New York, 2001 |
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The Whitney |
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Joseph Cornell’s little boxes and their meaning had always eluded me
in the past. The whole dada-surrealist thing I’ve considered just too
self-indulgence. But there was one on the wall, in the Whitney Museum, and it attracted
me. I felt like I was looking into a pure, clear mind. Clearer, more direct, than any
painting. Three empty glasses, then one with marbles. A large ball nesting on two rails
above them. Some celestial map, a fragment, behind the array. A little sculpture of a
child’s head, broken open. It made perfect, total sense. It must be I was too young
before, and now I’m not. And the Hoppers! In the flesh they have a wholly different impact than the posters and reproductions we know him from. We think of Edward Hopper as a social commentator. But no, Hopper is a painter, and a colorist. There are pieces of his paintings as abstract as any Gottlieb or Rothko. Diepenkorn stole much from him, I could see, the division of space into planes, the conversation among colored rectangles arranged in a perfect formal structure. My strategy for museums is to explicitly ignore most of the art. I walk into a gallery, and there will be one painting that calls me. I’ll glance at the other work, but beeline to the one painting, and give it all my attention for the time it needs—a few minute to a half hour. Maybe there’s something in the hanging of the room, some communication that is occurring that the curator has arranged, and I’ll note that. But my capacity for the deep attention that good art demands is limited, and ration it. And then I love what happens when you leave a museum. I noticed how, for a block on Madison Avenue, every door fixture was unique. People’s faces became beautiful tableaus for me to read. A flock of high fashion Japanese women, none of their hair a natural color, flowed past me. The buildings became a canyon of sheer cliffs, sky penetrating the depth like a white O’Keefe triangle. |
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