Samurai strong

Yesterday J and I took the T into Boston to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, where we saw Paul Cezanne’s “The Large Bathers,” which is currently on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as an exhibit of samurai armor. Although I don’t know much about Cezanne or the samurai, I was enchanted by both exhibits, albeit in entirely different ways.

Cezanne’s “Bathers” are calmly monumental with their bold, blurry pastels. Although the painting is in oil, Cezanne creates a watercolor-like effect that is simultaneously provocative and mesmerizing: the kind of painting you could study for an eternity, drawn into the depths of its soothing pastoral vision.

Displayed alongside Paul Gauguin’s equally evocative “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going,” Cezanne’s “Bathers” represents a turn away from the classical nude, which seems almost too-perfect in its idealized timelessness, and toward a more embodied Modernist vision. The bodies Cezanne and Gauguin depict look like actual, earthly bodies at rest, and it seems natural to rest a while in their presence.

The pieces of samurai armor currently on display at the MFA, on the other hand, are almost cartoonishly quirky, and I immediately fell in love with them. After walking through several galleries containing glass-case examples of helmets, breastplates, shin-guards, and other armature, J and I entered a room with two life-size free-standing displays: on one side, a trio of fully-bedecked warriors galloping on heavily-armored steeds…

…and on the other, a gang of walking warriors, their ornate armature letting enemies know in an instant that these guys mean business.

When you look like a bad-ass space alien and carry a big sword, you can let your appearance do the talking.

This is the last week of the semester at Framingham State, which means I’ll be swamped with paper-grading for the next two weeks. It felt good to take a virtual vacation at the MFA yesterday, traveling first to France to lounge with Cezanne and then to imperial Japan to stand with samurai. I’ve set the photo at the top of this post as my desktop background: a silent reminder to stay samurai strong over the next few, tiring weeks.

Click here to see my complete photo-set from yesterday’s MFA outing. Enjoy!

 

A thousand flowers

Long-time readers of “Hoarded Ordinaries” might remember the entry I posted after seeing the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in March, 2006. Crafted by 19th century glass artisans Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, these botanical specimens amazed me with their life-like detail. “Hearing the phrase ‘glass flowers,’” I wrote, “I imagined the objects on exhibit would look like glass first and flowers second: pretty, colorful, and entirely artificial looking, more art than science.” What I’d expected when I went to see the Blaschkas’ glass flowers, in other words, was something like the work of Dale Chihuly.

The countless flower-like forms in “Through the Looking Glass,” the exhibit of Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts through August 8th, are exactly what the Blaschkas’ flowers aren’t. Commissioned by a botany professor in 1886, the Blaschkas’ glass flowers are realistic specimens that capture plant anatomy in painstaking detail. Dale Chihuly’s flowering forms, on the other hand, suggest the color and shape of flowers as seen in a dream. The Blaschkas captured the anatomical details of plants as they are, and Dale Chihuly captures the contours and colors of flowers as they could be. “These are flowers,” you might say in response to the Blaschkas’ handiwork; of Chihuly’s specimens, “these are flowers on drugs.” Any questions?

“It’s like standing inside a kaleidoscope,” one museum-goer observed. “It’s like something out of Willy Wonka,” another woman noted. Stepping into Dale Chihuly’s fertile, flowering world, you’re forced to resort to metaphor, the forms before you not quite matching anything you’ve seen before. “It kind of looks like a cactus,” one visitor said in reference to Chihuly’s “Lime Green Icicle Tower,” and I overheard other onlookers comparing various pieces to fruit, candy, and an entire menagerie of exotic, sinuous creatures.

Turning the corner to consider the room-length wilderness of “Mille Fiori,” for instance, you might as well leave language at the door, the forms before you suggesting a hybrid riot of animal, vegetable, and miracle.

“Oh, my!” was how one child described it, and she stole the words right out of my mouth. Is this a marsh filled with reedy tangles or an exploded candy-factory offering a wealth of candy canes and rainbow-hued jawbreakers?

