, and as we found out, most anything goes.  Here are pictures from previous events (because remember, I'm lame and forgot my camera):

So, what's the right digs for this sort of evening?

We texted about it, there was talk of getting dressed together as girls do; but, our lives are just too full for that. So, we showed up at the MAM, both of us babbling about the "great-dress-good-deals" we'd found that week at thrift stores. Mine was a gray silk tank dress and hers was a black-and-cream summer dress.  We were neither under or over dressed, and we certainly weren't the most interesting ones there.

When I think of "Girls Night" something between "Sex and the City" and "Girls gone Wild" comes to mind. In my past, I've had wild girls nights and then I've also had a group of fellow waitressing friends who refused to buy into it all, and we'd slum it in dive bars.

At the MAM event, there were all sorts of outfits, from the trashy to the classy, but what was really interesting to me were the performance artists scattered throughout the museum (amongst the DJ area, and the places where you could DIY art a rope necklace).

When you think "Girls Night"does this come to mind?

Or this?

Probably not.

Now, thank you MAM, the two are forever etched in my head as part of "Girls Night."

One performance artist danced lithely (like a drooping willow) in front of a projection of great desolation. She wore a gas mask, a childish party dress, and white knee socks with holes in them. People walked past her not saying much.

The girl with the skull had a larger crowd. She danced near the front of the museum, wearing a black unitard, the top of a skull like this cave bear one, some bone-ribs, and a giant white dildo.  Her messy blonde hair tumbled down her back. (Aren't you salty I don't have a picture?). Behind her, shadows danced grotesquely as another girl inside a canvas tent moved sticks around.  It was haunting and primitive and kind of magical.

Other dancers were dressed as prom-dressed zombies, some just did expressive art movement behind screens, and still others moved in groups, making art out of their bodies, and making sound from the materials they found nearby. (Note: not all the dancers were women).

It was odd and wonderful. A girls night worthy of Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter perhaps. Was it a reflection of different women at different times? Was it female subconscious on display? Was it a send-up of the typical girls night?

I'm still chewing on those questions, but I'll tell you this: the next MAM After Dark is a pj jam.

(In December, the Museum throws its first-ever Pajama Jam. Highlights include Dann Smith (one of Wisconsin’s favorite Karaoke DJs), hip-hop lessons with Darrin’s Dance Grooves, board games, Classy Girl Cupcakes, and hot chocolate drinks. Wear your jammies, and don’t forget to bring a new, unwrapped toy to donate to Toys for Tots.)

I'm still stuck on the same question: what should I wear? (and the slightly secondary: how in the world with Pajama Jam be interpreted through the lens of art?). Thrilling to imagine the possibilities (and I swear, camera comes with me next time).

See you next Friday.

Friday #1: Women of Interest (11/10/12)

I know, I know. I'm already a week behind in the writing, but I've got the sticker to prove it happened (and no photoshop to make it reverse, apologies).

Day one of Fridays at the MAM was all about Women of Interest.

My husband, Adam, and I got there right as they opened at 10am. We were alone in this fleeting hour snatched away from our children, our lives, and our piles of work.

I love everything about the museum, including the parking garage:

I love the feeling of driving into the belly of a whale (which is what the architect was going for). I love the soft lights and arching ribs. I love parking our gray minivan in a spot near the door of the museum. But all of that is just prelude. As soon as we step inside, I catch my breath. I love the coils of white marble that curve into circular staircases. I love how my boots sound on the marble as we ascend to the ticket counter. I love the quirky art students, with their short-short bangs, black glasses, and serious eye liner who scan my membership card and give me an admission sticker.  I love that moment right after we get our stickers, when we turn away from the counter and pause. This unspoken moment of "what next?" can determine the whole tenor of my day. Inevitably, I look up.

And that is a step in its own way. I am instantly reminded of cathedrals, skyscrapers, and ambition. I am reminded of sky, steel, and my love of Ayn Rand heroes as a teenager all at once.

"I want to go in there," Adam tells me, pointing to the feature exhibition, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London.  And, so we step out of cathedral space and into gallery space.

The art in this exhibition is really more Adam's wheelhouse than mine- he likes sweeping pictures of ships, columns, and other Neo-classical type art (this is the man who wants to build follies in our backyard someday, sigh).

I like the dark corners where history, art and literature intersect. Here's a good example: This is a painting by Anthony van Dyck, of Princess Henrietta of Lorraine with a page (1634).   Princess Henrietta of Lorraine Attended by a Page, 1634 Oil on canvas.

Not my favorite painting, with all its overt and weird race and class elements (and remember what I was saying about short-short bangs?), but what peaks my interest is this fact: this painting was owned by the unlucky Charles I.  When he lost his head in 1649, this painting disappeared. According to the card at the exhibit it was not acquired by the Kenwood House until the late 19th century. So my question: where was it? Who was holding on to this giant painting while Parliamentarians called for the blood of royals in the 17th century? Where did it go in the time after the Restoration? Did  playboy Charles II bring it back? (I can't imagine him loving this one). Who had it? What basement/attic/back room was it hanging in before it emerged as a star of the exhibition?

