Modern Baby

In keeping with my desire to spend a little less time on this blog (and more time on other writing), I'll keep this short...attended the mobbed 75th Anniversary show at SF Museum of Modern Art, two Sundays ago. I remember how I felt that day--desperate to do something "cultural," and something in keeping with the "old me," so to speak, the pre-motherhood me.

What ended up happening, however, was interesting: a bit of culture shock, along the lines of "Who are all these self-absorbed poseurs who take themselves for sophisticates? And who could enjoy art in a crazy mob scene like this?" Once I got those thoughts out of my system, however, I almost enjoyed myself.

But what I really enjoyed (if truth be told) was the phenomenon of taking a 10-month-old baby to a popular art exhibit and seeing his reactions to things. The kid really enjoyed whamming his hand against the clear plastic that covered the descriptions of the different pieces of art (he was desperate to touch something, and I couldn't very well let him slap his palm against the art itself, so this was the next best thing). I couldn't tell if he liked the art itself, though he definitely wanted to touch it. And at one point, he squirmed and cried out, so I let him out of the carrier and let him crawl across the floor a short distance (worried, of course, that he'd contract some horrible virus or be trampled underfoot, but he survived). He loved doing that. And other than that one brief outburst of fussiness, his behavior was exemplary. But the only part of the exhibit that he loved completely and utterly was the huge curtain of bright gold beads at the exit. Strung up across fifteen feet of floor space, it was a marvelous shower of gold, something my son could touch, slap at, stroke, wrap around his little fist; he adored it.

The exhibit was well-organized; different rooms highlighted different eras in the San Francisco art scene and more generally, the history of twentieth-century art. But at the end of it I was left wondering: is this all there is? I almost raced through the exhibit, because I didn't want to be stuck in the middle if my baby decided to have a fit; so perhaps I missed something. But I thought I'd find more "there" there, as far as the SF MoMA collection as a whole was concerned. Perhaps I'm becoming more demanding or even fussy as I get older, where art is concerned; or perhaps I don't agree with their choices of what to display for this particular exhibit. I think it's probably a mixture of both.

But it's also true that I'm not the same person I was just a year ago. I don't have much patience any more for Clyfford Still and many of the abstract expressionists, for example, or art installations of various kinds--I find most of that incredibly dull. Whereas the Magrittes and Klees in SFMOMA's collection still move me deeply. I suppose that a year ago, I might have tried to learn more about the abstract expressionists to find out if there's something I'm missing; now I just don't care that much. It seems so important to create art as urgent as Klee's head with an arrow pointing at it (I don't remember the name of that one, will have to look it up). Art is as important to me as ever, and I need those Klees and Magrittes even more now--but I probably need the Abstract Expressionists much less. I'd like to discover a new trend in art that speaks to me as strongly and clearly as some of the early modernists do.

I see that I haven't kept this short after all...but so be it.