Washington, D.C. is a great city. It has its share of corruption and more than its share of bureaucracy, but it makes up for this with clean streets, quiet neighborhoods, and the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Museums are all free, all excellent, and usually showcase the best our nation has to offer. Of course, my favorite free museum on the mall isn’t a Smithsonian at all, but it’s still wonderful. The National Gallery of Art–I would pull a Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler there if I thought I could get away with it. The quiet grandeur of the rotunda, Hermes perpetually fluttering his ankle-wings in preparation for flight from the dark marble fountain, the small wood-paneled galleries which contain secret marvels from the Dutch masters, the echoing emptiness of the high sculpture hallways on a Monday at nine o’clock.
So a few weeks ago I made my first trip of the summer to the National Gallery of Art. Walking there from the metro station, I decided to detour through the Sculpture Garden right across the street. Since I’d been there last, they’d added a new scupture, “Graft,” by Roxy Paine.
Beside the trompe l’oeil house in bright red, yellow, and black, and the perfect replica of one of the art nouveau metro entrances in Paris was this tree, blindingly silver in the strong afternoon sun. Its branches tangled with the branched of real trees next to it. Its burnished trunk sprang from the packed dirt like any other hardy plant in a hot D.C. summer.
So, what is so different about art and nature? When we look at a flower, is it not nearly the same thing as looking at a sculpture that’s stuck in the ground next to that flower? What matters, I think, is context. A sculpture in a marble hall–that’s clearly art. We walk around it, we read the tag on the wall explaining its history and provenance. We look at it, expecting that it will say something to us. And if it doesn’t say anything, we either blame ourselves for being insufficiently perceptive, or we blame the artist for producing a failed work of art. Rarely we blame the lighting or the context of the sculpture or painting–because that’s where art is supposed to be, displayed in art museums, right? That’s what they’re there for.
But seeing this metal tree in the sculpture garden (which is sort of an outdoors art museum, the purpose of the place being the display of art objects) my paradigm was shifted. Nothing was really what it seemed anymore–Paine’s tree was as much part of the landscape as the carefully-desposited mulch piles. The famous, giant typewriter eraser had grown there from a tiny typewriter eraser seed. The pine trees in one corner were exquisite artifice, planted and pruned and genetically engineered to be looked at and appreciated as art.
So I don’t know what I think anymore–is art made to be looked at, or to be seen? Is the world for living in or for analyzing? It’s probably a jumbled mix of a lot of things, but I’ve ceased to think that context is overwhelmingly important when dealing with art, or life, for that matter. Context is just one more detail, and what matters more, I think, is the response we make to art or artifice, wherever we find it.
books, bottles, and broomsticks 