Time and again, I heard parents quizzing their wide-eyed youngsters: “Which one is your favorite?” And time and again, I heard children resorting to fanciful descriptions: “The pink snaky one!” “The one that looks like licorice!” “The peppermint!” Adults, too, pointed, gesticulated, and struggled to categorize what they saw. A debate arose, for instance, around a huddle of pointy-ended black blobs: were they tubers, snails, seals, or shrews? Unlike the Blaschkas’ glass flowers, which are politely labeled with genus and species, the creations in Chiluly-Land defy categorization, blurring the boundary between plant and animal, actual and imaginary. This ain’t your Grandma’s flower garden, but a psychedelic romp through a land of light and color.

As if the thousand flowers of “Mille Fiori” weren’t mind-boggling enough, the glowing expanse of Chihuly’s “Persian Ceiling” evokes an other-worldly, aquatic realm. Are these underwater flowers, terrestrial jellyfish, or translucent denizens of a yet-to-be-discovered planet?

The Blaschkas themselves made glass invertebrates–”jellyfish, anemones, planarians (flat worms), polychaetes (tube-dwelling worms), sponges, radiolarians and assorted molluscs”–that reside in Dublin’s Natural History Museum, which I visited in February, 2006…but again, the Blaschkas’ crystal jellies are worlds apart from Chihuly’s aquatic creatures. The Blaschkas captured the weird colors and stunning shapes of creatures that actually exist: their work mesmerizes because it suggests things you might see if you traveled the world with open eyes. Chihuly’s work, on the other hand, offers a fantastic glimpse into a world that never was: the muscae volitantes of imagination’s eye.

Click here for more photos of Dale Chihuly’s “Mille Fiori,” or click here for more images of his “Persian Ceiling.” Click here to see a complete photo-set from Chihuly’s exhibit at the MFA. Enjoy!

 

Enormous

Yesterday I went to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to see “Through the Looking Glass,” an exhibit of Dale Chihuly glass sculptures on view through August 8th. By far the largest of the sculptures on display is the 42-foot-tall “Lime Green Icicle Tower,” which looms in the enclosed Shapiro Family Courtyard between the MFA’s old and new wings: a spiky spire of neon-green goodness.

Before seeing the “Lime Green Icicle Tower” in person, I’d read about the MFA’s campaign to purchase the piece, which costs more than a million dollars. “Through the Looking Glass” has been an inordinately popular show, with weekend crowds queuing for hours for a turn inside the exhibit’s riotously colorful galleries. Now that so many museum-goers have seen Chiluly’s work–and now that so many museum-goers have seen how the “Lime Green Icicle Tower” perfectly decorates the Shapiro Family Courtyard’s otherwise bland, empty expanse–it’s only natural to ask those appreciative crowds to chip-in for the sculpture’s purchase.

Having snapped a handful of pictures of ol’ Limey when I first arrived at the MFA yesterday, I found myself photographing him again and again from every angle and seemingly at every turn. The “Lime Green Icicle Tower” is one of those monumental pieces that seems so at-home in its present location, I can’t imagine the space without it.

On the MFA website, there’s a short, time-lapse video of the installation of the “Lime Green Icicle Tower”: like an artificial Christmas tree, “Lime Green” was assembled branch by branch, starting at the base and working upward. Now that “Through the Looking Glass” is entering its final week, I hate to imagine crews tearing down ol’ Limey branch by branch, sending his pieces packing. Like a neon-green tree or spiky glass cactus, the “Lime Green Icicle Tower” has set down roots here in Boston, and I for one want him to stay.

Am I willing to put my money where my mouth is on that point? You bet your lime green icicle tower. Although the MFA has a page online where you can donate toward the sculpture’s purchase, and although cell-phone users can donate $10 by texting the word TOWER to 50555, I chose to make my contribution the old-fashioned way by dropping some cold green cash into one of the courtyard’s donation boxes.

Like individual branches assembled to form a towering green spire, your donation plus my donation plus every other museum-goers’ donation adds up to something enormous.

Click here to view my complete photo-set of Dale Chihuly’s “Lime Green Icicle Tower.” I’ll share the rest of my photos from “Through the Looking Glass” over the next week, as I’m able to sort through them. In the meantime, this is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Enormous.

