The DeCordova show was a really big show.

The musuem is on huge grounds, where before the show we ran around and saw a fantastic spherical sculpture made of brick and copper that reminded me of what would remain if all the mill architecture in Providence was boiled down into a soapy fluid and then blown into a single bubble. The interior of the joint is equally huge, and the crowd that turned out was huge to the point of roiling. I reacted predictably by becoming reticent about standing near my own work for fear of it being recognized as my own work, and surrounded myself with my usual contingient of friends.

All went well. Jamie found the beer for us, J Hogue repeatedly picked my stray hair off of my black sweater in a comfortingly familiar way, Brian became enraptured by the holographic fat woman in the museum’s permanent collection, and Jimmy was profoundly affected by the ape portraits.

You must read the text that accompanies them.

Partly because of the crowds and partly because of a problem inherent in large, themed art shows, I had a hard time really seeing, let alone reacting to, work through the lens of "museum" or the lens of "animal art". In the museum setting I sometimes suffer from a sensory overload from all the art and a contextual underload from all of the white walls and the lack of other signs of life. There was some really notable stuff, though.


Kitty Wales made life-sized, raggedy dogs out of black and white yarn, who prowled low and operated a mysterious and somewhat sinister machine that looked to me like some sort of archaic steam-powered weaving machine made of brass and old sea shanties. The machine was either being fed by the dogs with a heap of yarn that was then woven into more, identical dogs, or the machine was being used by the dogs to unravel other dogs into a heap of yarn. It wasn’t clear, but we sat on the floor across from it for a wonderfully long time.

There was also fantastic jellyfish made of a glass bulb, wires, filaments and whatnot and suspended in mineral oil that illuminated and floated eerily about when one pressed a foot pedal.

In both cases, as well as the cases of a slew of amazing photos including yet another jellyfish, I found myself desperately wishing to see the work by itself, or outside, or in a different setting. I wanted to encounter the photos on an apartment wall, stumble across the ape portraits slapped up on public billboards, or happen upon the dog sculptures in the raw space at Firehouse 13.

In other musts, We Must talk about this soon.

One of Haruki Murakami’s books opens with a couple meeting at a large jellyfish show in a small Japanese town’s aquarium. The idea of a jellyfish show completely bowls me over and I want to believe that such an eerie, bouyant thing actually happens, and even more than that I want to stumble across the filaments-n-glass jellyfish floating in an aquarium. Jellyfish are great. Murukami is great.

But then, where does the craze for natural settings end? If I ever went to a jellyfish show I’m sure I’d be disappointed and fairly disturbed. I would declare that I only want to see the jellyfish deep in their native seas. I would call the aquarium a prison (actually, I’ve done this, more than once). I would, I guess, only want to meet the filaments-n-glass jellyfish while rowing on the high tide of some dreamy, briny, mechanical ocean.

I have a hard time responding to art in museums and I continue to think that they have the effect of sterilizing the work. But I’m starting to understand a bit why they’re necessary. When I got to the opening, Nick Capasso, the curator who pushed to get my work into the museum, greeted me with a handshake and “welcome to the mausoleum!”. Apparently a person or two has read this here blog. Oops.

I can’t help but wish that Nick had written a comment on here, telling me just why I've been wrong to characterize museums the way I have. Maybe he could school me on the desperately crucial role that museums play in society.

Aren't you glad this is called "Broken Sleep"

I have a simple idea, anyway. I finally realized early today (I am terribly slow and have been busy doing things like goind to costume parties, buying 100 year old textbooks, and watching people put cupcakes down their pants) that a museum is not unlike a library. And of course I'd defend a library to the bitter end! Libraries are threatened and underfunded and I have gone to bat for them more than once on the merit of their being wonderful ARCHIVES of worlds and worlds of ideas, sparks, puns and revelations.

The destruction of libraries is terrible enough to have inspired futuristic horror stories and caused huge city protests and sit ins. Libraries are hugely crucial. But they’re also just containers. They're thankfully not too tied to the greedy and pit-fallible publishing world, but they also have nothing to do with the real life of a book. I wouldn’t even really recommend reading a book inside the library. Books and the ideas in them are meant to be dragged outside, stepped on and wrung out and decanted into our everydays. I can’t imagine that any author writes a mighty, writhing book while thinking about the interior of a library. It’s just an ARCHIVE, (For whatever reason, it’s this particular word that’s making me feel better about the big institutional buildings that hold the stuff we create so I’m capitalizing it), a cabinet in which to collect and preserve ideas.

And I s'pose that the big museums are likewise archives of art. As an artist, I can’t think of a museum as really having anything to do with the life of my work or anyone else’s work. By the time it’s on a museum wall you’re really just looking at a representation of the living work and can’t really feel its pulse any more than you can work up a sweat by watching a documentary about playing jai alai.

But if I had a kid I would, I think, bring It (saying "It" makes me feel safer about kids, not unlike Archives) to museums every day. I would be grateful for the collections like I'm grateful for jars of preserves and things visible through microscopes. And I would say “here are some images of wicked different art forms made by wicked different people for wicked different reasons” and we would look at every single one from far away and then from up close and then we would run outside and I would hope hard that my kid would carry the ideas from the art out of the Mausoleum and go looking for it in its natural habitat, alive, the same way that he’d want to go down to the shore and strip naked and get salt in his eyes and crab bites on his toes to find the real thing after we went to a jellyfish show at the Fish Prison.

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'Dance,' said the Sheep Man. 'Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou'retired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon'tletyourfeettop.' ... 'Dancingiseverything,' continued the Sheep Man. 'Danceintip-topform. Dancesoitallkeepsspinning...'" -- Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami