Report from a Billionaire’s living room exposed:
The art show that I went to last weekend, DoubleTake: From Monet to Lichtenstein, at the Experience Music Project in Seattle (the Gehry building beneath the Space Needle, which houses all of Paul Allen’s projects, including the Science Fiction museum and the EMP music museum – and now part of his personal art collection) was a little unsettling for me. First, they take you into a small, roped-off room, and make you watch a film defining things like “composition” and “color” narrated by David Hyde Pierce. After two minutes I ducked under the rope, frantic to escape, trying to find my way to the actual art. I hate anything that feels like a lecture about art – I went to my year of Art History, dammit! – I want to experience the art myself. Then you are given a talking handpiece which explains in “hip” language exactly what you are supposed to notice about the juxtaposed works. We, appropriately armed, are led into a single room, divided into three sections, which houses sometimes clever juxtapositions of one piece of art next to another, to highlight their differences and similarities, I assume. Sometimes this felt brilliant, other times condescending. On one wall where the juxtapositions worked, there were several paintings of the canals of Venice, one by Monet, one by Manet, one by Turner, and one by Caneletto. The Manet and Turner were both stunningly beautiful, and I’m not always a big Manet fan, but something about those intense blues, especially next to Turner’s gold light…of course what they wanted you to notice was that the images grew less defined as your eye went from painting to painting. The first wall you encounter was the huge promised Lichtenstein (of course, just having been to the incredible Lichtenstein exhibit at the Henry a month or so, I was less excited than I might have been) of “The Kiss,” a woman embracing a pilot with an airplane outline in the background – this was set next to Renoir’s “The Reader,” inviting comments about the positioning of the woman’s head, the background, etc. A wonderful Jasper Johns called “Numbers” – which was a brushed, beaten metal piece embedded with, you guessed it, random numbers, looked strangely appropriate next to a Monet of the Rouen cathedral. And one of the most amazing pieces of the collection was Jan Brueghel the Younger’s painting, “The Five Senses: Sight,” self-referential and delightfully detailed, a work I could have looked at for hours, next to Seurat’s “The Models” which has three women in varying states of undress seemingly in front of his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, visible as a background corner – again, winkingly self-referential, and amazing work. A Max Ernst painting of an alien landscape was set next to Van Gogh’s “Orchard with Flowering Peach Trees.”
The framing of all the works was odd to say the least (trying not to give the masterworks’ pieces more importance than modern pieces, some frames looked like ten dollar throwaways, others fancifully elaborate) and the lighting was downright bad, and the juxtapositions of contemporaty versus modernist versus classical work didn’t always serve their purposes. However, since the Seattle Art Museum is closed down right now for renovation and Seattleites don’t have chances to see this many Impressionists together anywhere else, even when the SAM is open, I’d say it’s worth the $8 visit.
On to more poetry-oriented news –
I was delighted to receive a contributor’s copy of Grimm Magazine, my very first appearance in a Canadian journal. This perfect-bound journal has an offbeat, artsy feel, and is named after editor Ed Grimm, in case you were wondering. Check out www.grimmagazine.com.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I haven’t been sending out much because I’ve got so much work that still hasn’t come back from last year. No rejections, no acceptances, no news whatsoever! What’s up with that?
I’m nervous about my May 16th reading at Open Books, my first ever official “Becoming the Villainess” reading in Seattle. Nervous nervous nervous!