I also resent a little bit the fact that I always have to look up the spelling. Hirschorn or Hirschhorn or Hirshorn just seem more likely to me.

I still haven’t broken my streak, but earlier this week I went down to the outside of the Hirshhorn to enjoy a moving piece of art. It’s “Song 1,” a multimedia installation by artist Doug Aitken. It’s a video, projected on all 360 degrees of the cylindrical museum’s exterior, with big speakers playing various people singing “I Only Have Eyes For You,” a song from the 30′s that I didn’t recognize but which has been drifting through my mind ever since Tuesday night.

It’s running every night from sunset to midnight, through May 13–definitely worth a visit. The closest metro is L’Enfant Plaza, but in this nice weather you could turn it into a walk from Gallery Place or just about anywhere downtown.

I’ve been to New York several times since then, but you know, MoMA costs $20 now, and I feel like I have to be able to devote a good chunk of the day to Modern Art if I’m going to spend that kind of money. If you don’t want to spend that kind of money, I recommend befriending someone with a membership. You get in for five bucks and you get to leave your stuff in the special Members’ Cloakroom.

Since the last time I was at MoMA was probably, oh, 2001, I can’t really remember what the space was like before. Honestly, all I remembered was Starry Night and this, one of a set of super exciting Kandinsky paintings:

This painting is one of four that were commissioned in 1914 to hang in the foyer of the Park Avenue apartment of the guy who founded Chevrolet. The artist, Vasily Kandinsky, was into painting as a representation of music.

That 1945 Bell helicopter hangs near the design exhibits. And it really is quite pretty, for a helicopter.There are lots of odd places like this where you can see from one floor to another or into special exhibit halls. From the bottom level, you can see all the way up, past the column by Sanja Iveković (one of the special exhibits) to the start of the Cindy Sherman exhibit.

And, after reading the MoMA’s Wikipedia entry, I have a new ambition: To become the director. He lives above the shop, rent-free, in a $6-million apartment. Wait–now that I’ve read the New York Times article that was based on, I realize the directors of AMNH and the Met get similar deals. I’d be happy to accept any of these posts, or at least the apartments, if anyone’s offering.

The work has finally started, which means when you walk by the museum, you see this:

Bricks! The building looks so strange without its marble overcoat. Less like a national monument, more like a suburban house. I learned from a 2008 Wall Street Journal story that bricks fill in the space between the load-bearing concrete. If you’re interested in how buildings work, the WSJ piece gives quite a detailed explanation, including the various things that may have gone wrong. Apparently the biggest problem was the expansion and contraction that happens every day in the heat of the sun. So, while the panels should be floating on steel supports that transfer their weight to the concrete structure, some of them have started to rest on each other instead. Oops. The reconstruction should fix that.

photo: me, with my phone – how ’bout that?

The V&A’s jewelry collection is amazing, but two things impressed me the most. First, the cast iron jewelry from 19th-century Germany. (Actually Prussia, I think.) Who knew you could make cast-iron jewelry? Well, you can. It’s black, like you’d think, but quite delicate. The other thing I thought was totally cool was the chatelaine.

I knew that chatelaine was a word, but I think I thought it had something to do with chattel. (And I’m not totally sure I knew what chattel meant; the meaning I was thinking of, slave, is archaic.) But it’s actually the feminine version of chatelain, the keeper of a castle. And it has a second meaning: this thing.

Women’s clothes weren’t always made with pockets, but that doesn’t mean women didn’t carry things around. They had one of these, a sort of ornamental chain worn at the waist with useful stuff hanging off of it, like keys and scissors. This one was made of cut steel around 1850 in London.

Seriously, the museum goes on and on and on. Somewhere in the back of a set of galleries is this bed:

But, oh no, it’s not just any bed. It’s The Great Bed of Ware. Haven’t heard of it? Well, that just proves you aren’t living in 16th century Britain. It was so famous, it made an appearance in Twelfth Night:

…and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of
paper, although the sheet were big enough for the
bed of Ware in England, set ‘em down: go, about it.

A traveler first wrote about it in 1596 in an inn in Ware, in Hertfordshire. The real textiles didn’t survive; these hangings and bed coverings are based on other textiles of the time.

The museum is truly mind-blowingly ginormous. Here’s a room of 20th-century design:

Note that the upper reaches of the room hold part of the library’s collection.

And then there’s large quantities of sculpture. And that huge wall thing at the end of this gallery used to be in a church, although I completely failed to collect any information about it.

I mean, I have a little information – it’s a choir screen, which goes between the part of the church where the congregation hangs out and the part where the action happens. They used to be common, and now they’re less common, if I remember correctly from the label. They’ve been taken out of a lot of churches, including whatever church that one used to be in, and some ended up at the V&A.

Including the one in this picture:

What’s that? You say the choir screen isn’t the most noticeable thing in that picture? Yeah. That blue-green thing is a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly that hangs in the big main entranceway thingy. I think “Dale Chihuly” is a good bet whenever you see a swoopy monumental piece of glass sculpture.