 

Irreconcilable

This morning I found the following entry in an almost-empty notebook: an essay I’d written on a day I’d gone fishin’ at the Museum of Fine Arts back in August, 2009. This is one of the things I like about keeping a journal. At any given moment, you can turn the page to rediscover something sensational you wrote then subsequently forgot.

Irreconcilable
Thursday, August 27, 2009

The judge was nearly an hour late. I don’t remember much from the divorce hearing that ended a nearly 13-year marriage, just as I don’t remember much from the modest wedding–just immediate family and a handful of friends–that began it. But I remember the judge being late.

It was October: too early for weather delays, but old cars break down year-round. Presumably my judge–funny how spending five minutes with a man will make you feel possessive of him–drove an old, unreliable car, as the bailiff seemed nonplussed when he announced the delay.

On that October morning, my judge was late–nearly an hour late–to my divorce hearing, and I fretted in the plain, paneled courtroom with its lawyers and tense-looking couples, none sitting next to the other, that the judge wouldn’t show up, my court date would be postponed, and after almost 13 years of marriage, I might have to wait a few extra days or even several weeks to end it all officially.

Marriage and divorces are both peculiar things. We place such value on the inexplicable power of brief, spoken sentences, as if words had the power to effect instantaneous and miraculous change. “I do” is the incantation that starts it all: so much tumult and transformation curled into two short syllables, an entire life–two entire lives–changing irrevocably in the space of a single breath.

My practiced line at my divorce hearing–my divorce hearing, not ours, the simple choice of pronouns saying everything–was much longer, but just as life-changing. When asked by the belated judge–my judge–what was the cause of this uncontested divorce–a dissolution so banal, my soon-to-be ex-husband didn’t even drive from out-of-state to be divorced in person–I was instructed by my lawyer not to tell the most dangerous of things: the truth. Instead, the magic incantation that would move my belated judge to sign the magical paper dissolving nearly 13 years of marriage was “irreconcilable differences have caused the irremediable breakdown of this marriage.”

It’s a mellifluous-sounding statement, sufficiently grounded in legal terminology to sound official, “I quit” or “It’s over” sounding too impetuous. A line like the one I rehearsed was complicated enough that you did have to practice it to sound convincing. You didn’t just utter it in the heat of passion or on a whim; if you could say it with a straight face, presumably you meant it.

Reality, of course, is never as simple as even the complex lines we practice in advance.

The real answer to my judge’s simple question of why would have been much messier had I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of truth. Why did my ex and I divorce? At the time, I’m not sure I could have explained something as simple as why. Who was to blame, he or I? Had we married too young? Had he starved me with emotional neglect, or had I choked him with unrealistic expectations? Did our marriage die under the inestimable weight of lingering resentments and reality-crushed dreams? Was either, both, or neither of us to blame?

“Irreconcilable differences” is a convenient shorthand for the most terrifying utterance of all: “I don’t know.” When I told my mother about my impending divorce, she told me, repeatedly, not to blame myself. “You can’t see yourself as being a failure,” she insisted again and again. “These things happen; you haven’t failed.” These weren’t the words I expected from my long-married, devoutly Catholic mother: surely someone had to have caused even a presumably no-fault divorce, and who better to blame than the only partner present in that blandly paneled courtroom?

I’ve tried hard these past five years not to blame myself–not to blame my ex–not, in a word, to blame. It’s incredibly difficult, though. That question of why still lingers, and pointing to “irreconcilable differences” feels like a cop-out. What have I learned from the end of an almost-13-year marriage? What mistakes did I make then that I might avoid in the future? On the one hand, I mustn’t see either myself or my ex as having failed–I mustn’t stoop to the vindictive level of blame. And yet on the other hand, if I don’t study my mistakes, how can I avoid repeating them?

You can’t simultaneously excuse yourself from blame and learn from your mistakes, although I’ve spent nearly five years trying to do both. These two ideas and the impulses they inspire, I’ve found, are simply irreconcilable.

Click here for more images of the Japanese garden, or here for images of the giant baby heads, or here for images from inside the Museum of Fine Arts, all of them taken the same day I wrote this subsequently-forgotten notebook entry in August, 2009. Enjoy!

