i'm a very very complex person

"Arnold Comes of Age" by Grant Wood, 1930

Hide/Seek, currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, claims to be the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference as represented in American portraiture. I don't know enough to know if this claim is entirely true, but the show is quite different from most of the art exhibitions I've attended. I've generally gone to retrospectives of single artists, or shows that explore the relationship between a few artists (like the big Matisse/Picasso show at MoMA a few years ago, or an exhibition I saw in Philly more recently that examined Cézanne's influence over a variety of other painters). In comparison, Hide/Seek is a hodge-podge: Thomas Eakins shares wall-space with Grant Wood, and in the next room there's Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs by Annie Leibovitz, paintings by Andy Warhol... The juxtapositions are jarring--sometimes in fruitful, interesting ways and sometimes not--and they make it difficult to walk away from the show holding a coherent impression.

This difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps it means that the show resists simple interpretations, that it makes the audience work a little harder. I think this is true--the curators seem to enjoy the multiplicity of forms and representations on display--but it also emphasizes intellect over emotion. I could tell you a lot of things that I thought while looking at the exhibit, but I couldn't tell you what I felt. Mainly because I didn't feel much at all. And, as always, I want to feel.

The wall text of the exhibit was very well done: it offered clearly-written help in decoding the artists' modes of representation, and mostly avoided the pitfall of reductive interpretation. But the presence of so much text, and the fact that the text was often vital to understanding how each piece fit into the exhibition meant that I found myself spending more time reading than really seeing the art. I don't know how to solve this problem. Without the text, many pieces in the show would have been opaque to me--each artist used different visual cues that could be read by those in the know, but I'm not a part of every queer demimonde that has ever existed in America, so I need the help! But I also want to be able to just look at pictures, and respond. I suspect that this may have been easier to do if the gallery hadn't been so crowded, but...


"Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane" by Marsden Hartley, 1933

Though the exhibition was flawed, it was fascinating. It was wonderful to get to peek at the hidden meanings of the works, and the show made it easy to imagine what it would have been like to live and work as a queer artist at many different moments in American history. Perhaps most interesting to me was the sense of humor evident in so many of the early portraits (Look at these fellows, for instance, with their sneaky grins and secret hand-holding!), and absent in so much of the more recent work. And even encumbered at they were by text and carrying a heavy historical burden, there were works that shone. The Grant Wood painting "Arnold Comes of Age," was perhaps my favorite of the show. A sensitive portrait of Wood's young assistant, who looks thoughtful and slightly troubled, the warmth of Wood's depiction is complicated by the flat black expanse of Arnold's sweater, which functions as a strange sort of negative space. I also loved Marsden Hartley's "Eight Bells Folly," a forest of private signifiers that is actually all the more powerful for the mysteriousness of some of its symbols.

I. Reading

I finished reading The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Melville last night. This was my book club's December selection, and until it was suggested at our last meeting, I had never heard of it. It was published in the UK in the late '90s and apparently made a bit of a splash over there when it came out, winning the Whitbread First Novel award in 1997 and being shortlisted for the Orange Prize (best English-language novel by a female writer) in 1998, yet somehow it never attracted my attention.

I haven't always been gung-ho about the books picked by my book club, so I was skeptical when they chose something I had never heard of, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised. It turned out to be quite a decent book, one that is both fun and a worthwhile read. It is perhaps not the highest of high literature, but it's an engrossing and well-told story.

The book is structured like one of those Russian nesting dolls (there's a word for them, I know there is, but damned if I can think of it...). The outer layer is the prologue and epilogue; these are told in the voice of a larger-than-life, unnamed, semi-mystical narrator who is the ventriloquist of the title, and is present only at the beginning and end of the book. The next layer down is the story of Chofy McKinnon, a Wapisiana Indian from the savannahs of Guyana, and his relationship with an Englishwoman named Rosa Mendelson who comes to Guyana to research Evelyn Waugh's trip to the savannahs. The core of the novel, both structurally and emotionally, is the story of the incestuous affair between Beatrice and Danny McKinnon, Chofy's aunt and uncle. I liked the way this structure worked in the first half of the book--it felt like I was peeling away the years of silence and gradually getting closer to the secret at the heart of the book. It was less effective in the second half, once the secret had been revealed. I was less emotionally involved with the story of Chofy and Rosa, and found that I didn't much care about the end of their story after I had found out what happened to Beatrice and Danny.

The Ventriloquist's Tale is a bit like Rushdie, particularly in the over-the-top verbal outpourings of the prologue and epilogue, and a bit like Keri Hulme's The Bone People in its concern with the intersection of native cultures and colonial forces, although Melville cannot compare stylistically with either Rushdie or Hulme. Her writing is straightforward, sexually frank, and serviceable, but the moments of truly beautiful writing found in the book are the exception rather than the rule. The writing doesn't really need to be gorgeous though, because the narrative has such strong forward momentum that I just kept reading and reading--quite the opposite of the last book I read: Gilead had no momentum to speak of, and I kept reading it just to be able to savor each individual sentence.

II. Slides!



While I was in London for Thanksgiving, I had one of the most fun art experiences that I've ever had. German artist Carsten Höller has installed five giant slides, ranging in height from one to four stories, in Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. The intertwining slides are visually stunning, but it's really the participatory nature of the exhibit that makes it so cool. Höller uses his slides to explore human behaviour, perception, and altered states of consciousness. He talks about the experience of simultaneous delight and panic that happens when people use slides (a description that strikes me as very accurate--moiethegreat and I were both experiencing nervous flutters before we went down, and then a state of nerves plus exhilaration as we were sliding), and he wonders why that experience is usually only limited to children on the playground. Slides transport people, both physically and emotionally; could they become a regular part the transportation systems in cities and public spaces? How would we be changed if sliding were a part of our daily routines? What do slides do to users and to watchers?

The neat thing about it is that all of those questions might have seemed foolish to me if I hadn't participated in the exhibit. But I did, and the presence of the slides made a palpable impact on the atmosphere of the museum. Adults and kids alike were lined up to ride the slides, and there were people clustered around the bottoms of the slides to watch as people came down, as well as people looking down from the galleries above to watch as people spiralled down through the transparent tubes. There was a great lack of self-consciousness in taking part in such a crazy spectacle. It was communal, it was fun, and it really did feel like slides could change our public life.

The slides will be up until April 9th. If any of you folks can get yourselves to London between now and then, I highly recommend you give it a try.