The Museum of Bad Art

Teresa, with "Green Figure on Sharp Rock." The curator wrote: "a work of profound sadness. An ocean-skinned nymphet, her bottom abraded by barnacles, surveys her options in the face of an unpleasant storm." Also, "Hollywood Lips," by Tiffany Nelson. "In Hollywood, even the palm trees have had work done."

Click on the title to check out this place. Tony rented a car for work stuff for a day, which meant we were suddenly, effortlessly mobile for an evening, so we grabbed Max and Teresa and drove to Dedham to see the Museum of Bad Art in the last hour before it closed. Thank you Paul Hastings for telling me it existed.

The Museum of Bad Art is a collection of paintings that were found in the trash, in thrift stores, or donated by people who recognized that they were never going to make it in the big time as genius of visual media. Normally, I try to avoid bad art, especially since I have to spend so much of my time reading bad writing. (I mean, "student writing," which, according to the theorists, is a VERY different thing.)

But no matter. When you descend into the yellowish basement, on your way to the bathrooms at the Dedham Community Theater, suddenly you enter a world where the worse the art is, the more wonder and awe and pleasure it produces. Mike Frank, the curator, has written interpretive cards for each painting, which, of course, are the highlight of the experience. And it's the same type of pleasure as Mystery Science Theater 3000--where the insanity of the original media is compouded and enhanced by comedic interpretation. (If you don't know, you better go to MST3K)

I think the publicity will be more important, in the long run, than any worries about copyright here, so I'll give you a mini-tour. Here is Tony, emerging from the Men's, next to a painting entitled "No Visible Means of Support."

This one is called "Thornton's Pond," and it was acquired from the trash. "The sky exhales a feathery rush, defying reflection in the murky alpine waters."

Max's favorite. A color-pencil drawing of a cat, with a kind of ghostly dog hovering over him. Titled "He Was My Friend." One the largest, about which there is apparently a grand debate, regarding its level of "completedness," due to the empty, vacant eyes...

My favorite, "The Waterfall," which appears to be one of those endearing efforts towards "happy trees." The curator chimes in with "snow-capped peaks tower over this summer meadow featuring evergreens, wildflowers, and a waterfall of mysterious origin."

After our excursion to the MOBA, we ate a resoundingly bad meal at Bertuccis, and tried to see it all as a package, as a perfect evening in the suburbs. We got close, I think. We got close.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

It's not a new museum, and it's not one of the major Los Angeles attractions, but the Museum of Jurassic Technology is my new favorite Southern CA oddity. Don't get hung up on what the name "means." What it means is: you are entering another world, where symbolic language holds as much importance as literal, where the poetic and thematic beauty of people and objects trumps their traditional place in the hierarchy of significance.

It's not the butterfly-scale mosaics that only become visible under a microscope, the sculptures of Goofy and Napoleon nestled in the eyes of needles, the room dedicated to Kirchner serenaded by a "Bell Wheel," the decomposing dice, the replica of Mary Saughall's horn, or even the plaque describing the problem of historical representations of the "Battle of Pavia" that make the museum such a necessary destination. It's the fact that all of these things are displayed and interpreted in ways that completely call into question our notions of (1) what is knowledge, and (2) what is important to know.

I recommend the museum for its content, absolutely. I fancy myself an amateur conisseur of independent, idiosyncratic museums, and there's no more eclectic, disturbing, and surreal collection of objects and stories on display, in that volume, that I know of. I recommend the place for the slightly menacing tea room, where even in bright sunlight the shades stay drawn, candles are lit, and a brass samovar steams with free English tea. I recommend it for its sweet little gift shop and reasonably priced publications.

But mostly, I want everyone I know to visit the museum to have their minds blown by how disorienting and shocking it is to be told, quietly and implicitly, that you are an impatient, narrow-minded, uneducated person, by virtue of the fact that you are tempted to listen to only two of five interpretive recordings on Georffrey Sonnabend's Theory of Forgetting, that you don't understand how to represent logic problems visually, that you are not spatially aware enough to make a new kind of cat's cradle, even with string in your hands, when a video shows you how. Or maybe you are, in which case, I am already impressed.

I continually asked myself, "why does this matter?" and continually the answer came: "because someone noticed it." Not everything in the museum is even "real," by empirical standards. In fact, there is an entire collection of "vulgar knowledge," a room dedicated to wives' tales and superstitions that presents each as simply something that was or is believed, with no discussion of whether the belief had been debunked. The debunking is irrelevant. The fact that at one time, people sent a child out to talk to the bees in the hive after a relative had died, the fact that that child was supposed to recite lines of verse to the bees, the sheer magical quality of that action, compounded by the magical quality of it being practiced for many years over a large geographical region, is the "mattering" of the museum.

I've never been in a museum that so carefully destroyed my notions of historical importance, so validated my sense of literary and aesthetic wonder, and so thoroughly disrupted my ideas about what is normal in this world.

Visit them! www.mjt.org

Newport Opulence

Last Sunday I went on a quick road trip (thanks to E and G!) to Newport, RI to visit mansions. This is a picture I took of a house called "The Breakers."

What struck me as most marvelous was the story of Alva Vanderbilt (later Belmont). A fierce suffragette, pioneer for the rights of women, divorcee, and terribly controlling person, she seemed to break nearly every stereotype and gender role she was given. Including the "nice" ones like nurturing mother. I was in awe of the strange juxtaposition involved in her material excess and defense of justice. She had a huge tea party, with special "Votes for Women" china, in order to bring attention to the cause at her Marble House estate in Newport. As far as I can tell, the women's suffrage movement in general was a rather high-class affair, and it's somehow a much more complex issue when faced with the idiosyncratic personal works of someone like Alva than it is in the history books. For Alva, women's suffrage was of the utmost importance, yes, but one of the ways she sought to secure it was through incredibly lavish parties that necessitated 40-50 servants, whom she tended to treat rather poorly. She forbade her daughter from marrying the man she loved, and kept her under house arrest until she agreed to marry the Duke of Alva's choosing. Fascinating, in light of all she'd said and written regarding women's rights and abilities to lead their "own" lives.

I'm tempted to introduce Alva to my class as an example of the twisted, complex notions we have of morality in historical hindsight. "Thomas Jefferson owned slaves," they like to say, with a kind of superiority that is meant to undermine all history they've ever been taught. I wish they'd simply been taught that Jefferson owned slaves from the beginning, so that these quaint ideas of "progress" and "development" and "good men" and "bad men" are revealed as the childish cultural myths they really are, and we could all settle in and get down to the real business of teasing out the complexities of historical acts.

Anyway, I almost bought a "Votes for Women" teacup for my mother, who, I think, would have actually ended up totally bored during these mansion tours except for the Alva bits. As fascinated as I am with demonstrations of opulence, the roomful of Vanderbilt's yahting trophies seem much less important than that blue and white china and the myriad cultural meanings it now holds. I ended up not buying the teacup--while Alva may have felt vindicated by their being priced at $21.95, I decided it was better to write about them for free.