Off Campus Event

I love art. I especially love art history. There are so many cultures without written histories that, through their art alone, can be beautifully illuminated. Thanks to this interest I’ve been to many an art museum and taken multiple art history classes but despite it all, every time, without fail, whenever I run into the door to Modern Art, I stick up my nose, cross my arms, and roll my eyes.

So, given this obvious and admitted prejudice, it was a stretch for me to go to the Blanton Museum of Art and attempt to enjoy the latest Modern Art exhibit. When I first arrived, I prefaced myself with a bit of Medieval Art before plunging into the great unknown. The exhibit was called: Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York. There was a tour going on when I stepped in, I could’ve joined, probably should have, but even as I prepared to sneak up and try to look inconspicuous behind a group of kids, I found myself suddenly distracted by a particularly crisp shadow upon the white wall. I stepped to the side to match my shadow up with it and found, suddenly, with a bit of a laugh at myself, that it wasn’t a shadow at all. It was a part of the exhibit. The closer I looked the more I found several shadows all to be fake and, most probably, totally passed by, by most of the other spectators.

Simple an idea though it was, I found myself suddenly very pleased by this and did my best to use it as a segue for more optimistic expectations of the rest of the exhibit. Next I came upon a set of hundreds of blank pages nailed into the wall in huge packets with a pile of crumbled shreds settled on the floor beneath them. I stopped here again, trying to blend in behind the tour group, and (unable to see over a few of the taller guys that had shuffled to the back) read the little plaque beside it to pass the time. Apparently Modern Art can also be Interactive Art because the crumpled pages upon the floor, I was to learn, were all victims of their spectators. The argument was that art changes and is different for every person and so every person should be able to leave their mark and physically change the art for the next person by taking one of the pages and ripping it off the wall to crumple and throw it any way you like. (Shyly, still a bit unhappy with myself for even sort of liking this, I only ripped a tiny corner of a piece and balled it up to hide beneath its fallen comrades.)

The rest of the exhibit, though of course individual and unique in itself, didn’t impress me near so much as these first two minor discoveries as they—in my prejudiced mind—were all made up of more “classic” Modern styles such as the multi-colored geometrical forms and twisted shapes suspended several feet above the floor. Most of them, as the title of the exhibit suggests, are all meant to experiment with space and so they employed various optical illusions and colors in order to bend space and how the eye perceives it. The ideas behind the exhibit, I freely confess, do interest me a great deal and though I know more traditional art cannot communicate these ideas, I still feel the need to argue against these works deserving the title of “Art”.

For more, unbiased, information on the exhibit: http://blantonmuseum.org/works_of_art/exhibitions/park_place/index.cfm