Monday, October 27, 2003
One Coin; Countless Sides
Yesterday was outstanding in all respects. I found it particularly satisfying because everyting seemed to have an analogue, something to compare it to or contrast it against, which brought meaning into relief and significance into focus.
The one thing that was incomparable was the weather - perfect San Francisco October weather, 90 degrees, windless and cloudless and clearer than any bell you’d care to name. It was, after a summer of thick cold fog and strong winds, the weather in which one comes out of oneself. From the moment I arose, flushed with my ‘dividend hour’ courtesy fo falling back into standard time, I felt nurtured by the very air.
The main event of the day was art at SFMOMA. The Chagall exhibit has been in town since June, but we waited till now to see it so we could double up and catch the newly opened Arbus show too during one of the two weekends they overlapped. It was crowded, but Mario Botta’s post-modern ziggaurat with the dramaticly angled marble smokestack handled us all nicely. SO: let’s get aesthetic:
Chagall is too well-known for me to expect much from his work. This established beyond doubt that I am an idiot. The exhibit was large, over 150 works spanning from 1909 to 1970, featuring many pieces I’ve never seen even in reproduction. His color, imagination, themes, courage and depth were profound. His early work recalls Modigliani, Braque, Picasso and many other titans of modernism, though not in slavish imitation but as an original and contemporary co-creator of this critical school. But when he came into his own, with themes of renewal, persecution, rredemption and above all, love, his work literally brought tears to my eyes. The response he evokes is intense and visceral. Works I’d seen in reproduction came to life and embraced me entirely; works that were new to me left my jaw on the polished wood floor even as my heart escaped through my eyes and plastered itself to the canvas. It was pure art, the human soul made visual and visible and captured in time and space. Phenomenal stuff. He lived till he was 97 and even at that age continued to produce truly original, new and uplifting work.
My emotions in turmoil, we descended two flights to see Arbus on the third floor. Again, it was a large exhibit, hundreds of items including her notebooks and influences (photographic and otherwise), her cameras and proofsheets, her letters and sketches and personal books from her personal library. But it was overwhelmingly dominated by her photography, if that’s the right word for what she did with her camera. The works are uniformly beautiful from a purely aesthetic standpoint, perfectly composed and lit and organized. But what she photographed was often the opposite of what we call beautiful. Most of the photos were of people from the ordinary to the freakish. Families out for a walk, children at play, individuals on the street - all captured in moments of overwhelming honesty and truth, but so as to raise terrible questions about the nature of the human spirit. And her pictures of beautiful people - debutants, “winners,” society ladies and establishment men in tuxedos, are even darker and more disturbing for being so thoroughly superficial and artificial. Are we truly so bitter, so ugly, so false and so hideous, from our skin right down to our souls? Many more of her photos are of the underworld - strippers, transvestites, ambiguous couples, sinister children and twisted elders… each face is an encyclopedia of desperation and regret. Occasionally, especially in her series on nudists, she’d find true warmth and humanity, but you’d have to fight the bizarre situation to find it; her landscapes were eerie and unreal (though manifestly identical to the reality in which we live); her posed shots were repellent in their perfect reflection of the pantomime of our own lives and her candid shots were like pulling off a scab or looking under a flat rock at the pillbugs and earwigs - and she accomplished all of this with unerring and incessant beauty within the frame of the photo. I’m not sure how else to describe it. The most intense room in the exhibit was the last one, in which she had a series taken at an asylum for the insane and developmentally disabled; most of the inmates were wearing masks or makeshift costumes and cavorted around large open fields in obvious parody of what I call “real life.” But the frame of the photo dissolves at that point, you walk out of the room and see everybody around you as they are, as subjects and objects, of art and of pity and even in a way of love, all the more in proportion to how much they are hateful and unbeautiful and twisted by their circumstances. Arbus committed suicide in 1971, after about 20 years of photography. This may be the first major retrospective of her work since 1972. It broke my heart and built it back out of kodachrome and paper bags.
We had time for only one more exhibit: Regan Louie’s contemporary collection of 50 giant photographs of Asian sex workers. The photos are all about five feet tall and four feet wide, very crisp in focus, very deep in color, very cold in feeling. Where Arbus made sociology into art, Louie has made art into sociology. I was able to look deeply into faces I’d never otherwise see, but were I ever to see them, I’d never look at them this closely. These are women on the market, some actively selling themselves to him and some, understanding his artistic intentions, letting the camera in behind their facade of come-on makeup. The works were, again, beautiful but hard to look at. They were accompanied by 70 or so important works of photography that represented the supra-boudoir tradition going back to the mid-19th century - photos of whores and carousers, posed and candid, erotic and tragic; photos of human degradation and recreations of folktales and entnological studies with vaguely prurient undertones… walking out of that exhibit, I felt overwhelmingly lucky and sad.
The entire visit to the museum had its own special dichotomy, in that we’d arrived at 9:30 to wait in line for three hours in the warm alley and then on the hot sidewalk of 3d street; I was beginning to think that we wouldn’t be able to spend enough time in the exhibits to justify the price of admission (we were still a good 45 minutes from the ticket counter) when a woman approached us in the teeming line to ask if we wanted free tickets. She’d just attended the exhibit and her tickets hadn’t been torn, and with that she handed us each a free pass to the art. If there’s one thing that’s better than great (anything), it’s free great (anything). We stood there for a moment as our neighbors in the line congratulated us and then we just cruised into the building. The timing was perfect. We’d arrived at the exact right moment to be exactly where we needed to be at the exact moment our angel of gratuitous art bestowed her gift on us. It made the wait feel as if it hadn’t happened, and it made the art much more beautiful and powerful for not having to had pay to see it.
One more dichotomy for the day: On awakening yesterday a bit earlier than I’d expected, I took a shower in dim natural light and felt a slight pulled muscle in my back - so I toweled off, pulled on bike shorts and shimano clip-ins, and took a quick ride across the big orange bridge before breakfast. It’s about a 5 mile ride, which takes me about 40 minutes (there are some decent hills to cover both going and coming back); the air was cool on my legs and in my lungs on the way to Marin county and had warmed up to sublime tepidity by the time I turned around back home. I felt great the whole time, worked out that pulled trapezius, and felt energized and tingly for hours - until we left the museum, a bit worn and frazzled by the six hours we’d spent standing and staring in amazement and awe. We got home just in time to empty the dog and don our stretchies for the poweryoga class we’ve been attending at the Presidio Y, where I always develop a full-body sheen of sweat while exercising every muscle I own in a vigorous, strenuous, deep but not percussive series of poses, vinyasas, and calesthenics. I feel it up the sides of my thighs as I sit here typing this, and down my back, in my neck, my triceps, my calves and feet and fingertips… it’s a great class, very challenging and fulfilling. At the end of class as we lay quietly on our backs, eyes closed, palms upward in the natural light as it faded into dusk and beyond, the pines and eukes rustling and perfuming the air outside the many wide windows of the room, the teacher read this poem by Pablo Neruda:
And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.
***
Then we all went, went home.... and I ate a salad for supper and watched some cartoons and went to a wonderful bed of blissful sleep, and now it is now and time for me to go back to my office for five more days of honest toil. I’ve spent too long typing this but I felt I had to memorialize it, so that I would not forget how things come together and make each other more meaningful and important. I hope you enjoyed reading about it, but that wasn’t the point - it was something I had to do for myself. And now I will do things for other people, and revel in the contradiction. Have a great week.
