culture diary, day 2

Good morning darling. Yesterday, Independence Day, took myself to a museum in Chelsea. Is it possible to get off on the wrong foot at a museum? Yes, it is.

I should back up. After a morning of blogging & breakfasting I left the apartment and thought I'd catch a bargain matinee of Solitary Man, starring Michael Douglas, that's playing at Cobble Hill, a five-minute walk from here. I got there at noon, asked the clerk for a ticket, gave him a ten, and waited for change. He said it's ten dollars. Oh! Isn't there a bargain matinee? He said not today because it's a holiday. I thought, that's new - or relatively newly enforced - because for all the years I lived here I never paid full price for a matinee, including holidays. I said, I'm sorry, I had no idea - could I come back another day? And he was very nice about it, sure, and immediately gave my money back. No attitude, which was really nice. I'll go tomorrow instead - $7 all day & night Tuesdays. Might have gone today - but is today a holiday too? I don't wish to get into the issue. So I'll catch a French film at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema at 2. $10 for adults, all the time. Period. Takes the uncertainty right out of it!

So, back to the museum. This museum's policy is $10 for adults, $7 for artists. I've been feeling more emboldened lately to think of myself as an artist (of sorts), poetic letter writer more precisely. I balk at "poet" - I don't really write poetry, or only rarely. But letters are a legitimate form I believe - art form, that is. (E.D. was always known as a letter writer, but I'm getting the sense that more recently her letters are being formally considered as part of her oeuvre.)

I enter the museum and approach the desk. Three young people sit behind it. I say, pretty shyly, I consider myself an artist, and hand a young woman a ten. She says, oh - umm, do you have a resume or a business card? Say what?!!! (I'm thinking to myself - I have to prove that I'm an artist? it's not enough simply to self-identify as one? Okay, I probably look like a suburban matron - maybe I don't "look like an artist" in the hipster art uniform sense). I feel flustered. I say no - but I do have a website. The young man gets excited, and nods with vigorous approval. Oh that'll do, he says, what is it. And I blurt out the name, and instantly regret it - because of its odd, inbetween nature between public & private. And then I'm really flustered and say, no never mind - I'll just pay the full price, it's okay. And then they're all, no no, just tell us the website. Oh my God. No. It's okay, I'll just pay full price. And I do. Awkward, unnecessarily stressful encounter, not a good way to start off a museum visit.

I don't want you to think that I go through each and every day of my life tiresomely haggling. I don't at all. I hate it. I have never done it. I hate flea markets and avoid situations where one is expected to negotiate or haggle. If this museum had a flat pricing policy, I'd pay the price. I don't try to talk my way out of MOMA's $20 admission. But when the Met says "recommended" admission, and the Rubin allows "artists" in for $7 - I try, legitimately I hope - without trying to get away with something, without being an asshole about it (e.g., offering fifty cents to get into the Met) - to avail myself. If I could easily pay the full price in these situations I would do it. The institutions deserve it and it would certainly make my life easier.

Anyway. The Rubin specializes in Himalayan art, which I'm almost completely unfamiliar with. I was intrigued by their current exhibition, Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures, which explores "thought-provoking correspondences and assymetries" between the "art of death" in Tibetan Buddhist and Christian European traditions. Rich subject. I don't have much to say about it at the moment. It was interesting, though much of the imagery of the Tibetan Book of the Dead went right over my head, unfortunately. I realize it would take concerted study over a long period of time to fully enter it. Here's how ignorant I am of the culture (I'm not proud of my Palin-like ignorance). I watched a short video, an introduction to Kathmandu. Darling, I have heard the exotic name of course, but had absolutely no idea that it's a city - a teeming metropolis no less - in the Himalayas, and an extraordinary one at that, with art and temples at every turn and a pervasive sense of being in close contact with the gods. Imagine that, I thought, such a place absolutely exists, its world worlds, millions of people live their lives - all the while even when I had no idea!

