glass houses

Tonight I went to the Seattle Art Museum, and it was truly wonderful. I highly recommend it. As a bonus, the first Thursday of the month is free, and tonight there was live music and the museum was open til midnight. I don't think I've ever done a museum at night before, and I think that's the ideal time to do it.

The night didn't start off so lovely....I got a little surly and resentful because they asked me to take notes with a golf pencil instead of my ballpoint pen, which I understand in principle but I still walked around fighting the urge to draw on the walls with my stupid baby pencil just to teach them a lesson. Then I got over it because I saw such wonderful, weird things. Here is a list of some of my favorites:

--I think my favorite thing was the Porcelain Room. It's like the Amber Room in Russia, except with porcelain. Cups, dishes, statuettes...in these cases that go all the way around the room. A thousand pieces. It's got this low-lighting that makes the porcelain glow and you feel like you're in a fairy castle. I just want to put a big bed in the middle and live in that room. I wouldn't need a computer or a tv or anything, and I would never turn the lights down to go to sleep. I'd just lay on the bed and look at the porcelain.

Midway through the room I was like, this is so stupid that I'm getting excited about porcelain, you can get it in junk shops or at Target. Then I read the wall and that was kind of the point: "Today when porcelain is everywhere in our daily lives, this room evokes a time when it was a treasured trade commodity--sometimes rivaling the value of gold--that served as a cultural, technological, and artistic interchange between East and West."

Here's a slideshow of it (I would mute your computer because the narrator is creepy!) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/sam2007/porcelain/

--A coffin shaped like a car by an African artist. There was this film about these customized coffin sculptures. There was a screwdriver for a carpenter, a can of evaporated milk for a marketwoman, and a stack of fabric for a clothes seller. They carry the coffin all around so the dead can visit their favorite places and people before being buried. This sounds like the way to go. I definitely want a customized urn. I will have to think about what it should be though. If you had a customized burial container, what would it be?

--Any painting by an Italian, because the Italians will always be my favorite. Tonight I saw "Madonna of the Magnificat" by Sandro Botticelli and wanted to go back to Italy so badly that I could hardly stand it.

--A sculpture called "John with Art" by Robert Arnesen. It's a stoneware toilet with a fake crap in it.

--Erotic Frog Cup by David Gilhooly. It's two frogs doing it in a cup.

--Mann und Maus by Katharina Fritsch. It was a giant black mouse standing on a man lying in a bed. I just Googled it and it has to do with the dominance of the mouse in human biology and biomedical research.

--Some/one by Do-ho Suh. This is a gigantic coat made out of military dogtags. It's huge..covers the floor. It's about the individual becoming part of the collective.

--The African stuff. They had these cool cloths with bright colors and wacky patterns that I wanted for a bedspread. They had these awesome chairs that were so intridately carved...something sitting on every rung, or a back made out of a person or a bunch of leopards. I'm not describing it well, but maybe I should go to Africa to decorate my next apartment.

--Totem poles. Also a head dress made out of cedar but shaped like a heron.

--The Japanese teahouse

--These aboriginal paintings that were just dots or lines but had this enormous effect when you stepped back to look at them. They were supposed to represent places, I think.

--Mark Tobey's paintings, of these wild crowd scenes, that were paired next to his recollections of the Pike Place Market.

--This bear that looked like taxidermy, but when you got closer, you saw the bear was made of glass and beads and shells and the like.

I guess there was more, but I am getting tired. I hope I have colorful and creative dreams about art tonight!