I was at the V&A for a couple of hours and really just barely scratched the surface. I suppose I’ll have to go back sometime. One thing that makes that easy: Admission is free. I love free museums. Not only because I am totally cheap, but also because I feel like I can just go in, look at a couple of things, and leave again. There’s no need to stay for hours and get my money’s worth. Well, come to think of it, that’s less true in this case, because I had to get all the way to London – with a plane ticket from the U.S., then a train ticket from Guildford for the day. But anyway, V&A. Yay.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

On the way home from a recent wedding, I had lots of time – thanks for the delays, United – to examine the exhibit Second Chances: Folk Art Made From Recycled Remnants.

It’s from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. I’m not totally clear on what that means about the relationship between them, but I’m guessing a curator in Santa Fe put it together and they lent it to the SFO Museum.

The items in the exhibit are charming – it’s fun to look at something, see its current shape, and also be able to see what it was before. License plates turned into dustpans, bottle caps strung together on wire to make a toy snake. Of course, it’s not like people were recycling to be cute; a lot of this is recycling born out of necessity.

That’s a trunk made out of tin, wood, and paper, Dakar, Senegal, c. 1994. I just looked up “arachide” in the handy French dictionary next to my desk and am delighted to tell you that these tins used to hold peanut oil.

This kind of recycling also funnels into a souvenir trade. One of my favorite Christmas tree ornaments is an angel made from an insecticide can that I bought in Mali. I also love a little dump truck I got there, made from pieces of a can of the “Gino” brand. Something that involves tomatoes. I bought it from a small boy atop a mud-brick building in Djenne. So I was pretty amused to see the exact same design (made from a different can) in the exhibit:

It’s also from Mali, but from 1994 – I bought mine in 2005. So I guess that particular form of folk art manufacture has been going on for a while. It’s really a pretty sophisticated toy. The dump truck dumps.

There was quite a variety of stuff in the show – early American furniture and duck decoys, for example, and some items made by contemporary artists who just like working with old stuff. I think my favorite item was this eagle:

It was made by some Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1993. I’d forgotten this, although it sounded vaguely familiar when I looked it up. Their ship ran aground off a beach in Queens and over 200 immigrants were stuck in prisons while the U.S. figured out what to do with them. The last people weren’t freed until 1997.

While they were in prison they did a ton of origami. This eagle is made from magazines and papier mache of rough prison toilet paper. Google tells me that some people now call this style of paper folding “Golden Venture Folding,” after the ship that the immigrants came in. Some were granted asylum; many ended up back in China or in other countries.

The SFO Museum’s website says it was founded in 1980 and was “the first cultural institution of its kind located in an international airport.” That’s a lot of qualifiers, so I guess that means it isn’t the first museum in an airport. But it’s still pretty neat. I loved having the opportunity to lose myself in this art for a bit while I killed time before my flight.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

One of the less exciting sites was Djenné-Jéno. Now, Djenné is fantastic. It’s a city of mud brick buildings, including the world’s largest, this mosque:

But Djenné-Jéno is an archaeological site just down the road from Djenné. Several centuries ago, it was an important city. Now it looks like this:

To an archaeologist, that may be exciting, but to me, it kind of looked like a big empty space covered in broken pieces of pottery.

So I was pretty excited a few weeks ago when I was at Yale for a story, dropped in on the Yale University Art Gallery, and found this case of wonderful terracotta figures from Djenné-Jéno (or Jenné-Jeno, as they spell it).

I love the personality – they’re so different from anything I’ve seen. This male figure is from sometime between about AD 600 and 1200:

The label called this a “maternity figure,” from a bit later, somewhere in the AD 1100-1700 range:

Another label mentioned that some of the figurines show signs of disease and might have been somehow associated with healing. Look at the maternity figure’s back:

I’m not sure what disease involves polka-dotted snakes, but it can’t be a good one.

Isn’t life cool? It was so neat to wander into the art gallery and see these delightful figures from a site I’d walked on. Here’s some background information on Djenné-Jéno from the people who did a lot of the excavation there.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

pictures: first two by Jim Fields; the others by me

While I was poking around, trying to figure out where they live, I discovered that the Milwaukee Zoo sells bonobo paintings. Zoos do a lot of things to keep their animals entertained, especially the smarter ones, and at Milwaukee, that includes letting the bonobos mess around with paints.

I like this trend of animal art. The most famous, I think, is elephant paintings. There was a video going around for a while of an elephant painting…an elephant. Elephants don’t actually know how to make 2-D representations of things they see. They’re trained to make the right set of strokes on paper. But still, it’s awfully cool that you can buy something an elephant painted and have it shipped from Thailand. Actually, you have more than one option, if that is the kind of thing you are into.

By far my favorite thing in the world of animal painting, though, because it’s got the least evidence of intentionality by the artist, is something I saw at the gift shop of the National Aquarium in Washington. They were selling art that was made by dipping turtles in paint and letting them walk around on paper. Or canvas. I forget. Either way: That is funny.

Of course, the cool kids know the best way to visit museums by computer is by reading my museum tourist posts.

Whoa. In an odd coincidence, if you google “Year of Meteors,” about half the results are for an album by someone I went to college with. I’m listening to it now and, wow, she’s good. Here’s the Whitman poem.