Daily Archives: March 15, 2008

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

Art and Religion

Leave a comment

30  bar steady 30.06 1mph WNW windchill 30

     First Quarter Moon of Winds

When I woke up, Kate was long gone.  It was 9:30.  I missed my nap yesterday and I picked the sleep time this AM.

The rest of the morning, what there was left anyhow, I used looking over my notes for the religion and contemporary art discussion I will lead on Monday.  This topic follows two ancient trails I have followed for many, many years.  I would not characterize myself as an expert in either one, though I know enough to guide conversation.

The result of this work has convinced me that there are several interesting tours at an encyclopedic museum like the MIA that do not follow either the cutesy or the artworld insider glimpse that most of our tours use.  With tours like love and scandal or chocolate whatever we give a cutesy turn to looking at art. It gets some people into the galleries I suppose and and the works themselves have many different facets, so these tours are not vacuous at all, but they don’t focus the mind.

The other category of tour:  On Dragons Wings, a Taste of Asia, Art of the Americas, Art of the Ancient World give tour goers an insiders tour, a short glimpse of the world of art history, connossieurship and curating offered through a slice of an encyclopedic museum.  Nothing wrong with this either, though I often wonder about the value of this brief an introduction to six to eight objects.  It may spark interest that tour goers will pursue on their own.  I hope so.

The kind of tour topic this religion and art material suggests could offer a third type of tour, one that takes a point of view and pursues an argument through use of various objects.  The relationship between religion and art has a long history with many chapters and in some senses the most interesting chapters come last in the world of contemporary art.   The MIA has a much better collection for pursuing this topic than, say, the Walker because we have art as old as the Lady of LaMouth and art as recent as Hirsch’s, Death of St. John.  Other interesting tours along these lines would involve the relationship between literature and art.

Art and Culture, Friends

Aramaic and the Democratic Primary Race

Leave a comment

28  bar rises 30.06 5mph N windchill 28

    First Quarter Moon of Winds

Yesterday I had tours with a group of 4th graders from Hastings and 1st graders from Apple Valley.  Though these tours don’t race the intellectual engine, they are fun.  These kids are thoughtful, attentive and excited about the art that they see.  It refreshes my eye each time I do one of these tours because the kids see things I don’t see and make conjectures about the works that don’t occur to me. 

An example of the latter is a discussion I had with the kids from Hastings about the Fanatics of Tangiers.  Delacroix painted a Sufi sect as it engaged in an ecstatic dance to reach the wisdom of their saint.  (BYB-Fanatic is ethnocentric, not to mention xenophobic, but it is the name of the painting.)  The kids looked at the sect and imagined that the group surging foreward through the streets (the sect) might be being chased by animals; or, perhaps the people who stood around had sent an army to the crowd’s village and chased them back here. 

Another great thing about tour days is the opportunity to connect with docent classmates and to make new friends from among the docent corps.  Today Stacy, Careen, Annie, Sally and Wendy were there.  They reveal, among them, the infinite variety our species takes, even among those who appear so similar.  All white, all well-educated and with one exception upper middle class at least, these women vary a lot in their personal details.  Stacy’s husband runs and owns a business recharging ink cartridges while she works at a Lutheran church in various capacities.  Careen is a Quebecois, an architect and a physician’s spouse like me.  Annie’s husband is from Lagos, Nigeria and contracted malaria while there.  Annie’s adopted.  Sally is a retired trainer and organizational development person whose daughter almost drowned in a ferry sinking off the coast of Thailand not too long ago.  Wendy has bright kids, and married an Italian.  She’s works on her conversational Italian for trips to the see the in-laws.

Lunch with Frank.  We went to the Black Forest where we were the only customers in the dining room except for a couple at the very far end next to 26th Street.  We both had sausages and we both knew better.  We talked about travel, serious illness, Aramaic and the silliness, if it weren’t so damned serious, of the late stage Democratic primary race.