So, I finally make it to MOMA, the aesthete's cathedral, only as I wander I'm getting increasingly depressed. It seems more a morgue than a cathedral because I've seen everything before in books, and lectures, and slides which, truth be told, were better illuminated and often more interesting than the masterpiece itself. For a while I console myself with pomo platitudes about the impossibility of possessing "the original" unmediated by other representations, but congratulating myself by being ironical and snide about less informed pilgrims wears a little thin, even for a bona fide Gen Xer as myself.
Then, perhaps revived a little by De Chirico, it hits me: I would much rather be in the Charles and Mary Johnson Gourd Museum in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. I'd rather be there because I have no familiar categories to make sense of it. I'd rather be there because it unnerves me, and reminds me that there are things in life too strange for knee jerk irony. I'd rather be there because it will never have a mass market or become a ministry of culture. Don't get me wrong, it isn't pure in some stupid Kantian sense: "absolutely" free from commercialism, mass marketing, or critical paradigms like "outsider art." But it's still strange enough to send my mind skidding off the usual highways taken by a graduate student in English. Suddenly, my mind's an ATV, off the academented highway and roaming over magnificent obsessions so off the map that I refer to them as "alternative sanities."
This is not some cult of the Romantic madman. It is not the next hot thing. This revolution will not be televised because it is not, nor ever will be, a revolution. So park your car and head in to the museum.
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Gallery 1 |
Gallery 2 |
Gallery 3 |