There’s something Tess has never liked about museums. It’s not the people, necessarily; she is even a little envious of them. Avant-garde hipsters walking around frantically, looking busy – writing or photographing or standing there with head tilted, trying to appear contemplative. Unaffected, jaded watchers, wise ones who, alone, know what art is and judge the masses for their obedience to the exhibits. At times the whole thing seems silly to her, but at least they’re here by choice. Tess enters the museum, trying to slip through a crack in the door that is as small as possible. Her job here is to not take up space. Her coworker in this room of the modern art wing is entering at the same time. “Morning, Jim,” she murmurs quietly to him, and her voice glances across the windows in sweeping echoes. Morning, morning, morning. Jim grunts self-importantly, seeming to swell up like a navy-and-brass-upholstered balloon. His skin is dark brown to her caramel tan, his hair as short as hers is long. Somehow his grunt barely echoes at all – maybe that’s why he got the promotion and she didn’t. Technically he outranks her now, not that it really matters, since their jobs are identical; make sure no one gets too close to the art.
As she takes up her post in a blank white corner, Tess sees the painting she stares at every day. “The Senseless Cycle, Tender and Benign, Bring Great Comfort,” it’s called. By Lari Pittman. She knows a lot more about it, too, including the year it was painted, what some art historians think it means, and what’s across from the wall it’s hanging on. And where you’d be if you stood in front of it, walked to the right, took the next right and then two lefts and exited through the glass doors you’d find. Not that Tess really cares about any of these things; it’s just her job to know them. She stares at her favorite corner of the painting’s canvas: a pair of eyes, among a jumble of other objects. They are oddly shaped, swirled with arrows and trees and feathers shooting out of them. Ice blue, like her own, but many times larger. Or maybe just more noticeable. In her mind, they are the arbiters of justice, the subtle gods of what is, the lovers of truth and speakers of silence. A blessing and a curse, for as they watch they are doomed never to participate. Tess feels that they have no purpose of their own, and yet without them purpose would perhaps cease to be.
It is cool and open in this room, though the strips of metal wire around the paintings line and confine her, strapped down with paintings and sculptures on an intentionally white gurney. To her left is the room full of blank white canvases with little strips of metal on them. They remind her of her life, every day among the security wires, white walls and silver slivers. None of the visitors here can understand that. Tess is too young to know how to escape, but too old not to want to learn. Soon the museum is open, and people begin trickling in. Next to her, a young man is writing an exposé on the meaning of the chair shaped like the negative space of a stool. Red felt on metal. It looks uncomfortable, frankly. Tess notices the missing pieces and the things that don’t fit in the art around her. Being here every day, it’s hard not to. What she sees in this sculpture is emptiness, lack of use. She so badly wants to know what this guy thinks is important enough to write about. What does he see in that stool? Her guess is, it’s just the fact that it’s here, in a museum, where age equals honesty and death equals power. But she’d love to be proved wrong, love to hear him talk about how his mother owned the metal stool missing from that sculpture, and how she put flowers on it the exact red of that felt, and how after she died those flowers sat there, withering, until he threw them out. And how now, when he sees that shade of red, he wishes he had planted the half-dead flowers instead of locking them in a green metal trash can to become all-dead.
Across from Tess, a girl rails in whispers that the sculpture “Concrete Screen Door” is not art, it is just a door. Tess rolls her eyes, and receives a stern look from Jim. Rule number one of museum guards: protect the art. Rule number two: respect the patrons. But she has seen “just doors,” and this is not a “just door.” Although if truth be told, she’s never seen a door without a doorway. She imagines going up to the girl and saying, “Do you understand that a screen door keeps little things out? And a concrete door keeps big things in?” She does not do this, of course, even though she wants to. How can anyone even define what is and is not? And how can what is not hold us to anything? The girl moves on to another wing, her muttering becoming incoherent. Her annoying little ballet flats slap against the floor. Ker-slap, ker-slap. Tess sighs and rubs her eyes. Two hours gone. Too many to go.
Now a group of elementary school kids are coming up to her. They’re lost, and can she please tell them the way to the cafeteria? Patiently, she outlines the route for them. “See that painting over there?” She points rather indirectly at it – guards are not equal to the art they guard, and may not disrespect it. Rule number three. “I see it, the one with the eyes?” asks a boy. He can’t be more than seven or eight. “That’s the one. Now you walk to the right, take the next right and then two lefts, and go out some big glass doors. “Thank you,” whispers the shy voice of a little girl. She scampers off happily after her friends, louder than she should be. But Tess says nothing. She wants these kids to like her, and by association, the art. Of course, when the girl passes Jim, he reprimands her. “No running, young lady.”
Tess is annoyed again. She half wants to go up to that weathered tree trunk sculpture and climb it and sit on it and get thrown out of the museum. Preferably by Jim. It looks like a real tree trunk from where she’s standing, not something you see a lot of here in the city. Maybe Jim would like to climb it with her; maybe she should ask. She imagines their conversation:
Tess: “So, want to go climb that tree trunk?”
Jim: (blankly) “What tree trunk?”
Tess: “That one, over there. In that big room that seems like it was designed to fit that exact shape of tree trunk.”
Jim: (annoyed) “Oh, that. That’s a sculpture, not a tree trunk. And what do you mean, climb it?”
Tess: “Never mind. It was a stupid idea anyway.”
Jim: “Probably. Can you stand a bit to the left? You’re blocking my assigned sightline."
Tess: (quietly) Assigned sightline. Can’t you even figure out what to look at without a rule about it?”
Jim: “What was that?”
Tess: “Nothing.”
Tess also wants run her hands over the fuzzy grey paintstrokes of a mother and two children that she knows are in hanging on the opposite side of the wall behind her. She wants to feel what the artists felt as they molded clay in their hands and sewed together watercolors and cloth. She wants to lean into them, as she feels sure the artists did when they were done, and exhausted by their own work’s very existence. After all, once they have defined a piece, set out to begin it, they’re inviting an ending to come along and carry them. She wants to catch the dry bones tossed up by this art, and once she has done this, throw them back to the smell of salt and paint. She wants to free these caged animals, give them love and light and happiness and wear them down until they die and finally prove that they are alive. Maybe what she wants doesn’t matter, nor what she needs or sees or feels. But maybe it’s all that matters, if only because it’s also what the artist wanted, needed, saw, and felt. To write it down is to entrap it, to hold it forever and always have it near to summon at a moment’s notice. Of course, art is not like this. It cannot be named, held, owned, captured, or preserved. Perhaps this is why we try so hard, thinks Tess. Standing in a room of art, like creating art, is really just another form of being alone in your own head. If you have trouble with it, maybe it’s because you’re trying to make yourself feel something you don’t.
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