Outliers of culture

So I went to the American Folk Art museum today--the first time I've gone since I went a few weeks after it opened a few years ago. It was more disappointing that I remembered--like six floors of stuff in a tall, narrow building, most of which looked like it was created by the mentally ill.

Seriously--I understand the collection of folk art is a relatively new field, and it's possible I'm missing an entire world of interesting objects and paintings. But in order to get people to appreciate it, you've gotta deal head-on with most people's natural reaction, which is all this stuff looks crude and brings to mind the scribblings and cobblings of crazy people.

A lot of it was complex; many of the works seemed to have religious or spiritual linkages. But mere complication, even time-consuming complexity, does not make art. And a museum is not the place for non-art to be 'rewarded' or acknowleged.

Almost none of what was in the museum, apart from the building itself, appealed to me in either an aesthetic or an intellectual way; most of it was just jarring and unsettling without also being thought-provoking or emotionally rewarding.

One work that I did 'like' was by Maceptaw Bogun; it essentially was a waterfall scene made from pieces of thickly-painted carpet stuck to a canvas. For some reason it really worked; I'm not sure if making paintings from carpet is a known thing in the art world, but I've never seen it before, and the piece of carpeting he picked for the waterfall and the paint he put on it really conveyed rushing water.

But that was about it. Even the museum's manner of display put me off; it felt very anthropological, the way the cases looked and the lighting and colors and groupings they used.

It reminded me of how Western museums display art from Africa (and sometimes Asia too), as 'representative'. Which just means hey, we don't think any of this is good enough to stand on its own as a work of creation, we're just randomly showing some things we managed to pick up somewhere to give you a taste of the exotic, really there were scores of other similar things that could be behind glass here but this is what we got.

The difference though is when it comes to non-Western art that method of display shows the ignorance of the institution rather than, perhaps, serve as a commentary on the thread-bareness of the subject matter.

(Incidentally, why are the aesthetic taste of most Westerners still so bad when it comes to the non-Western, in art and food and everything else? It doesn't work the other way around, just think of all the Asians for example (and I mean Asians, not Asian Americans) whose judgments about things from the West are world-class, without the whiff of the colonial or commodification or belittling or overbearingness or insecurity that always seems to me to accompany Western assessments of the East.)

At least it was Friday night free admission. Likewise at The Museum of Modern Art, which per usual meant hordes of (mostly) young people from all over the world strolling about and taking pictures like mad. MOMA's space encourages sweeping tours through galleries--which is generally what I do when looking at contemporary art.

A few works caught my eye; Moma's website has great search functionality, hence the ability to reproduce the works here. You can even browse thumbnails of the works they have by a particular artist--why doesn't every museum website have this 'create your own gallery' feature?!

The Picasso section made me think about how brilliantly diverse this man was--so many different styles of painting, each interesting but especially so next to each other. It's one reason why I've always liked Georgia O'Keefe--she's like three great artists in one.

One of Edward Hopper's works made me stop and look--his Gas had me imagining what it'd be like to be that man, tending to his pumps in that outpost of civilization.

Hopper always gets nature right; its forebodingness in mass, its stark colors in relation to light, how it comes right up to and then encroaches on the man-made. Moma's wall text reads:

This work resulted from a composite representation of several gasoline stations seen by the artist. The light in this painting—both natural and artificial—gives the scene of a gas station and its lone attendant at dusk an underlying sense of drama. But rather than simply depicting a straightforward narrative, Hopper’s aim was “the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature”—in this case, the loneliness of an American country road. Fellow artist Charles Burchfield believed these paintings would remain memorable beyond their time,because in his "honest presentation of the American scene . . . Hopper does not insist upon what the beholder shall feel."

He doesn't insist on what we feel because this is America--we have so many landscapes, so many people, so many life stories, everyone's bound to react differently.

I wanted to somehow get the people who flowed past Hopper's little section to stop, to cease chatter for a minute and just look and process and have an actual encounter with Hopper (aside from Nighthawks). But I guess passing by is a form of feeling.

The other specific work that caught my eye, + and -, is by a woman in some ways Hopper's polar opposite, Mona Hatoum. The wall text told us she's "(British of Palestinian origin, born in Beirut, Lebanon, 1952." It described her work this way:

This work is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.

All I know is I stood there and watched it for 10 minutes, to see how it worked and also to watch the sand hypnotically smoothed then raked, smoothed then raked.

Was it art? Sure; it made me think and took me out of the temporal. Smooth sand is nature; ridged sand is man. Nature always follows behind us, smudging what we try to make of her, even as we spin forward shaping her in our hands.

Uncredited photos of Edward Hopper's 1940 Gas and of Mona Hatoum's 1994-2004 Self-Erasing Drawing from MOMA's website.