MoMA: Two Art Works

We stopped by yesterday to see the newly renovated MOMA, Bush. That’s the Museum of Modern Art. I guess you must have been there. But have you been since the remodel job? It’s a fantastic improvement over the old one, well worth the long wait. It feels much more spacious, airy, and there’s a great deal more breathing space for the collection. Ellie spotted the architect during our visit there, deep in conversation with what seemed to be an interviewer. He certainly did a great job.

The collection has incredible depth, as I'm sure you know. It seems never-ending. We were there for six hours, and skimmed through a lot of it. Despite the grandeur of it all—the Van Goghs, the Gaugins, the Picassos, the Matisses!—I myself came away with two seemingly rather modest pieces in my mind. Both were in the current exhibit of the UBS corporate collection, on the top floor. The first was by the British artist, Richard Long, who’s known for working with the natural environment: the image was a circular trail of footprints, made on paper after stepping in the mud and silt of the River Avon. A very primitive instinct, to leave one’s mark; also a kind of drumbeat in its rhythmic pattern, evoking a kind of ritual dance; and the material, earth, clay, is the most primordial of all--and the earliest used by our species. A sense of the human being springing from the earth, and reconnecting with it in the most simple and basic of ways. Very personal, too—these would have been Long’s own feet—and an assertion of his presence at a particular place and a particular moment in time. It reached me in the most immediate and intimate kind of way.

The second piece was a painting by the American artist, Vija Celmins. A deep, deep, deep blue background (it could even have been black) and, set against it, hundreds of tiny white dots, stars scattered on its surface. It’s a quite small painting, but it manages to evoke in one small area the vastness and the unimaginable depth of the universe. You could just stand there for hours in front of it and get lost in its totally imaginary spaces. The mind travels with the eye, making its long journey from dot to dot, from star to star, in an act of mesmerizing contemplation. A breathtaking visual experience.

So there you have it, Bush—the intimate and the infinite in two small works of art. Both spoke to that part of me that is devoted to the practice of meditation: the Richard Long suggests a grounding, meditative walk, the careful, inch by inch placement of the foot, heel to toe, heel to toe, with an accompanying sense of total presence. Very physical. The Vija Celmins takes me to the opposite pole, the furtherst point imaginable in the universe, the absolute, a kind of emptiness—but an emptiness filled, as it were, with infinite and infinitely silent presence. You have to be right there.

That, in itself, was enough for one day. Jet lag caught up with us by evening, and we headed back to the hotel for another early night.