Beacon, NY
Meeting the neighbors at our friends’ new place in Beacon.
Notes from the Met - 9/28/2014
Greek Coins
I was really taken by the display of Greek coins. They seemed more real than our modern versions. That’s because of the inconsistency, irregularity, and imperfections. It was clear they were man-made, melted shapes of copper and iron. I’d love to have a pocket full of them to spend. Three-dimensional, with character and personality. Portraits, turtles, flowers, horses. Imperfection adds beauty. I’d love to see more unevenness in everything. More bends, cricks, cracks, flaws.
Kwoma Ceiling
Breathtaking patterning. Impressive size. The painted patterns had a flow like an animated breeze, or trickling streams. Also with jagged points like teeth or plant needles and thorns. It was the beauty and danger of the jungle painted on a low ceiling made of large sheets of tree bark. Never realized before how patterning could so clearly represent the spirits in the world. They speak a kind of magic. It works on the deepest, most animalistic layer of our brains. And they’re pretty.
Midnight Ride of Paul Revere - Grant Wood
So fake and dreamy and amazing. Like a living diorama. It’s an idealized, almost comic, image. Cartoonish but darkly so. The moonlight is far too bright in the foreground, as if it were stage lighting. The forrest in the distance is made up of bubble trees; no attempt at realism, which makes it that much more comic. The painting is fun, first, but also creepy like a dark joke. We often romanticize the past like this. We even the edges and smooth out the narrative, which noticeably distorts the scene if you then look too close.
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold - Charles Demuth
I first studied this painting in elementary school — I have a vague recollection of copying it in crayon. It’s much better in person. Rich in color with textured outlines. Textured flatness. It reminds me that we lose a lot of depth when we design everything with such strict lines and smooth, unblemished colors. Digital screens will long lack the tactile quality of this painting. Figure 5 is an example of an older thing which is still so much better than the newer things.
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold feels as much like design as it does art. It’s probably the care taken with the painted type. The beautiful “5”, the gothic “WCW” and “CD”, the lettering on the shop window. It moves within your periphery when so large, fluid and exciting. Red yellow gray cream: an excellent and stirring palette. I aspire to this.
The Banks of the Bievre Near Bicetre - Henri Rousseau
Rousseau was a painting hobbyist. He wasn’t formally trained and I’m sure he didn’t start out painting thinking he’d be so revered 100 years later. One of his greatest traits was his determination. He was considered finished paintings which often still looked very juvenile. He didn’t care that he hadn’t yet learned to paint things correctly. He painted, considered it done, and moved on. Look at the trees in this painting: they're horribly conceived, deformed really, but the painting is still pretty and likable.
Allegory of the Planets and Continents - Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Very active and living. I like imaging the world as allegorical people, imaging the workings of the universe as daily jobs performed by gods and spirits. It makes the world seem more both more magical and mechanical. But also more human, somehow. If you imagine everything in terms of human/godly work, it's much more relatable. Look up at the sun. Why not see Apollo in his chariot, surrounded by a swirl of horses and cherubs, doing his daily duty, trekking from East to West. I sometimes fall into the trap of removing myself from the world — not a super rare mistake, I know. Perhaps I — or we — could use more of this magical thinking in our lives. More spirits, elfs, cherubs, devils, gods. I don’t know. But I do know that this painting is beautiful, and it represents to me something we’ve lost.
Chamunda, the Horrific Destroyer of Evil
This statue is frightening in a way almost nothing else is. Terror in a waking dream. A nightmare come to life. It’s deeply, spiritually horrific. What a soul might look like as its being torn apart. It suggests a culture much more connected to do death. More aware of it. More involved in it. More respecting of it.
Various Thoughts
- Immediately felt at home inside. No surprise, I guess, but working in one museum demystifies all of them. Now that I know how they work, and what goes on in the back rooms, museums feel a little more down to earth.
- Paintings are just paintings. Strip them of their mythical status, and the artist behind them becomes real, normal, relatable. Throw yourself into them, and they come back to life.
