An Afternoon at the Met
A great deal of thought and writing has been committed to American art museums: their histories, their concepts, their explicit and implicit messages, their politics and business practices. I have a deep interest in this chatter, I’ve contributed to it in the past and plan to again. But what of the museums themselves? The artworks, their placement, the hallways, the exhibits, the choreography of passing through?
In Adorno’s essay “The Valéry Proust Museum,” he weighs the literary accounts of trips to the museum from the sensitive and serious craftsman Valéry, and the excited, amateur flaneur Proust. Adorno judges the former superior, if tragically so (“Valéry’s loyalty to the objective demands of the work forces him to give up culture for lost”), but I confess I have far more in common with Proust who “holds on to culture for the sake of objective happiness,” even if tragically so.
In these reflections I endeavor, if not exactly to conjure one or both men, to set aside the critic’s ledger and engage my senses in the halls where the senses reign.
There is something soul-crushing about exiting the galleries of French 19th-century painting and being greeted by a Dan Flavin. Not even a particularly good Flavin. A single fluorescent bulb bisecting a freestanding wall built solely for the purpose of its display in a hallway shared with bathrooms and a gift shop kiosk. After all the richness, texture, enthusiastic discovery, and deeply felt sensitivity to the gaps and blisters of modern life in the galleries prior, I am given this. For a moment I worry that I’ve wandered into a forbidden gallery with an incomplete installation.
The truth is, I like Flavin. I have, more than once, found his work quite compelling — moving, even. But there is a great deal of architecture for both body and mind required to host an aesthetic experience with his sculptures. For the body, a space evacuated by all else, such that the suspension of disbelief can float for a moment and allow the conventional to become its opposite. For the mind, an academic appreciation of so many conceptual frameworks, their discoveries and their discontents, the details of which do not bear mentioning here. On that scaffold Flavin’s work is indeed quite beautiful.
Here, all those struts and joints are absent and I am left only with the sinking, defeated frustration that this lonely lightbulb (which will burn out and be replaced time and again until the maintenance department is laid off for good, the last bulb burns out, and it passes from existence) is my century’s answer to Manet’s brush.
But I have no time, on this late afternoon visit to the Met, to dwell in languid disappointment.
Dan Flavin, The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (To Robert Rosenblum), 1963
I find comparisons of museums to prisons rather unconvincing, and even though I can concede some similarity to the great necropoli of the Levant, I hesitate to call them mausoleums instead. Both these monikers only make sense if one forgets the pleasure one finds in the galleries, and the freedom with which one enters. They seem more apt for a schoolchild groaning on a class field trip than a casual visitor or tourist. Museums are gently authoritarian to the extent that history itself is a project of familial training.
But on this visit, my first since the pandemic began, that authority is much less gentle. The sensitive poet Valéry complained a century ago that he was parted from his cane and forbidden to smoke as he entered. I moved from spot to six-feet-apart-spot like a game piece in a long line before having my temperature checked, my purse searched, moving through a stripped-down Great Hall, which, without kiosks and coat checks, indeed felt more imposing than inviting, to yet another game board of designated human positions to finally arrive at a counter where I stood before plexiglass and communicated with an attendant through an intercom. I have visited a prison once and I confess the process was notably similar.
The whole process took half of an hour, which constrains my joy upon finally reaching the Grand Stairs with a sense of urgency. I have many friends to visit and not nearly enough time. But revisiting my favorites is barely enough to make a good visit to the museum; there must be spontaneous discovery as well. My haste is compounded by the fact that I have not been to this extraordinary place in over a year, and I want to see every single thing, absorb every single pleasure, all at once and forever. But my eternity is to last no more than ninety minutes.
Éduard Manet, The Funeral, 1867. Likely the funeral of Baudelaire.
The French 19th century will prove, as it often does, to be the peak of my visit, followed abruptly by the deep valley occupied by that poor Flavin. An exhibition I’m sure I’d have enjoyed of pictures by Alice Neel has too long a line, it must be saved for another day. Not wishing to dwell too much in the too-distant past, I resolved to pass, if not through the contemporary, at least through the 20th century.
I was surprised, on my journey to the “short century,” to pass through “Epic Abstraction,” an exhibition that opened a lifetime ago at the end of 2018 and had apparently been extended past its intended close in 2020. It felt extended, like a tired old workhorse plodding alone through a dusty field. I have no great animosity towards the abstraction of the mid 20th century. The Pollock and Rothkos in the first gallery aren’t my favorite, but I see how they can be someone’s. But the Stills in the next gallery enthrall me; I could positively fall into them. There are gasps and shards of moments tumbling together in perfectly choreographed entropy into eternity and I would happily tag along. They are followed by the manic delights of one of Twombly’s abstract algorithms.