 

Under wraps

This weekend a friend and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts, where we viewed the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit which is ending next month, as well as a visiting Van Gogh which is similarly poised to gogh. Both of these exhibits were a bit disappointing, failing to meet my expectations. The Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit was in a hallway, so it was difficult to get and stay into the mood of Parisian cafes and cabarets with other Museum patrons constantly moving to and fro. The mood could have been “Parisian sidewalk cafe,” I suppose, if there had been tables at which we could have sat and contemplated the art over coffee and croissants. Instead, it felt like trying to look at art at a shopping mall, with passersby bumping into browsers at every step.

The visiting Van Gogh had lovely accommodations, hung at the head of the museum’s Impressionist gallery, which has remained untouched by the Museum’s ongoing renovations. A low barrier indicated that this particular Van Gogh was Special, different from the other Van Goghs and Monets that typically hang in this room: don’t get too close! But the painting itself was a disappointment: so very small, with its eponymous sower dominating one half of the canvas while an ominously dark tree towered over the other half. The sower, in a word, was too large and the landscape around him too small. I’m biased, of course: my proclivities run toward landscapes, not portraits, and my favorite Van Goghs are his wheat fields, where human figures factor only insignificantly, if at all.

The highlight of our brief visit was purely accidental: the sight of several works from the permanent collection wrapped in cellophane to protect them from dust and damage during renovation. Last year, one wing of pottery was swaddled against jack-hammer vibrations, with squat works circled with tubular sandbags while taller pieces were carefully laid down on cushions (or removed to storage) lest they topple and break. This weekend, the hanging figures of Jonathan Borofsky’s I Dreamed I Could Fly, which I’ve photographed often, were wrapped in cellophane and tape, still suspended from a sky-lit ceiling, and another sculpture was thickly wrapped in opaque layers of plastic. The Calder mobile by the stairwell was gone rather than wrapped, and the mirrored glass case containing Josiah McElheny’s Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism (another work I’ve often photographed) was boxed in cardboard and securely taped: a “Do Not Open ’til Renovation Is Over” present.

Although I went to the MFA this weekend specifically to see two temporary exhibits, it was this disguised portion of the permanent collection which surprised and tickled my fancy: a jolt to my aesthetic expectations. All it takes, apparently, is a new outfit to remind me of the fact that everything old can be instantly new again.

 

Of a certain age

It’s been almost a week since I celebrated my 41st birthday with a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, and let me tell you: I simply love life on this side of forty.

Last year when I celebrated the Big 4-0, I wasn’t sure how middle age would suit me. “Middle age,” in fact, sounded like a term I couldn’t imagine applying to myself. Given the fact that it feels like I finally finished graduate school only yesterday, it seems physically impossible that I could be over forty. But, it really is true when they say time speeds up as you age, for my long-awaited graduation from graduate school happened over five years ago, not yesterday. My twenties were the decade I married and moved to New England; my thirties were the decade I finally finished school, divorced, and came into my own; and my forties are…now. I’m not exactly sure how I got here so fast, but here I am, waking up to “middle age.”

And therein lies the kicker: it turns out I actually like being “middle aged.” I don’t necessarily like that term, as it sounds middling and mediocre: not quite young and not quite old, just a nondescript mishmash of This and That. I don’t like the way that many folks utter the term “middle aged” as if it were an epithet synonymous with “out-of-touch and stuck-in-a rut” rather than “a period of life when you’re still active enough to do fun things and wise enough to enjoy them sensibly.” But despite my initial indecision about how I’d like being 40, I’m finding that being a “woman of a certain age” really suits me. I’m beginning to think, in fact, that I’ve been a 40-something-year-old all along, and only now am I behaving in a way that is age-appropriate. Finally, the sprinkling of gray hair that looked so strange when I started getting it in high school looks entirely appropriate on a 40-something head: a badge of wisdom rather than an unfortunate genetic inheritance.