I moved about the dimly lit gallery and decided to jot down a few notes. Without thinking I opened my handbag, fished for readers, pen and notebook, pulled them out, and scribbled. Across the darkened gallery space elevator doors open and I realize that a guard is warily coming towards me. I must have been observed on a surveillance camera and judged to be a potential threat. I feel sickened by this. It was stupid of me to have fished into my purse in a dim alcove rather than in a more open area (would that have made a difference?), it's the Fourth of July, and probably the whole city's on high alert. In the dimness, clutching my pen, notebook tucked under my arm, I stand frozen like a deer in headlights looking at the guard, while he, arms out, an apparition in the darkness, looks at me.

You know, usually in my life I have the sense that I'm a very good person, on the side of good. And I sense that spiritually, somewhere, somehow, it's quietly recognized. It's an abiding, enveloping sense, a comfort to me. And here twice in this museum - this museum of spiritual art - I'm feeling these challenges to my self-identity, that I must prove to young clerks' satisfaction that I'm an artist, and now to this guard who's hovering around me that I'm not malevolent.

So unpleasant. I tried to get over it. It was like a colossal misunderstanding in a nightmare, impossible to get out of. Whatever good karma there was for me (what I inchoately sense in my daily life) in this place, at this moment, had been utterly broken. I went through the rest of the museum and eventually slunk out of there, as doubtless noted, perhaps to their relief, on their cameras.

(You're going to quit reading my blog I'm complaining so much! I'm sorry, darling. I felt I needed to confront and come to terms with the experience - then put it aside.)

Back on a positive "culture diary" note. In a separate exhibit were beautiful large black and white photographs, portraits of residents young and old of a Himalayan village, and visions of the bleak, foreboding, fascinating, desolate landscape at the foot of Mount Everest. It really worked my imagination - it all exists, on the other side of the world - those lively individuals exist, every bit as you and me.

Finally, in the Memento Mori (Remember That You Will Die) exhibit, played a beautiful, enigmatic video, Three Women (2008), by the artist Bill Viola. The video served as a highly resonant transition between the Tibetan Buddhist art of death in one "hemisphere" of the gallery, and early Christian European conceptions in the other.

I sat in the darkened gallery before a vertical plasma screen. Images of three ghostly women emerged from the grainy black and white depths. They stood together at a remove, wearing long, simple gowns that draped against their bodies, revealing the contours of their breasts and their beautiful shapely forms. By turns they regarded one another, looked away, held hands, and took hesitant steps, all in slow, dreamlike, swirling movements like the three graces. They appeared to be a mother and her two young daughters, one a few years older than the other. The sense was of glimpsing into another realm, the afterlife, or beforelife, a dimension in which the dead or unborn are on the other side of the living. The women made langorous steps and lifted their lovely arms, swirling in slow motion around one another with longlimbed, balletically-trained movements that showed off their beautiful physiques and graceful comportment to beautiful effect. Then as if reaching a decision or sensing that it was time, the woman linked hands with the girls on either side and all three turned and began to step forward, appearing larger and increasingly defined as they drew near. The woman let go, extended her arms and stepped forward, seeming to break through a fluid wall from the black and white realm into sudden, immediate high-definition color as if she'd just been born. She stood soaking wet in her gown and lifted her hands to wipe the streaming water from her drenched face and hair so that she could open her eyes. Elegant and elemental she turned and extended an arm back, where it turned black and white as she invited her older daughter to join her in the realm of color. The girl emerged through the shimmering wall in full color, wet from baptism by invisible waterfall, lifting her hands to smooth away the rivulets of water streaming down her hair and face. Then the woman invited the younger girl to step into the realm of color. The three beautiful women stood blinking, wondering, regarding, marveling, in the light... Then one by one each stepped back into the black and white realm, became otherworldly apparitions again, growing smaller and smaller, their images grainier, until they disappeared finally from view.