Zoning out to “Untitled”
When looking at my planner, a few days ago I saw that I had to post about the MoMa by Thursday. Having people coming over the weekend and having classes in the afternoon on weekdays, I’d thought I’d visit the MoMa sometime at night. It would be a nice calming stroll where I could look at some pretty colors and fancy architecture after my brain had already been zombified after an economics class. So I set out on Tuesday ready to relax when I found out that the MoMa closes at 5:30. When I saw that, more fucks came out of my mouth than I am proud of. So first off, I’m going to start off by complaining that a museum shouldn’t close that early on a weekday. So after finishing a 4 o clock class, I rushed on to the subway and got there at about 4:45. With little over half an hour left, there was a lot of museum to look at in that brief amount of time. I wanted to approach going to an art museum differently than what I was used to; and really wanted to try ‘seeing’ and deeply thinking about all the paintings. But for whatever reason, I was simply not in the mood. Maybe it was the anxiety that I wouldn’t get the assignment done or perhaps the adrenaline from rushing to the museum itself, but I decided that I really wanted to relax and enjoy myself. So I thought, I think I’m going to see things a little differently; and decided that I would browse through the galleries and comment and look at whatever was funny to me. I thought that humor would probably be the best tool to calm me down and really appreciate the different paintings. But soon I realized that looking for the funny got old fast. Many paintings were so simple and so bland that I found it to be eventually more taxing on me to actually make up a ridiculous story- so I gave up. I just wandered around the museum and decided to ‘let it come to me’. It was kind of a silly strategy, but I thought the worst thing would be I didn’t absorb anything and would have to come back on Wednesday and figure out something to talk about. So I took a walk around the museum and treated it more like a walk, just defeated I decided that it was a tranquil and somewhat serene place to daydream and wander. After sitting down, I saw “Untitled” by Lee Bontecou it was a good painting to zone out to. It was very ominous. Basically it was a dark hole surrounded by some kind of industrial material. I liked this piece, not just because it was 3 dimensional, but because it didn’t seem to make me think I was supposed to be getting something out of it. It wasn’t telling the tale of a random girl or nude, it simply was there, watching me. It didn’t seem to care that another random college kid was trying to decode this museum. It just stayed there and stared. For some reason I always got the feeling that it was looking at me once I appeared in the room. It reminded me of one of my favorite old movie “Alien” where in the end the alien gets flushed out into space. I think when I looked at it I thought of space a lot for some reason, just the emptiness and the almost alien exterior that surrounded this black hole made me think of something beyond the earth realm. I then thought about the horror movie “The Ring” and how the dead Samara creeped out of the well. Overall, it was definitely a dark and mysterious painting: giving off vibes of mystery, and suspense rather than a clear emotional background. I think my love for literary and film horror provoked my stumbling and losing myself on this random piece of artwork. I guess looking ahead, maybe I’ll be drawn to the more mysterious, more suspenseful works. And right as I really zoned out to the hole, one of the staff at the museum tapped my shoulder and told me that the museum was going to close soon. And when I looked back at the painting it just looked like a boring old hole. I turned around and started to leave when the feeling that it was watching came over me again and as I turned around it seemed more sinister for some reason. It was all pretty bizarre and I don’t know if that was really meant at all by the artist. I just hope his intended meaning wasn’t something too different although I guess its hard to relate to aliens and creepy dead children. All in all, I had an interesting day at MoMa, but I’d like to go back, there was a lot that I felt like I could go deeper into but panicked for time. And once again, I’d like to say that closing a museum at 5:30 is dung.
Posted: September 20th, 2012 under MoMA.
