As of a couple weeks ago, I am now covering arts and museums for Chicagoist.com, a blog about Chicago. If you point your browser to chicagoist.com/profile/laurambrowning, there’s an RSS feed at the bottom to help you stay on top of what I’m writing. Expect news about art exhibits and other worthy museum events as well as some in-depth looks at art around Chicago. And poke around the rest of the site, too!
Cross-posted at artcanthurtyou.com.
In the East End near Brick Lane.
The murals at 47th & Lake Park are dead.
About two weeks ago, after narrowly missing the 8:46 am Metra, I grudgingly hopped on the 6 bus to go to work. (I hate the 6. It is always too crowded. Sometimes it smells.) As always, we made damn near every stop between 59th Street (where I catch it) and 47th Street (where it begins its express run downtown).
We passed under the 47th Street viaduct. The walls were white. Bright, glaring white. I thought we’d been rerouted and the murals were just a block north or a block south. Even the most recent addition had been whitewashed with some painfully kill-all shade of white. It had been an eye drawn on each of the columns in subsequent stages of opening and closing so that when you drove under the viaduct, the effect was of a giant eye winking at you. They hadn’t even left that.
I’d come here sometime this past winter to take pictures of murals that had been recommended to me by Preceptor. I thought maybe I’d write another essay for my master’s thesis about them, but it didn’t work out. But I have the pictures, and thank goodness I do, because everything is gone.
I don’t know why. I emailed CPAG, the Chicago Public Arts Group who oversees a lot of Chicago’s mural projects, but I haven’t gotten a response. Some of the murals were dated 1999, and none of them seemed too much older than that. True, some of them had sustained some vulgar damage, but really, they were in pretty great shape.
One long wall stayed true to its hip-hop graffiti roots. Each section of the concrete wall formed a kind of three-dimensional frame, its edges protruding slightly. The artist had used it a bit like a frame, keeping his or her letters mostly inside of it, with splashes of color or edges of letters waterfalling over the edge of the frame. The opposite wall, on the north side of the viaduct, spanned African American and Latin American cultures, and maybe more.
You can see the pictures I took here. There’s a lot, but it’s worth skimming through them.
* * *
current book: I’m a good 100 pages into Moby-Dick. The writing is beautiful and the story is compelling, although I’ve been told to “just wait” till I get to the technical descriptions of whaling.
current music: I just received I-don’t-know-how-many-CDs; everything from David Bowie to Her Space Holiday. No, Ryan, I haven’t listened to everything yet, but I will, I will! And I’m VERY EXCITED about the new Jarvis.
current socks: Bright red with yellow, blue, and green stripeys, and black silhouettes of Northwestern things like moose and evergreens and bear claws. Thanks, Miles!
Try as I might, nothing that has happened in the last week can be fluffed or fleshed out into a proper narrative. I’m in neither a bad mood nor a good one; the weather is gray and rainy; I run, I commute, I work, I sleep. I think it’s a symptom of the changing season: the gray is pervasive, and there have been several days in which being indoors is no different from being outdoors. Office Space calls it a case of the Mondays. My friend Tim calls it terminal malaise.
Of note is the spectacular storm that rained down on Chicago on Monday night. I’m going to try to get some pictures of the carnage–Hyde Park is littered with huge tree branches, some of them split jaggedly from their trunks, leaving behind slabs of white splinters. Westbound 60th Street is badly flooded under the viaduct, and the nearby parks reek of standing water. At least it’s a sign that something exciting happened, and that our ‘hood was rocked by more than the bass from pimped out cars.
Although the gray feels like it’s been in my veins forever, Sunday was actually beautiful. A friend and I went to Kristoffer’s, a great little cafe in Pilsen, and read and wrote over breakfast, coffee, and coconut tres leches cake. Unfortunately for us, it was the final day of a Pilsen gallery walk, so Kristoffer’s was louder and more crowded than usual. But the sun shone till nearly 6pm and the sky was blue and the weather was crisp but warm. We drove by my murals–I always miscalculate the distance to the first ones, the soccer players and the glowing Virgin–and I thought for a moment they’d been whitewashed. I’ve never loved those first murals (I prefer the older ones further west), but, to my chagrin, I was upset at the thought of them being whitewashed. These murals figured prominently into my master’s thesis, so I (re)wrote about them for nearly five months, thinking I hated them. Funny how writing about something over and over changes it. It’s hard to maintain my vigorous distaste after attempting to get under their skin, under their paint.
