two things i can't yet shake off: this edward hopper picture of a lone dungareed gas station attendant and a wonderful (no other more apt modifier) afternoon with a fellow blogger at the museum of modern art, which, in a way, could be just one and the same.
yesterday afternoon, lux, a globe trotting blogger, made a pit stop in new york, her mother's provenance. after having notched up all the excitement she could, to probably last her a lifetime, in her visits to vietnam, cambodia, egypt, greece, france and, god knows where else, she decided to have some downtime with moi, mr. excitement, at, of all places, the moma, a favorite haunt of sedate, chanel wearing upper east side matrons.
thinking i should match up all her previous heady travel experiences, i made the gaffe of ushering her first towards the more kinetic pictures of moma's most recent drawings and paintings acquisitions. you know, the type where the very idea of a representation in a canvas would send an artist serious enough to be curated at the moma to art hell apoplexy. and there we were, two flabbergasted art hicks who literally couldn't make heads or tails with the hung pictures.
but we were hardy souls and we slogged it through, our trek made only bearable by our conversations about our differing cultures and our common love for writing. until we finally found ourselves in familiar ground, the museum's gallery of its early modern art warhorses-picassos, matisses, magrittes, and even a spattering here and there of van gogh. and we both heard each other exhaled.
here's a dirty secret i've long kept. despite my very vocal affectations of digging contemporary art, i was never that comfortable around non-representational art. there i've said it. you can now heap scorn on me. i'm waiting. you're all done? let me proceed.
this is yet tentative, but i guess, my unappeasable discomfort with this type of art stems from my relentless love for both the written and spoken word. it's not that i don't get the validity of these paintings. i do, i truly do. the energy, the rhythm, the ambition. i do get them. (the lady doth protest too much!)
only that i also believe, and more strongly, i suspect, that representation is the more inexhaustible language. we still use the english language, say, to write the most scathing of essays, the most heart rending of poems, the most poignant of memoirs. why not representational art, the image, the figure in art?
i also suspect that as a species, us humans, both those from the peripheries of the art world and its metropolises, have this instinctual need to understand and remember things and employ words in our attempts. and to let go of the image, the figure as a latch on point to understand, much more remember, art is arguably akin to shedding our dependence on everyday language to make sense of our existence, to recall all that was sweet and good that ever happened to us. indeed, this art is the art of amnesia, the art of forgetting.
when i tried to show lux this edward hopper picture of the lonely attendant at an isolated gas station on the side of a long straight road which unfurls into the foreboding darkness of a dense wood, she told me something like this was more like me. or perhaps, the picture more to my liking. i wasn't certain then what she meant.
but now, i think i do. for now, i realize i could easily fill the shoes of that attendant. in fact, i am he. lonely and shabbily dressed. check. just a hop and skip away from the foreboding of a dark forest. and expectantly waiting for pit stoppers, like you, lux, to come by, to feel the frisson of excitement and life from stories of their travels. check and check.