Sunday, November 07, 2004

Cleveland Post-Mortem: Eye Candy

Today will be my first of a handful of little essayettes on my recent trip to Cleveland as a volunteer with Election Protection.  Before I get too far into that, though, I’ll just link to this.  It’s a cheerful article about an alleged wide-scale “spoilage” of “uncountable” votes that has had the effect of shifting the outcome of the election, despite the effort to ensure a clean process at the polling places.  Conspiracy theory, or responsible journalism?  I haven’t yet made up my mind.  But in the meantime, I was actually there in Cleveland, Election 2004 Ground Zero, and some of my experiences there are ones that have sort of stuck with me even to this late date, so I’ll stick you with them for a while. 

Art: Cleveland had a cool project last year to have local artists do makeovers on fireplugs downtown.  My part of downtown Cleveland had the distinct look of a district that was contracting - empty storefronts, or a few tired shops on the ground floor of a once-distinguished mid-rise office block, now abandoned from the mezzanine up and starting to decay; these fireplugs stood before both gleaming and busy commercial towers and vacant shells with crumbling facades, and the busy street rolled by inexorably, and the fireplugs quietly howled their individuality in the diffuse fogfiltered light.  There were quite a few of these fireplugs and I didn’t see nearly enough of them, but I did take a few photos of them and you can find some of those in the photoblog, the link to which is to the left, finally.  These fireplugs seemed extremely hopeful to me, for some reason.  Looking back on the trip, they remain a detail that helps me look forward with optimism.  I have no idea why, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

I also got to visit the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is a really excellent institution with a very broad range of collections.  I saw some great ancient stuff, some cool modern stuff, and some splended stuff from the bits in between… But the place where I found I spent the most time really looking at the paintings, losing myself in my examination of them, was in the italian paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, just as perspective and verisimilitude were being perfected and integrated into the visual arts.  It was fascinating to me to watch the beautiful and rich but flat and iconic faces of medieval art being transformed, one development at a time, into the indistinuishability of a renaissance canvas from a live tableau.  You can see the steps, halting, unsure - here, the floor is painted in parquet to demonstrate the artist’s skill in showing it as a receding surface, but it looks strangely tilted and the furniture on it seems liable to slide off; the buildings in the background do not recede in space because they do not diminish in size as they get further away; the furthest window in the background is exactly as big as the closest one.  But the horses finally look real.  But the baby looks like a 70-year-old man.  But then in the next canvas, from thirty years later, the artist dazzles you with a floor laid with gorgeous marble that gleams convincingly in the false space of the framed environment; the baby really looks like a pudgy little baby, but the angel still seems to be suspended by wires and the wings will get more convincing soon too… It was a time of great promise when these paintings were made, but it was also a time at which things looked, to me at least, rather wrong a lot of the time.  The pre-raphaelites may have taken this notion to its illogical extreme, but their fascination with the era out of which greatness emerged is one that resonates with me as well.  I am grateful that I got to wander the halls of the Cleveland Museum of Art for a while.  It gave me the reminder I needed that perspective isn’t always something that even giants and geniuses figure out overnight, and in the meantime the interim product can be hard on the eyes.  Regardless, something good develops out of it.  Patience will have to become a learned virtue of mine. 

Have a great monday.  Don’t forget to paint your plug.