I went to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as part of my "do Berkeley things while in Berkeley" initiative.
When I go to an art museum alone, my goal is to come away from it with some specific thought, some piece of art that I appreciated in some way, or a crystallization of something that's been nagging me.
I keep wanting to talk about these things with people, and it keeps not seeming like the right time, and this is why I'm so grateful that you can just put words on the internet for people to read or not read. (In lieu of crappy cell phone photos, I'll just be talking about what I thought was cool, and I took no notes, so this will be without names of pieces or artists.)
Toward the back of the museum, on the ground floor, there was a collection of portraits, all along a single wall. They were from different time periods, in different styles, showing different things. One was a scientist smiling at the camera with his chalk a few inches from the chalkboard. Another was someone's knee. There was a photo of a man who'd been moving his face when it was taken, so it was just a blur with teeth visible as a streak. They were in different mediums, different time periods, different things they were saying. And what I liked about it was that, by being put together in this way, they were in conversation with each other, all these people across hundreds of years getting at the idea of what it is to show a person, to make a statement through framing and presence. I think "pieces on conversation" is something that's sometimes underused by art museums - often I see things as part of a collection, and yeah, this is neat, but it's not always saying something. Same for when I see a bunch of stuff by a single artist; it's common for me to see themes, but there's not that special thing happening of interaction.
There was a drawing, very crude and incomplete, a messy sketch, but it was mounted so that it was sticking out of the wall, and on the other side, there was a different sketch, possibly of this person from behind. I enjoyed it, I think because it gave me this impression of transience and impermanence, of palimpsest, someone turning over the sheet of paper to use the other side. The unfinished, sketchy feeling of it helped. And by having both sides used like that, sticking out of the wall, you couldn't see both parts of the whole at once, in a way that was more stark than when looking at e.g. sculpture.
There was a card that said "please touch" behind glass, and the description behind it said something to the effect of "the reverse of this card says that the bearer is allowed to touch the artwork of [artist name here]". And I thought ... I don't know, that this is a cool performance art thing, and that they put the less interesting face of the card on display, and also "please touch" beneath glass preventing me from touching the card was hilarious? And I wondered whether that was the intent of the curators, if they wanted to give me the feeling of the delightful absurdity of the concept, while also not allowing me to touch the card.
Alright, those were my three Thoughts, thank you for listening tumblr, this is why we're friends.
