On the Shoulders of Really, Really Tiny People

Rich & I had dinner at Da Blue Lagoon recently. Highly recommend the seafood, though everything we tried was quite fabolicious.

Then we and our distended bellies (thankfully there's room for four in the car) motored over to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where, in less time than it took for the shrimp to swim the streams of my duodenum, I felt the sudden and unwilled rearing up of my Midwestern provincialism. This doppelganger hovered over me, whispering commentary on much that I saw: pretentious, banal, vulgar, boring and - well - silly.

Now, there was lots of good stuff to see, and R & I found ourselves sort of taking refuge in the antiquities of the West African/Egyptian exhibit (neat Orthodox iconography there, btw - very cool). The interactive Chinese calligraphy thing was also fun, once we got past the video of the Chinese guy covered in a buffly chiseled suit of raw meat. And, with cultural biases aflame, we revisited some of the old European & American works, which was like a glass of cold water after a long walk.

See a theme here? Out with the new! In with the old! Geez, I hate being pegged, even when I do it to myself.

Really, I tried to fight this tendency as we surveyed. And then I realized what a great job the culture is doing on me when I suspect my own allegiance to some sense of objective standard (which is the best an art ignoramous like me can aspire to) as me being narrow-minded and pedestrian. Sigh.

There was one really neat (modern) exception we saw, and as I've thought about it, it sort of encapsulates my recent foray into the world of art:

Do-Ho Suh's Floor is a large platform that we were invited to step up on. Under our feet was a giant sheet of clear Plexiglas. Beneath this were hundreds of small, plastic, human-like figures, their arms raised and fixed in such a way as to appear to be holding up the Plexiglas. As I walked on all those people, I felt tears in my eyes. Really. It was an amazing visual.

Our guide asked us to interpret the piece. Someone mentioned, "the glass ceiling". Another spoke of communism. I said, "We are who we are because of all those who have lived and died before us. They hold us up - provide our foundation."

And maybe this is my problem with modern art, music, what have you. When so much of it is a rejection of what was before - rejection of something simply based on it's historicity - I see crumbling foundations. I see a rejection of historic and universal truths (the essence of beauty) in favor of narcissism.

Some may argue this is only healthy and normal evolution. No, as exhibits like Nauman's clearly demonstrate, if it is evolution, it's evolution with an agenda. It nods to the historic universals of art with a sneer, and seeks to destroy or distort them, so that the funhouse mirror image we're presented with confuses our bearings, and we forget what 'good' looks like, sounds like. How does Fergie, singing about jiggling her various "bumps" (talk about narcissism), claim such music as the legitimate child of the artful, soulful music that came before - of, say, Ella Fitzgerald's admittedly adults-only, 'Bewitched, Bothered, & Bewildered'? That's not evolution - that's entropy.

So, getting back to the Plexiglas, I can't help but wonder what kind of foundation our kids will be standing on one day. When the post-modernists of the 20th century have finished deconstructing everything, will the next generation be able to pick up the thread where it was cut, and make something that honors what time has tested and found enduring instead of rejects it? I don't want our kids, our society, standing on self-referential, small-minded reactions. - not in art, thought, religion, whatever. I want them, and all of us, to stand on the shoulders of giants.

"Grant me compunction and contrition of heart, humility in my thoughts, and a release from the slavery of my own reasonings." - From the prayers after Communion, Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom