Yesterday was my day off from AWP-related events. Lori and Adam took me to the Museum of Contemporary Art since I had been to the Art Institute many times before and wanted to see something new. Of course it had to be kid day, or family day, and while I know these events are vital to keeping museums relevant and out of the red I’d prefer to see art without screaming children running around, or annoying parents who dumb down the complexity of the works to either avoid having to explain the risque or because they don’t understand what they’re looking at either. I know, I’m an awful person.
Here’s a list of the works we saw: Alexander Calder mobiles, sculptures and drawings (my favorite was a whimsical cat-like creature which, thanks to some expert lighting by the museum, cast a mask-like shadow on the wall behind it); a huge room of Kara Walker’s silhouettes where we marveled at her ability to express such mystery by just presenting the outline of a scene or events, whether it be the swamp-like, spanish-moss hanging trees, the faerie-like mischief of children and adults with musical instruments for body parts, women wearing heads as hats, grotesque tongues lolling out of mouths, etc., and wondered whether she reuses the cutouts or makes new ones for each installation; William Kentridge’s film History of the Main Complaint along with some of the large-scale drawings for the film. Basically he draws his image, snaps a shot with the camera set-up in his studio, erases or moves the image to its next location, takes another shot with the camera, and so forth. It makes these beautiful trails when viewed sequentially in film form. The imagery is also very haunting–telephones and other office supplies lodged in a businessman’s body, ghostly men running from trees and one smashing into the windshield of a car, the coma of shock the businessmen enters and his doppleganger doctors hunched over his hospital room bed.
What else: a Cindy Sherman room of photographs, a huge city-like installation of Sarah Sze’s, and a room that juxtasposed Donald Judd’s cantilevered blocks and minimal boxes with Sharon Lockhart’s hyper-attention to detail in oversized photographs (in two that hung side-by-side where a mother-figure is helping a girl put a puzzle together we stood for some moments trying to find the difference between each work until I noticed the puzzle piece the mother was holding was slightly lifted in the one photograph and firmly locked into place in the other, almost like two frames from a film).
We spent most of our time in the Joseph Grigely galleries. Lori knows Joseph and explained how he is deaf and when one sits and has an intimate conversation, he doesn’t use a translator but relies on hand-written notes to communicate with his friends. Joseph’s been collecting these notes and cataloging them for years and returns to them as art objects that can be assembled and placed in combination and relation to each other.
Many of Grigley’s works explored the relationship between sound and silence, or explored his own way of experiencing the world as a deaf man. There was a wall of images cut from the NYTimes and in each it depicted a singer or musician in mid-act, mouth open, cheeks flared. Those images are great equalizers: someone who has their hearing will have the same experience of hearing nothing when looking at these frozen stills. One of the best works explored lip-reading using a choir singing familiar Christmas carols. There were two screens set up with two large speakers above you depending in front of which screen you stood. In front of the left screen you heard the carol as it would sound to someone who could hear it; in front of the right screen you heard the carol as Grigley “hears” it through lip-reading. It made for some pretty amazing “translations” such as the second verse of “Silent Night”: “Sailing light, Rolls in flight! / Leopards make hats at night! / Laura’s dream from heaven afar / Every horse sings “Hal, where are ya?” / Mike the Zephyr is born / Mike the Zephyr is born.”
I bought a book on Joseph Grigley and found a DVD for the film The Red Balloon. The retired woman working the checkout asked if I knew the story as a little boy and I said yes, it was a favorite, and she said “Well I hope you enjoy it as much as an adult as you did as a boy.” Very sweet.
We spent the rest of the day wandering around their very Ukrainian and hipster hood in Chicago, visiting book stores, brunching late and then finally off to O’Hare where I was on a very empty flight home and had my choice of seat as I delved deeper in Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, the recently released Reborn. They’re good. Really good.