- Statues are very moving when large and dramatic. The third dimension adds so much, offers highly varying feelings from different angles. It strums an emotional chord I'm still amateurish at feeling. The art of sculpture does not enjoy much respect in modern public spaces, which makes them seem like foreign objects to my American eyes. What would our American public spaces be like if our statues were more dramatic like these old Roman works? Are they? Do I not notice?
Adding more "I"
I've come to realize that writing for a blog requires more personalization. The blogs I love are written by people with distinctively human characters. They’re able to write about things with depth and meaning while avoiding the rot of academic tone. And I think they do that by using more “I” and “me”.
As an English major in college, I made the common mistake of confusing haughty, elevated writing for better writing. I thought that if I aped the academic tone, my essays would be more quality. This is a fallacy.
The posts I’ve written which I like the least are those in which I have removed myself the furthest. That’s the trap of academic writing, the point of which is to make lofty claims about your subject and assume objectivity even if you have no claim for it. Blog writing is the opposite of this, which most people have learned long ago. Keep it simple. Keep it personal.
It feels weird because I don't very much like focusing on myself, even though I do it so much. We all do it. It’s natural. The trick is figuring out how to be personal without being self-absorbed. I’m learning. I’m learning to write from me, and not about me.
Good Days
I'm on a packed train and it's really alive. Usually, a noisy train annoys me to no end, but today I'm enjoying this. There are three large groups of people and they're all having a great time. Families, tourists, parents, children. Smiles on everyone's faces.
It's a beautiful late-September day and everyone is wearing it on them. It's on me, too. How often do I blind myself to these moments. How often am I superficially annoyed by someone else's good time?
I live in NYC because I love the hustle and bustle. I left Indiana in part because it never moved. The Midwest has a snail’s pace, which is just right for many people. Not for me though. The thing is, a hectic city like New York comes with noise and commotion and the worst of the worst. It's all a part of it. I need to be better about being negatively affected by those things. I could even choose to revel in it. Maybe wave to the driver with the nothing-but-bass-at-200dB music playing. Maybe give some change to the Mexican guitar player on the subway. Maybe take the Jehovah’s Witness flyer with a smile.
I share this city with all these people. I don't remember that enough.
The Visitor Engagement Initiative Commences
The news about our project at the museum has finally started to break. It went out first in the Wall Street Journal. Shelley then posted a longer explainer on our Tech blog. There's still a ton to talk about, and there'll be many more posts to link to. I'll try to collect the best ones here, occasionally. I'll also be writing for the Tech blog, myself, from time to time. Some, or all, of those posts I might repost here sometime later.
I started at the Brooklyn Museum January 2nd of this year. Shelley and Sarah had already been testing paper, analog prototypes for what would eventually become the VEI — which actually might be branded as Ask. As in Ask Brooklyn Museum. We didn't get to actually conceiving of the digital version until February or March. Design began shortly thereafter.
It's been at least 6 months that I've been working on this. Feels great to have it out in the open.
Feenster
This morning, I pulled down the Jason Fulford book *Crushed* and it reminded me of all my old photos. All those photos I took in 2005 for my old (defunct) photoblog Feenster, when I had been trying my best to find my inner Fulford. Fulford is amazing.
I had been locked out of my Flickr account for a couple years. It’s not worth talking about, except to say that when Flickr required a new Yahoo account for login, it caused problems which grew exponentially. But, today — today I finally broke in. Broke in and downloaded all the stuff and went through those old photos again as if for the first time.
I uploaded the best 80 of the few hundred photos which once lived at feenster.com to brianfeeney.us. They're here for you now, if you scroll back through the Photos section far enough. Feenster started in early 2005, a sister blog to Matt Brown’s much better unsharpen.net. Taking photos for it was my first experience of art as work as melancholic, zen practice. I'd walk around Bloomington with my camera, snapping photos with my eyes open but my mind turned off. Then, later at home, I'd find the shots with any magic in them, open up Photoshop, and toy with color collecting late into the night.
I can't say if these photos actually contain any all those old feelings in such a way that anyone else might find them. But *I* can see myself in them. I'm in those photos, even while I'm on the other side of the lens. I know I'm being sentimental. They're my photos and I put a lot of myself into them that year — 2005. It was a good year.