Besides these dark corners, I am also always drawn to people on the margins of society.  Like prostitutes. I love paintings of prostitutes because of the unique place they held in society.  Because of the risks they could take. Because of the dare they offered. Take Kitty Fisher for example. It was Kitty's beauty that caught my eye, but her allegory that made me pause. This is famous courtesan, Kitty Fisher, painted as Cleopatra, by Joshua Reynolds.

In this painting, she's dropping a pearl in wine, just like histories most dangerous Cleopatra did.

Here's the legend according to the British Museum: "As the story goes, Cleopatra invited Mark Antony to compete with her in providing a banquet, boasting that whatever he spent she would outdo him. When it came to her turn, Cleopatra simply removed a splendid pearl earring and tossed it into a goblet of wine in front of her. According to Pliny, the pearl magically dissolved in the wine, which Cleopatra then drank. But for the protests of the onlookers, including Mark Antony's, she would have followed with the pair, which, like the first, was worth 100,000 sesterces." (http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/egypt/cleopatra_history_to_myth/william_kent_after_carlo_marat.aspx))

As I look at this painting, I'm also reminded of Emile Zola writing about Nana: 

"Thereupon Nana became a smart woman, mistress of all that is foolish and filthy in man, marquise in the ranks of her calling. It was a sudden but decisive start, a plunge into the garish day of gallant notoriety and mad expenditure and that daredevil wastefulness peculiar to beauty. She at once became queen among the most expensive of her kind. Her photographs were displayed in shop windows, and she was mentioned in the papers. When she drove in her carriage along the boulevards the people would turn and tell one another who that was with all the unction of a nation saluting its sovereign, while the object of their adoration lolled easily back in her diaphanous dresses and smiled gaily under the rain of little golden curls which ran riot above the blue of her made-up eyes and the red of her painted lips. [...} There was a nervous distinction in all she did which suggested a wellborn Persian cat; she was an aristocrat in vice and proudly and rebelliously trampled upon a prostrate Paris like a sovereign whom none dare disobey. She set the fashion, and great ladies imitated her."

Emile Zola, Nana, Chapter X. 

Here's E. Manet's 1877 Painting of Nana, just for some cross-talk between these works: 

***

As I turned away from Kitty Fisher and thoughts of Nana, a girl in the gallery caught my attention. 

She was young, lovely, and wearing a shockingly inappropriate (for 10am) skin-tight, off the shoulder black elastic dress with slouchy boots. It was just enough on the side of revealing that it made me pause. She was clearly not a prostitute, but in every way she was Kitty Fisher or Nana reincarnated in a time and place where she could dare to wear what she wanted. It amused me to no end to see this girl-- did she know she was being watched?-- pause in front of the mirrored vanity that marked the transition into the exhibition gift shop. As she stood in front of the mirror, she let her hair down from a ponytail, and shook it out. She turned her profile from side to side and preened, oblivious to the old man shuffling past her.  She was totally caught up in her own reflection until we walked past, and her eye caught mine as she glanced quickly at Adam. 

I longed to capture this moment of life and art reflecting each other (sorry for the mirror pun), but the moment passed almost as quickly as we did. She turned back to the mirror, we turned away from the trinkets in the gift shop. 

***

With only 20 minutes left of our Friday at the MAM, we ambled and stumbled into something we didn't even know we were looking for. There's an "Art goes to the Movies" exhibit at the MAM, which I wanted to check out for a friend whose Aspegian 2nd grader with is determined to be an animator. 

There we found the last and darkest of the day's Woman of Interest; one of my earliest favorite, marginal, misunderstood women: Maleficent. 

As in Disney's dark villainess from Sleeping Beauty. Just the way her name rolls off my tongue delights me. When I was a girl-child, she was my favorite anti-princess. 

Poor girl, all she ever wanted was to be invited to a party. She didn't get what she wanted, so she took action.  She used her brain to think of a curse that was bound to ensnare; she gathered her minions (goblins whose inspiration was the fevered imagination of painter Hieronymus Bosch); and then she  retreated to her fortress to listen to Beethoven's 9th (as a child, this was the music of darkness to me because of this movie) brood, and practice turning into a dragon. Badass.

I love all the pointy angles in this sketch-- from Maleficent's chin, to her horned hat (which is distinctly devilish compared to the heart-shaped versions of this medieval hat), to the angles of her clothing.  

Clearly this is a woman with edges. Beware.

And we'll end the first Friday there. With the knowledge that in times gone by, Women of Interest were prostitutes or witches (as Bettleheim or anyone who studies fairy tales has pointed out).

Women on the margins are dark, dangerous, daring creatures. They steal hearts, they are beautiful, they are sharp.  They wound.

And I am entranced by their narratives every single time.

See you next Friday.