the touch gallery
this will be my 70th post, since October 2008.
on the Friday I was in Chicago, I had my day all figured out. since the tour I was going to take as part of the ASLA conference was cancelled due to low enrollment (surely there are other people besides me interested in the cemeteries and memorial sites of Chicago??) …I opted instead to flake off for the day and see Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago.
I didn’t really realize until I stopped by the convention center for the schedule that I was, by so doing, flaking off on a full day’s worth of educational sessions. it appears, owing to the compressed schedule of the conference this year, that things overlapped quite a bit more than usual. but I stuck to my original plan, and was glad I did, since I got a day of nice weather for my urban wanderings.
in fact, a little more nice than I’d bargained for. as I trudged up Michigan Avenue from the conference center I got hotter and hotter, and more and more in need of a cold drink. I finally found one, at the shop at Columbia College, which gave off the unmistakable aura of an arts institution, and was emitting students with tripods and huge box cameras as I passed by,
Columbia College, Chicago
I didn’t even really stop to admire the lakefront park land, though there were a few moments that caught my eye..
..so intent was I on my goal, the Art Institute and Dan Kiley’s South Garden, a project I’ve seen pictures of, but never exactly the pictures I wanted, and besides, pictures are never enough.
it is one thing to take an analytic distance from a work of landscape architecture one admires (or thinks one admires, on the basis of pictures and plans); and another to suddenly come upon it on a very warm day in September, after a long walk in excessively warm socks, and experience the temperature gradient from the sunny street to the dense and dappled shade at noon, and see the sprinklers being dragged around during maintenance (always a strange sight to those of us trained in Southern California, where there is *always* an irrigation system built-in, and we don’t drag sprinklers around unless something is seriously wrong.)
South Garden, Chicago Art Institute, Dan Kiley
when I try to explain the phenomenology of landscape architecture, I could really do little better than to describe having woolly socks on after a long walk, and finding myself here, using this landscape as it was intended to be used, in the company of others doing the same thing.
South Garden, Chicago Art Institute, Dan Kiley
and to explain landscape architecture *as* architecture, this would be a good place to start, within a disciplined grid of hawthorn trees, trained to a low canopy – ceiling, columns, and ground plane.
South Garden, Chicago Art Institute, Dan Kiley
having been heated and cooled thus rapidly, and probably expanded and contracted in the process, I was a little befuddled and possibly a little more nonlinear than usual in my approach to the Art Institute, once I got inside. I knew from the outset I would not have time to see it all, and didn’t intend to. the sensory overload set in very quickly, and with it, perhaps a little more vulnerability to the emotional impact of the art.
there was nothing too gut-wrenching about this lovely display of architectural details, which seemed so characteristic of Chicago - a city that apparently has liked to decorate itself with ever more elaborate moldings, friezes, medallions, capitals, corbels, quoins…like the engraving around a dollar bill, letting you know the ceremonial value of every temple of commerce.
and, on that future trip to Chicago that I fully intend to take, I know I’ll spend some time going around this massive and ornamented architecture that they’ve grown there, and I’ll admire it, and it won’t choke me up much. not the way this did.
"The Solitude of the Soul", Lorado Taft, Chicago Art Institute
now, when I look at the photos here, safely at home, the sculpture seems a little overwrought, a little obvious, a little too on-the-nose as a comment on whatever I might have been feeling that day. the label contains the comment of the artist: “The thought is the eternally present fact that however closely we may be thrown together by circumstances…we are unknown to each other.”
so, no, it doesn’t work quite the same way here and now as it did on that day, what with the wooly socks, the fatigue, and the sensory overload. you will just have to take my word for it: in the moment, it almost knocked me over.
moving on, stumbling across some famous works quite by accident, and not even really taking the time to contemplate any of them properly: but I observed that “Night Hawks” has such clean and glossy streets and such tidy countertops, how orderly and sinister it really is in person. and “American Gothic,” how elaborately constructed the rusticity of it is, even down to the rough-hewn frame, when all along we know how thoroughly the thing is a construct, and that the farmer was really Grant Wood’s dentist, and these hands really weren’t that sort of working hands at all.
I found myself down in the lower level, the kids’ area of the museum, at a time when there were no kids to be seen there. so when I wandered into the “touch gallery,” which has Actual Works of Sculpture which we are intended to touch, it took me a long time to overcome my properly instilled training in museum etiquette (which is even more heightened by having an art historian in the family) and actually lay my hands on the art.
you can also adjust the amount of light shining on Joan of Arc, in addition to getting a grip on her thorny crown.
how can this be OK? I kept wondering, and finally learned from the labels that they’ve coated the busts with some kind of wax to protect them. so, OK, I went all giddy and handled them all.
wow, I felt up the art! I’ve never done that before! I thought.
and, about a second later, realized that of course I have – many times. because the rules are totally different for outdoor art. just about every landscape with art in it that I’ve ever encountered is a touch gallery – including the cemeteries.
having completely overwhelmed myself, I had to take some recovery time sitting in the new Modern Wing, by Renzo Piano, which is indeed as lovely and inviting as advertised, and leads to the most tantalizing views of my next objective, Millennium Park. but first I sat for a long time on a bench in here, a space limited to art, however disturbing,
"The Flooded Grave," Jeff Wall, Chicago Art Institute
at least confines itself to the walls, and does not present itself to all the senses. which nonetheless doesn’t keep it from causing pain. some thorns are pretty sharp even if you don’t touch them.
(more Chicago soon. I still haven’t made it into Millennium Park. however sore my feet, I’ll get there, without regard to whether I drop in my tracks.)
