Museum Memories

On the last day of January of this year, George and I went to the Dia in Beacon, New York. I love contemporary art for its challenging, thought-provoking ways of deconstructing and reconstructing the world. Little did I know that would be the last time I visited a museum in...a year? years? 

Thinking of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses and Michael Heizer's North East South West (you can google these artists/titles, and in fact almost the entire collection of the Dia is viewable on this museum's website), I see the common themes and effects of these works on my way of thinking. Serra's metal cylinders are inviting, yet create a sense of vertigo. Heizer's geometric holes descend like wells, or like the subconscious. Both works are metaphors for what we are going through in these days of the Covid-19 pandemic: Spaces we thought we knew now seem out-of-balance (or its lack of balance has been revealed); the the paradox of absent/all-too-present is on us like a physical weight. 

Thank you, Dia, and all art museums, for asking us to stand and stare and wonder. Thank you for offering to shore up our inner resources, for when we need to make sense of the senseless. Thank you artists, for the new ways of thinking about the world. 

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artwork: altered page, "In the Museum," 4-29-20, by Jean LeBlanc