Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon<\/p>\n
A very interesting conversation among fellow docents over lunch.\u00a0 When I reflect on it, it seems like we’re asking a potentially troublesome, certainly challenging question.\u00a0 What is the role of the docent?\u00a0 The museum?\u00a0 Art in a museum?\u00a0 What kind of experience do we want our visitors to have when on a tour?\u00a0 Should it be entertaining and fun?\u00a0 Should it be informative?\u00a0 Should the experience include wrestling with difficult topics like rape, violence, feminism, racism, colonialism, homosexuality or are those kind of topics best left alone?<\/p>\n
Art, any art, whether in a museum or gallery or private collection or still resident in an artist’s studio, represents a dialogue between an individual and their interior life on the one hand and between an individual and the context of influence in which they swim, on the other.<\/p>\n
Museums represent a democratizing of arts role in the culture in that they preserve works over time and exhibit them to anyone willing to come and, if necessary, pay an entrance fee.\u00a0 Otherwise art remains locked away behind walls of privilege, secreted in private rooms or hung in institutions of wealth and power\u00a0 corporate, governmental or religious.<\/p>\n
Art’s intimate dialogue, a dance really, within the artist’s person expressed in the artist’s world, does not end with the finished work, rather, in one sense, it is only then that it truly begin.\u00a0 Arts life, its voice, emerges only in those one-to-one moments when another individual stops, looks, wonders, connects, feels.\u00a0 Imagine, if you will, the great stream of people who have seen Michelangelo’s Pieta since he finished it in 1499.\u00a0 Imagine them as one long queue, standing patiently, moving slowly, each person stopping.<\/p>\n
As I take my time before it, I’m moved by the tenderness to pity (pieta) both Mary and the crucified Jesus.\u00a0 The humanness of a mother with her dead son cradled in her lap suggests heartbreak, anguish, maybe even despair.\u00a0 In my case I may reverse it, remembering my mother, dying from a stroke at the age of 46.\u00a0 The emotions, the experience comparable.<\/p>\n
The smooth finish of the marble, the folds in Mary’s garments, the limp body pressing into her lap not as a long piece of stone, but as dead weight.\u00a0 Her downcast eyes, her upturned left palm, her apparent youth.\u00a0 All of these create in me a response not dictated by the material, marble, but by the marble’s transformation at the hands of a 15th century Italian, a rugged, intelligent, sensitive man.<\/p>\n
Michelangelo speaks directly to me, soul to soul.\u00a0 The conversation is lively, profound, memorable.\u00a0 Yet he’s dead, just like Jesus.<\/p>\n
The line moves on.\u00a0 Who knows what the next person will experience?\u00a0 What will their dialogue with Michelangelo be?\u00a0 There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions in that line.\u00a0 The Pieta is only one work of art.\u00a0 Imagine the lines that have formed before Botticelli’s Primavera?\u00a0 Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.\u00a0 The Sphinx.\u00a0 The Churning of the Sea of Milk in Angkor.\u00a0\u00a0 In each instance we offer ourselves up to another, at best we become vulnerable, the conversation is two way.<\/p>\n
Then, there is the more complex phenomena of groups encountering art.\u00a0 That is, of course, the essence of touring.\u00a0 How can we make that experience, that encounter with a work, intimate?\u00a0 What extra do we add to the experience that makes us worthwhile?\u00a0 Answering that question, it seems to me, is the journey on which this small group of docents has begun.\u00a0 Sounds significant to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon A very interesting conversation among fellow docents over lunch.\u00a0 When I reflect on it, it seems like we’re asking a potentially troublesome, certainly challenging question.\u00a0 What is the role of the docent?\u00a0 The museum?\u00a0 Art in a museum?\u00a0 What kind of experience do we want our visitors to have when … Continue reading Imagine a Line<\/span>