Jo(e) hit the nail on the head in her post about not making New Year’s resolutions when she remarked, “By the time I was forty, I had decided to accept my vices as part of my charming personality.” In my 20s and 30s, I looked at myself as some sort of self-improvement project that was never quite finished, and this meant I spent a lot of time and energy mentally comparing myself to people I thought were more “improved” than I was. During the long slog to my doctorate, for example, I wondered why I couldn’t/didn’t finish sooner, like others did. In the years leading up to my divorce, I wondered why I couldn’t assume the character of the “perfect wife” as I imagined other married women did. Throughout my twenties, I worried that I wasn’t as good a college instructor as my peers were, and throughout my thirties, I even compared myself to my female students, wondering why I as a 30-something woman couldn’t look as cute, thin, and fashionable as a fresh-faced coed.

Somewhere around the time I turned 40, though, many of these comparisons simply fell away. It was as if I reached a point in my life–as if I reached “a certain age”–where I was simply too tired to worry about how I look, seem, or behave in comparison with other people. Somewhere around the time I turned 40, I remembered I’ve never been cute, thin, or fashionable in a conventional sense. I was always the strange kid who, in elementary school, used to climb to the top of the jungle gym to contemplate the universe while my classmates played kickball; I was always the kid who spent more time reading than socializing. Now when I see my 18- to 20-something female students in their crop tops and skinny jeans, I no longer compare myself with that because I was never a girl who wore the latest fashions or anything called “skinny.” As a 40-something, I’m in a completely different category than all the world’s 20- and even 30-somethings, so there’s no use trying to make a comparison.

Going to an art museum on your birthday, it turns out, is a wonderful way to embrace this kind of age-acceptance. The MFA contains artworks of all ages, with galleries devoted to objects both contemporary and ancient. In an art museum, there is no indication that works “of a certain age” are less valuable than younger works; instead, older pieces are cherished as “classics” and “masterpieces.” Why then do we worship human youth over the more seasoned ripeness of age?

Last year, a few months after I turned 40, I went not once but twice to the MFA’s eye-popping exhibit of paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and as a woman of a certain age and body shape, I absolutely loved viewing artworks where full-grown and fleshy women were displayed as being the pinnacle of erotic beauty. Titian’s Venus and Tintoretto’s Susannah aren’t young girls or wispy waifs; they are mature, substantial women who would never stoop to squeeze themselves into skinny jeans. Standing in a room where voluptuous Venuses hung on every wall, I had a moment of clarity: “Maybe this is what mature Italian women actually look like.” If you’re a woman of any age who has ever felt a pang of insecurity when you looked in the mirror or compared yourself with the models in magazines, you know how liberating such a realization can be.

Ultimately, the lesson of any museum is that you should enjoy beauty wherever you find it, regardless of its age or shape. It’s a lesson offered to any who would hear it, but it is one especially savored by those of a certain age.

Click here to see my photo-set from my birthday trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. Enjoy!

 

Respite

One of the things I love to do at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, after a few hours of exploring has caused a case of museum-fatigue, is to find a comfortable chair near the upstairs rotunda and spend a quiet while reading whatever issue of The New Yorker I have stashed in my purse, the John Singer Sargent murals overhead providing ample canopy for the most expansive and inspired of thoughts.

 

Not dead yet

It’s become something of an unofficial tradition for me to go to the Museum of Fine Arts on or around my birthday. I did it last year when I turned 40, and I did it several years before that when I turned 38. Taking a day off to stroll the galleries is a simple pleasure that gives me a chance to take stock of where I’ve been and where I’m going, and I love surrounding myself with beautiful things–paintings, sculptures, and the like–as a reminder of how I’d like my life to be.

In characteristically warped fashion, today I want to spend my birthday contemplating death, first in an exhibit of ancient Egyptian funerary art and next (if I have time) in an exhibit of prints by Albrecht Durer. The ancient Egyptians turned preparing for the afterlife into an art, and Durer’s prints often focused on dark and otherworldly subjects. Neither probably sounds like the stuff of your normal birthday celebration, but I’ve never exactly seen myself as normal. In my mind, taking time on your birthday to remember where your life is headed isn’t morbid; it’s realistic. Although I’m not dead yet, I figure it never hurts to check out the scenery in the “neighborhood” where we all eventually end up residing.