Installation view, “Epic Abstraction,” 2021.
I remember scenes from Manhattan and wish for days when museum galleries were for picking up girls or getting picked up. I wonder if my fellow gallery goers are good-looking under their masks. I would be delighted to cock my hip in front of a Rothko and say with great gravitas, and perhaps a slight, implacable accent, “it bores me” to whomever is standing next to me, kicking off a wild 24-hour romance.
By this point I have realized, quite to my chagrin, that all “epic” means in this context is “big.” It is a collection of works that are abstract and large. Some, like an excellent Rashid Johnson at the show’s close, are not exactly “abstract” in the proper sense, although the show doesn’t bother much to define the term. It opens into a joy-sucking gallery full of those hard-edged beasts from the likes of Kelley, Herrera, and Stella that are intent not only on rejecting all that is human, but on denying that it ever existed.
Manhattan, 1979.
Over the balcony I see a glimpse of a Kerry James Marshall and hope that it can restore some spark to my eye, but alas that gallery is closed for an installation. It’s now a quarter of five and my pace quickens toward the 20th century, where the first thing I see is a potato masher in a bizarrely placed design display. All my months missing the Met, all these centuries of art, and here is a potato masher. I remember that, oddly enough, I don’t own such a device. I briefly consider the consequences of punching through the glass and taking this one, which would do more good for humankind plunged into a bowl of Thanksgiving mash than it does in this damn vitrine.
The clock ticks down as I push on into the 20th-century galleries, a dim, low-ceilinged assembly, tucked away as if there’s something shameful about it. And in fairness the thought passes my mind that this feels like walking through the (extremely talented) mind of a deeply traumatized child. So many twists and crumples, fragments and bodies phasing in and out of materiality. I frequently have to yank myself away from my 21st-century cynicism to recall that this Miró and that Chagall or Tanguy were in the midst of discovering the utter disappointment of modernity in figures that evaporate and horizons that deceive; that hideous Dubuffet is building a shanty in the space between what is and what ought to be. The Americans have a better time of it, the wonderful installation of Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today mural recalls some of that old French exuberance for emergent possibilities even as they are already in decay. A self-portrait by Samuel Joseph Brown Jr., both in “real” profile and in an impossibly angled mirror catches my eye, not least because the features of the man in the mirror seem ever so slightly different than the man in profile, too much to be the effect of the device but not enough to make him another man entirely.
Marc Chagall, The Lovers, 1913-14.
Theodor W. Adorno argued that while artworks rely on museums for their continued existence, they also perish in them, ossifying into a macabre collection of dead things. The opposite is equally true: it is the art that is alive and I am dead. I and all the other visitors — couples holding hands, parents guiding children — meandering through the gallery are nothing but ghosts trapped in the eternal delusion that we survived the concentration camps and the atom bomb, moving through a purgatory overstuffed with meaningless pastimes interrupted, rarely and ever so subtly, by a glimpse of a work of art, a real work of art that confronts us as something genuinely different, something alive.
But these may be the last pictures to which I give a real look. I can hear guards announce that the galleries will close. I’m now speeding forth, pausing only to take photos of paintings that may, at some unspecified later date, pique my interest for some unspecified reason. I’m no longer in the museum. I’m somewhere in my mind, in the future, snapping photo after photo, careful to take a picture of each wall label, thinking of what I might write about my visit when I am back home in Brooklyn, thinking that I may write about this experience of non-presence.
I join a growing mass of people herded from various galleries towards the exits. Guards have already roped off any other routes. I glimpse fleeting images of forbidden rooms. My heart sinks a bit as we traverse “The Arts of Africa,” (south of the Sahara, of course), “Oceana and the Americas,” a fairly small set of galleries representing a great swath of the world, lit and painted more like an aquarium than an art museum. In a brief rebellion I pause to look at some textiles.
Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., Self Portrait, ca. 1941.
We emerge into the vaulted ceilings and marble of classical antiquity. I run unexpectedly into an old friend, a tiny Greek terracotta comedian. Then out through the hall, just out. The metal buttons once collected by the doors were discontinued years ago. The stickers that replaced them were victims of the pandemic. Now it’s just doors.
I don’t have cash to buy my ritual post-Met hot dog, so I cross Fifth Avenue hungry and walk past empty storefronts to Lexington, where I catch the train home.
Terracotta Comic Actor, Greek, late 5th - early 4th century BCE.