Also funny that writing and thinking about the murals just bled a little of the gray out of me. Perhaps a happy autumn after all…
* * *
current book: I’m nearly done with Blood Meridian. Its bleakness makes the seasonal malaise feel all the more terminal, and yet it becomes more compelling the further along I get. I’d like to re-read it within a few months–now that I know I’m capable of liking it–and see if it gets any easier to keep my finger on the plot.
current music: What Made Milwaukee Famous’ Trying to Never Catch Up and Cafe Tacuba’s Unplugged. Oh, and I fucking hate the new America’s Next Top Model theme song. But did you see the “—– must go” blues song the judging panel sang? For THIRTY SECONDS?
current socks: I wore my crabby socks today (the black ones, not the turquoise ones), although they’re not completely accurate. Think they make Office Space socks for those days when I’ve got a case of the Mondays?
When people ask me why I wanted to work in a museum, I usually describe the "aha! moment" I had when I saw that first Michelangelo in Oxford. It's not the best phrase, maybe, but it does the work I want it to: it describes in humble language (I didn't want to describe it as an "epiphany," for example) a single instant of getting it. Like when my nephew was born: the 48 hours of labor preceeding the actual birth were excellent birth control, but as soon as his big punkin head popped out, I thought, "Ohhhh. So this is why people have kids." I got it.
It was pointed out to me by various people over the course of last quarter that "aha! moment" might be well, a little hokey. After all, Oprah uses it. And do I really want my readers to be thinking about Oprah? So I've been going back and forth on this issue for several months now. In the thesis draft I just turned in last week, I omitted all references to "aha!" and replaced it instead with the somewhat more loquacious "experience of being pulled into the here-and-now."
My advisor just emailed me yesterday with the breaking news that the front page of the online edition of the New York Times (and the paper version of today's paper!) features an article by chief art critic Michael Kimmelman. Kimmelman was pretty much the reason I went to graduate school–he writes about art reflectively, contemplatively, and in a way that is readable, accessible, and even exciting. He anticipates his readers' doubts and skepticisms and persuades them to give art a chance. Even the difficult kind of art, the earthworks and Yoko Ono performances and Bob Ross and his "happy little clouds." His book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (which you should immediately go out and purchase) has been the model for the kind of writing I'm trying to do.
So of course I went straight to the article. (I've copied it here since the New York Times doesn't archive their articles for more than a week.) Either Kimmelman doesn't watch Oprah or he doesn't care, because he draws on V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist who is interested in the relationship between neurology and the visual arts. Ramachandran describes–you guessed it–an "aha! moment" when the brain processes, say, seemingly disorganized splotches that become a Dalmation upon closer examination.
Ramachandran even goes so far as to compare the experience of understanding art to an orgasm: "[art] may be thought of as a form of visual foreplay before the climax." He describes the climax as the culmination of the multiple "ahas!" that one undergoes when they try to discern that Dalmation. He says that our brains seem to tend toward things like grouping together like colors or assembling parts as a whole.
It would seem, then, that Ramachandran is working from the premise that art is beautiful. But I think that premise was thrown out the window a long time ago, certainly at least by the time Cubism and Futurism were entering the art world's consciousness. Beauty wasn't the point. Subverting beauty was (at least, it was a point). Good art doesn't have to be beautiful; sometimes it's provocative or frightening or just plain challenging. And why shouldn't Yoko Ono or earthworks provide an "aha! moment"?
* * *
current book: Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, vol. 1. That's not gonna change for awhile.
current music: Amelie soundtrack
current socks: white socks with red toes and heels and "Texas" written on the side. There's a Texas flag on the top of the sock, and when you fold it down, it says "The Lone Star State."
