Museums and Culture

As a class we ventured into the city on a Friday afternoon to visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to see the Rineke Dijkstra exhibit that we had been discussing in class.  A docent took us as a group around the museum through the temporary as well as permanent exhibits.  There was a great variety in styles of artwork: Dijkstra‘s blunt photography, Manet‘s fuzzy impressionist portraits, and Kandinsky‘s early non-objective paintings.  After the guided tour, we were free to go exploring on our own and were each assigned different floors of the Dijkstra exhibit.  The Krazyhouse, a video displayed on the fourth floor of her exhibit and on the seventh floor of the overall museum, captured our attention as it differed from her stagnant photographs and really engaged the viewer through movement and sound.

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The Krazyhouse

Close your eyes.  You’re walking from a brightly lit room into a narrow passage leading you to a large box-of-a-room.  There is little light.  Each of the four walls sports a white screen and each screen has a designated projector hanging from the ceiling.  One at a time, never overlapping, the screens light up with the image of a lone person.  You can’t take your eyes off of that one person; there is no where else to look.  It’s flesh on white.  No where to hide.  No where to disguise your awkwardness.  Watch as the figure begins to dance to the music.  Judge them.  See the fear in their eyes.  Or the complete freedom they feel.  This is The Krazyhouse.

It was the twenty-seventh of August, and I was excited to go to my first Macaulay Event – Night at the Museum at the Brooklyn Museum.  The Brooklyn Museum just happens to be one of my favorite museums due to its variety – art, artifacts, and great temporary exhibits.  I visit the feminist wing every time I stop by – Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is so interesting to look at and I love learning about history’s strong women!  So, of course I was excited for this event.

The assignment for our visit was to talk about the artwork in an intellectual manner.  For me, there’s no difficulty in talking about artwork.  It comes naturally to me.  However, many of my fellow “Macaulians” were very nervous about this assignment.  They felt insecure.  My group-mates thought I was a genius, as I talked about Hellenistic-esque drapery and the symbolism of the color white.  But little did they know, my group-mates themselves made several comments that far exceeded my perceived genius.

I was really blown away while admiring Abbott Handerson Thayer’s My Children in the American wing.  As a group, but I was mostly influenced by the others’ ideas, we decided that the painting was representing Mother Nature and Adam and Eve.  From this assumption, I offered some feedback about Thayer’s style (brushstrokes) and possible symbolism – are the brushstrokes of Mother Nature’s hands more visibly sparse because mankind is killing the natural world through industrialization?  One of the other members of the group suggested that the children (believed to be Adam and Eve) were in a darker shadow because of sin and evil, as they no longer took care of their earth.