2 men and 2 women encounter the 1964-1966 display at the LBJ Library.

I took these 2 photos on April 13th, when we were in Austin, Texas.

This is not a café post/open thread. I want to discuss the aspects of the 1960s on display here, the aura of creepy entombment, etc.

Mendota and museum.

Today, in Madison, it was not summery, but we loved it down by the lake:



And we browsed the Samurai exhibit at the Chazen:

"This vaudeville-era poster of a man in blackface hung in my parents' living room."

"We never thought of it as racist – the man in blackface was my grandfather. My parents recently moved out of their house, and it was only when I presented the idea of hanging the poster in our own home to my husband that he looked at me in horror and said we could never do that. I’m ashamed I’ve been so willing to dissociate the family history in this object from the history of racism. Part of me was sad and conflicted about it never seeing the light of day again, but I’ve decided to donate it to the Jim Crow Museum where it can be contextualized, and people can learn from it."

From "Confronting Racist Objects" (NYT).

Here's a link to The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia:

The Jim Crow Museum is the largest publicly accessible collection of segregation and racist artifacts in the United States. These objects are used to teach tolerance and promote social justice. The Museum is free and open to the public; therefore, the Museum is largely dependent on donations-financial and in-kind-to enhance its work.

Speaking of contextualizing racist objects reminds me of this scene in "Ghost World," which we were just watching the other day:

"The spirit of Prince is here. And he did plan it to be a museum. Everything is strategically placed, and when the fans come in they'll see that it is."

Well, I don't think so, but I'm glad they've preserved things and it's a museum for people who are able to believe the spirit is there.

"It's truly Prince," continues Norrine Nelson, Prince's sister. "He had a vision and he finished it."

And Al Roker is there with enough gas to drive home just how finished it is. Scared me off the idea of ever going there. But America needs Paisley Park, I guess, just like we need Graceland.

"There she stood in drag/Just a-looking cool in astrakhan/She's looking so wiped out/And she said I looked like Peter Pan..."

That's a line from "Museum," a Donovan song on the "Sunshine Superman" album, remembered and pointed out by commenter Kevin Walsh in the post about astrakhan, "Thinking about fetal fur."

I must have heard those lines a hundred times without having any idea I was hearing a word that would be spelled "astrakhan," so I could even get to the point of wondering what it is. It's the fur of an unborn lamb. The woman looking cool in astrakhan had told him to meet her under the whale in the natural history museum and he was sad to have to go there, so I don't think he approved of the fetal fur. And the song's refrain is "But don't do it if you don't want to/I wouldn't do a thing like that."

"Lenin's 3.5 tonne head will now be transported from the forest to west Berlin's Spandau Citadelle museum..."

"... to be included in an exhibition about German monuments. It is the only part of the statue to be excavated."

At the Biomorph Café...

... it's so organic.

The Houdini shop...

... outside of the "Houdini: Art and Magic" show.

At the Shadowy Figure Café...

... skies are slippery grey.

Gender difference.

You see it everywhere.

(Photo taken yesterday at the Chazen Museum in Madison.)

At the Museum Café...

... you can talk all night.

3 views of the new museum.

It's the new addition to the Chazen Museum on the University of Wisconsin—Madison campus. The glass sculpture in the case is "Large E. coli," by Luke Jerram.

American Atheists sue to keep the WTC cross out of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

The cross, you may remember, is not something human beings constructed intentionally. It is steel that remained standing after the buildings collapsed. But it was noticed, honored, and preserved because of the Christian symbolism:

"This cross is now a part of the official WTC memorial. No other religions or philosophies will be honored. It will just be a Christian icon, in the middle of OUR memorial,” Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, said in a release.

Silverman added that the memorial must allow atheists and other belief groups to include their own displays of equal size. For the past several years the cross has been housed at St. Peter's church. On Saturday it was permanently moved to the 9/11 Memorial Museum after a ceremonial blessing at Zuccotti Park. The 9/11 Memorial Museum, which will officially open next year, said its mission is to tell the history of the attacks through artifacts like the cross.

"This steel remnant became a symbol of spiritual comfort for the thousands of recovery workers who toiled at ground zero, as well as for people around the world," said 9/11 Memorial President Joe Daniels. "In the historical exhibition, the cross is part of our commitment to bring back the authentic physical reminders that tell the story of 9/11 in a way nothing else can.”

I think the historic significance of the cross justifies its inclusion in the museum. Human beings cannot construct equivalent monuments for other religions, even if it were, in fact, legally required. Silverman's argument assumes that a historical museum is a free-speech forum that must be open to the speech of all groups, but that's not what a museum is.

Sometimes organizations file lawsuits not because they think they will win but to gain publicity for their cause. This is a case, however, of an organization drawing bad publicity, though, isn't it? I suppose this group seeks favor among a fairly small percentage of the population. If that is the goal, outraging the majority could feel like a good thing.

"Man Walking Down the Side of a Building."

Where's the line between art/dance and stuntwork? Don't let the fact that the building is an art museum muddle your thinking.

(Video.)

At the Zaha Hadid Café...

... you can talk about the "urban carpet" effect of architecture in a "somewhat declining downtown"... or anything else that might amuse you.

AND: Speaking of questionable interior space, you might what to weigh in on the redecoration of the Oval Office.

ALSO: Here's how LBJ had it:



I took that picture at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.

"The Museum of Modern Art has turned down the volume on Yoko Ono's atrium art installation...."

Ha.

The installation features a microphone, speakers, and the instructions to visitors: "Scream against the wind/ against the wall/ against the sky" on the far wall. But according to museum employees, the loud, sporadic screams that resulted startled visitors, while staff members strained to speak to museum-goers over the noise. "It was disturbing to the staff at the information desk," said one employee who wished to remain anonymous because MoMA discourages its staff from commenting on artwork or internal affairs.

The Ono piece is featured prominently at the entrance to the museum's just-opened "Contemporary Art from the Collection" exhibition, a radical re-installation of its collection that adds nine Ono works. One employee said that the fitful, high-pitched screams caused visitors and even guards to jump with surprise. "Visitors complained," he said.

Shame on MoMA! They put Yoko Ono in there in the first place to lure the throngs of people who still pay attention to anything Beatles-related. Then, when the piece had its intended effect of startling and troubling people, they changed it, squelched it, undermining the artists' point to please the lame-oids they lured.

(Via Expecting Rain.)

"Meetings between great men don't always result in elevated colloquies; sometimes they tend towards the crudely basic."

For example:

When Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald met in Paris, at Le Dingo Bar on the rue Delambre in April 1925, Hemingway was disconcerted to be asked: "Did you have sex with your wife before you were married, Ernest?" They became friends, however. Their most intimate conversation (as reported by Hemingway) was also about wives. One evening, Scott Fitzgerald confessed to his friend that his wife, Zelda, had told him his penis was unusually small, and that he could never satisfy any woman. Hemingway said it was just typical of Zelda's undermining ways, but Scott wasn't reassured. So Hemingway asked him to come to the lavatory, where he inspected his friend's lance of manhood. Back in the bar, he explained:

"You're perfectly fine," I said. "You're okay. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile." Now there was an act of friendship between creative giants, if not an especially artistic conversation.

Oh, I think it's artistic as hell.

"I was inspired to make a sculpture and studied many other logs, but I realized that I was only interested in this particular one."

I love this line of wall card next to a sculpture at the museum:



That line made me — and, independently, Meade — think of the way the Little Prince felt about the rose he loved. Eventually, the Prince encounters a garden of roses:

"You're lovely, but you're empty," he went on. "One couldn't die for you. Of course an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than you altogether, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass. Since she's the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except for two or three for butterflies). Since's she the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."

Here's the sculpture that was made out of the loved log:



"Hinoki," by Charles Ray is actually one of my favorite things in the Modern Wing of the Chicago Institute of Art. I've criticized the writings on the wall at the museum. I dread these explanations of art, but I loved Ray's essay, which you can read in full here. The man found and fell in love with a log, but the log was about to rot, so he got big cypress tree and got it carved into a replica of the log:

"With several friends, I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki).... When I asked Mr. Mukoyoshi about the wood and how it would behave over time, he told me that the wood would be fine for 400 years and then it would go into a crisis; after two hundred years of splitting and cracking, it would go into slow decline for another 400 years. I realized then that the wood, like the original log, had a life of its own, and I was finally able to let my project go and hopefully breathe life into the world that surrounds it."

At the Late Night Notes Café...

... you can always find one more detail to observe and describe.

At the Alienation Nightclub...

... you can walk right by.