Today’s images come from an August trip to the MFA, when I shot lots of pictures of art, images of the Museum’s Japanese garden, and a photo-set of the enormous baby heads outside the Museum’s Fenway entrance. Enjoy, and I’ll see you once I’m another year older.

 

The face

Today’s Photo Friday theme is The Face, so here’s an extreme closeup of one of Antonio López García’s larger-than-life bronze baby heads, more formally known as “Day and Night.” Beside this sculpture’s angelic sleeping expression, I love the tints of green reflecting from the surrounding lawn: a tinge of summer adding color to a bronze baby’s brow.

I first blogged these paired heads in May of 2008, when they were installed outside the Huntington Avenue entrance to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; they’ve since moved to the museum’s Fenway entrance, on the opposite side of the building. In either location, these big babies are attention-grabbing and seem both playful and a bit ominous. Given how enormous the job of parenthood already is, can you image trying to raise a pair of kids with heads this huge?

Click here for more pictures of Antonio López García’s “Day and Night,” or click here for images from the sculpture’s previous installation site. Enjoy!

 

Tableau

Leslee’s view of Josiah McElheny’s Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism is much more orderly than mine, showing the linear repetition of shiny bottles reflected ad infinitum toward a distant vanishing point. From my angle, I saw a chaos of bottles reflecting bottles reflecting other bottles, the clean geometry of classical perspective being replaced by a self-referential visual clusterfuck. From her taller height, Leslee saw the forest; from my shorter one, I saw the trees. I suppose that’s how it is touring a museum with a friend: the two of you can’t step into the same exhibit twice.

As challenging as it can be to understand a single work of art, singly, adding another perspective can sometimes clarify matters. Viewed on its own while you’re on your own, a single work of art speaks a given language; viewed alongside other works and in the company of other views, that same single work might say something else entirely.

When Leslee and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Friday, we were intent on seeing “El Greco to Velasquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III,” and we did. We hadn’t planned, though, to juxtapose the 17th century works of visionaries such as El Greco with the 20th century Spanish realism of Antonio López García, but we did. How better to understand El Greco’s almost hallucinogenic Toledo landscape than by considering it against López García’s almost photographic Madrid? And how better to appreciate multiple artists’ versions of Mary’s immaculate conception than by viewing them before considering López García’s multiple perspectives of a less-than-immaculate bathroom?

Upon exiting the Antonio López García exhibit and on our way to lunch, Leslee and I passed the reflective bottles of McElheny’s “Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism,” which are contained in a reflective case situated incongruously between the Museum’s upscale first floor restaurant and the stairway leading to its more moderately priced basement cafeteria. Perhaps by reflecting upon the shiny bottles of twentieth century Modernism, you can better decide where to eat? The MFA’s two dining venues provide another sort of tableau, with a dazzling parade of culinary choices being another kind of aesthetic object reflecting ad infinitum toward a digestive rather than visual vanishing point. Shall I have pizza or stir-fry, or soup, salad, or sandwich? In this century more than previous ones, we live amidst a dizzying array of choices. Is it any wonder we occasionally have problems seeing the forest for the trees?

On the wall opposite the reflective case containing Josiah McElheny’s Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism, along the hallway across from the Museum’s restaurant and on the way to the stairway to its cafeteria, Jim Lambie’s RSVPmfa offers a dizzying array of geometric patterns interrupted by three-dimensional objects–chairs, sequined handbags, and the like–erupting from the starkly flat visual pane into the lived space of passersby. Viewed on its own, RSVPmfa is psychedelic enough, its black and white zebra stripes seeming to swirl with your every step: an optical illusion writ large. As luck, chance, or astute curating would have it, Lambie’s wall seems most interesting when viewed reflected in McElheny’s mirrored case, the endless repetition of last century’s RSVP becoming Postmodern when viewed as an unintentional tableau. Sometimes the best way to view one object is by considering it alongside another radically different one.

Click here for my photo-set of these two juxtaposed works; you can find Leslee’s photos from our day at the MFA here. Enjoy!