minimal

I've been reading this new book on minimalism, which felt appropriate for this specific moment, and it is separated into four sections:
1. Reduction
2. Emptiness
3. Silence
4. Shadow

I'm on the silence section, and was sitting here on my couch in the short time before Josh woke up, reading about Cage's approach to ambient sound and the four white guys (Reich, Riley, Glass, and Young,) who took up his banner. In the book, he briefly mentions Pauline Oliveros's concept of Deep Listening but glosses over her work to focus on Julius Eastman – no less important, but I was disappointed. A few years ago, I got to participate in Oliveros's "Rock Piece" at a gallery in Detroit, and it was so fantastic, so moving, so communal and fun that I think about all the time. Here's a recording of the same piece in the same space several months before I participated.

I started to think about art that's made an impression on me, the art that I think about, go back to, cry over, or that is so situational that I still feel an urge when I consider it. I was brought back to seeing Sagrada Familia in the bright morning sun after a bender, a night where we didn't go back to the apartment we were staying in and instead did drugs with a Dutch man I never saw again and sang Graceland at the top of our lungs. As girls "who had recently been given a Fulbright," our addled brains were connecting dots that didn't exist. The next day felt like a hallucination, the chapel mildly threatening, the throngs of tourists overwhelming. When I got to the top, I cried. We dozed in a public park in the afternoon and later flew to Rome. She drank a beer in the airport at 7AM. We rationed our cigarettes. We hadn't actually slept in 48 hours.

I can never guess what will move me, and where. As a child, I became obsessed with a massive statue of the Buddha in the MFA and still visit it on every trip to the museum. Around the same time, I spent a lot of time with Degas and Warhol, returning to the former's "Little Dancer" (like many little girls), and the latter's Mao screen prints (an odd fixation for a 12 year old.)

Later, I became obsessed with the Fauvists, Florine Stettheimer, Diego Rivera, Dorothy Iannone, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Darger, El Greco, Gerhard Richter, the Guerilla Girls, Swoon, Mark Dion, the concept of the Wunderkammer, the list goes on and on. I traveled around Europe, spending full weeks wandering museums, not nurturing any distinct taste besides a weakness for prints (Hokusai's Ghost Prints came to mind during this exercise) and a love of bright, moving colors. The first time I took acid, I painted all over my best friend's walls and exclaimed, "I finally understand abstract expressionism!"

Though I studied curation in graduate school, my relationship with art has always been almost childish in nature. I'm not an artist, and have no innate artistic talent besides theater and (possibly) writing, which I often feel like I have to somehow justify. A few years ago, I quipped blithely, and unthinkingly to my friend who is an excellent curator and musician that "everyone is an artist" and he responded "not everyone is a plumber."

Like everything else, though, it takes practice. My mother, who was a wonderful and imaginative craft artist, never made me practice the piano or draw – if she had, would I have hated these exercises so much?

Now that I am stuck at home, I realize that my experiences of seeing art are often social and situational. Even though I worked for an organization that released millions of artworks online in collaboration with museums, I feel like the Benjaminian concept of the aura remains accurate. My exposure to art comes not from sorting through "collections as data," (a popular phrase in my world,) but through being with the pieces, hearing the corny music piped in at the Sistine Chapel as.I sobbed on the floor from its beauty, living in Köln and visiting the Richter stained glass every day before I went to do my homework at the Turkish cafe, stumbling upon a bizarre wooden altarpiece in a church in the Azores that made me gasp in its intricacy.


I've been traveling less this year than I have in the past, which mostly means I constantly lament "that I should go to the museum more often." Now that we are all grounded for a while and avoiding big crowds, I wonder how this moment is going to change our relationship with art in public. Will we return to the salon? Will we make all our art only outdoors? Will we look at our collections as data, staring at our laptop screens and VR headsets to try to approximate the feeling we had when we stood in front of the Ghent Altarpiece for over an hour with no concept of time?

Today in teaching myself to draw: