Words by Annie Fish
(April 29th, 2022)
I can’t use a day off unless I have another day off next to it. This week I’ve found myself with four days off in a row. Over the last week, two thirds of my bosses and one boss’s sister got the world’s most famous coronavirus and yesterday we finally convinced them to close the shop for One Day. Today, the first of those four in a row, I thought “hey… maybe I’ll be spontaneous and go to the museum.”
On the train downtown I considered the amount of money I had spent on a ticket to the museum— 25 dollars!— and thought “why does it cost so much? why does it cost anything?” Those thoughts are true, it’s just another way this silly little society we got roped into ruins something else for those who lack means. I thought of the fact that even though I went to the school attached to this exact museum, I don’t get in for free. The moment I stepped off the stage of my graduation ceremony, the doors were locked, the windows barred, the art stripped off the wall.
The time I spent in college more or less dovetailed with the exact amount of time it took to build out the new modern wing of the museum. The day it opened was the day of my graduation ceremony. It was offered to us to wake up at 5AM to preview the modern wing before it opened to the public. I didn’t feel like doing that, and I didn’t realize that it was the only chance I would have to see “modern art” for free ever again.
I got downtown and looked at the Chase building with the curved bottom and I saw a church that felt out of place, a sixty foot tall stone carving of Christ looking down on the cars and delivery trucks. I took a photo, making sure that there was a car perched under His feet.
Before I could walk in to the museum, my boss called me to ask if I thought it was okay if he came back to work even though, more than a week later, he was still testing positive. He said the CDC says it’s more about your symptoms than the test results, and that he didn’t have any symptoms. I told him that the CDC makes its decisions based on capitalism and not actual health (I heard his wife say “yeah!” from another room), but that I’d be fine sharing a room with him on Monday (it was Thursday). He said he didn’t mean Monday he meant tomorrow. I told him that since I wasn’t planning on walking into the shop until Monday it didn’t really matter to me, but I’d be fine if he was there on Monday. He said goodbye and I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or not. I turned a corner, saw the bronze lions and heard a bucket boy blast the pavement.
I went to the museum with one goal— to look at religious art, what I had once called, on a piece of paper meant to be an ice breaker back in college, “the huge paintings of Jesus.” The prompt was “what art did you like in here,” and I was being serious with my answer, but no one believed me and looked at me like I didn’t take anything seriously.
More than once as I walked around the museum, I thought about that. I thought about how I come off to people. Do people think I’m irreverent? Do people think I’m intelligent but uninterested (or vice versa)? Am I just a charming idiot? Do people really understand what goes through my head most of the time— the swirling miasma of screaming faces counterbalanced with a three-bowled scale with “dumb shit,” “other people’s personalities,” and “spiritual curiosity?” People probably only see the first two, and don’t even begin to imagine the third even exists.
But I walked around the lower levels of the museum and thought about the act of making. I kept walking into the wrong rooms, it had been five years since I’d last been, things had changed, or been moved. I found a buddhist statue that my dad had always loved and took a few pictures of it. A few rooms later, a Native American headdress was pressed against the glass, the painted skin of a tee pee next door. I blinked at it, surprised to see it there.
Every museum is just a history of violence.
Nothing in the entire building really belonged there. Not just the rooms of stolen artifacts, though those are clearly the worst offenders. There’s a way in which I don’t really think paintings can be truly enjoyed in the over-lit, clinical rooms of a moneyed museum. Like, to take the actual worst most obvious example I could possibly use, Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom was barely meant to be enjoyed by anyone, let alone looked at halfway by a thousand field-tripping high schoolers. Paintings should be kept in small rooms for people to look at and murmur about, I thought, as a thousand years of money laughed at me.
Walking around the museum started to annoy me; it started to remind me of all the other bad times I’ve been having in spaces around other people. It started to remind me of the concerts I’ve been to where people won’t shut up, or when a man weaponized the sound of a cough to get the people in front of him to sit down. It reminded me of the movie I saw where people were audibly yelling “what the hell” at the screen when something that didn’t conform to modern expectations played out. It started to remind me of work, of how when it gets warm out people stop treating you like a human being. There’s a problem with people, my brain keeps saying. We don’t deserve nice things, because collectively we’re terrible.
I found an area of the museum that people weren’t in. It was medieval devotional art, carvings of Christ and the Virgin, scenes from the Passion, illuminated pages, Christ carved into a Nut, huge wood panels painted in tempera of John the Baptist. My breath kept catching throughout every room. It was joy, I thought. The joy of creating something for this thing you love. That was the connection I saw in it, to art-making in general. The joy of making, in honor of something greater. In this room, it was God. I tried to make the voice leave my head that said “God is Cringe,” a feeling I don’t believe in.
This last week, as I thought of my body and the ways it is changing or about to change, I thought of the idea of taking my own hands upon the creation that is my body, but I remembered that my hands were created too, and the Me that made the decision to change my body was also created too, and that it’s all part of the same process, the same circle of creation, and then I stop the thought because that implies that I actually believe in God, and I’m still not quite comfortable with that thought being spoken aloud. But here I am, in rooms full of incredible, eye-gougingly amazing works of art from people who are more than comfortable with that idea, they were made ecstatic by it. The word ecstasy bounded through my head, looking at these works. I want ecstasy back in my life.
I made my way up and around, to find those huge painting of Jesus. I forgot that that area was also filled with renaissance and pre-renaissance art. Huge oil works from people just figuring it out. Babies that looked like men, and toes that all curved identical. Buildings that cannot be, before the notion of perspective even existed. Still lives and portraits of men with ruffs and women with bigger ruffs. More paintings of Jesus, the ones I wanted to see. And I ate it up, the rooms started to clear out a little more, and I didn’t have to think about “people” and I didn’t have to think about anything other than imagining those little men and women in their little studios with their little brushes flagellating themselves in joy at the act of making. I thought of old painters crushing chicken bones for pigment. Of people realizing you can paint more than one thing, of looking at a human body and losing your mind, and wanting to get it down on that canvas, get the form down any way you can, and I imagined the sheer feeling of every final brushstroke.
And I thought, “am I romanticizing this?” and I thought “yes, absolutely I am.” And I wondered if that was good or bad and I told myself to ignore it. I didn’t, and thought “well, it’s okay.” And then I kept thinking about it and it stuck.
All memory is romanticizing.
Making history of something is not inherently bad; nor is romanticizing. One can paint a false picture of a memory and strive for its repeat, that’s just wishing for something else. You can build whatever you want from the past, and sometimes that is good. A museum is just a history of violence; you can make of it what you will.
My eye caught on “The Song of the Lark” and I stared at it for a minute. I realized I was confusing it for another painting (I was thinking of “The Gleaners”), but in that confusion came the realization that I’d always loved this painting, that maybe it was my favorite painting ever. That maybe I still had a part of me connected to “the art world” that would even dare to have a favorite painting. Then I remembered that I do have a favorite painting and wondered if I should get out of the “huge paintings of Jesus” wing.
I made a full circle around the museum, thought about doing another lap, then made my way through the now-unfamiliar clinical labyrinth to find the modern wing. I realize now I could probably count the times I’d been to the modern wing on one hand, and emptied the thought out of my head of who I’d visited last with.
I climbed up to the top floor of the modern wing to make my way down, and walked into the modern art rooms. My brain caught a snag on the labelling of it: “modern” or “contemporary,” and how in a certain way the Warhol they had one floor below felt just as old as the Magritte on the top floor. How both of them tried to be sassy about their work in a sense. How they introduced a now-acceptable form of “play” into “stuffy” art.
Then I wondered who had given me the idea that pre-Modern art was “stuffy.” And wondered how many other people had gone to school to have people tell them that.
As I walked around the Modern Wing, I started to get angry. Look at these guys, jerkin’ off, painting their melting clocks and their titties and their non-comformist art. I almost laughed at myself, why was I so mad at the dadaists? Why did their defilement of representational painting rile me up so hard? To me it felt like they weren’t doing it for the joy of making anymore, they were doing it to do it. Or they were doing it for the joy of the joke, which is different than the joy of making.
I don’t feel like there’s any of God in a Joke, which is the most insane thing I’ve ever pushed out of my brain, but it feels right to me. There can be God in the community a well-told Joke creates in its telling, but not within the Joke itself; nothing for the sake of itself alone is good. That insane thing to say feels like it sums up what was really missing from all these tricksters’ paintings: ecstasy. It was that feeling that was missing for me in those rooms. There didn’t feel like there was joy for something greater in there, just people painting to serve their own means. The bright, clinical lights all felt perfect for these paintings— it made me wonder if, once art was made with the eventual goal of lining these wealthy, constructed walls, that was when the joy left. Then I turned another corner and gasped.
It was Emil Nolde’s “Red-Haired Girl,” which I have said out loud since the year 2004 (when I first saw it) was “my favorite painting.” I love it. It’s the color, obviously, the fact that it seems on fire. The economy of strokes that still feel wild. There’s a feral desperation to it, even if the word “feral” feels like a screenwriter’s description of a woman on page four. I stared at the painting for a while, trying to follow the path of the brush, wondering if there ever was one, wondering what intuition existed, or if it was just a relinquishing of sense into the volcanic maw of ecstasy.
Out the corner of my eye, I knew it was there. A title card with a huge block of text that had never been fixed to the painting before, at least not to my little memory. I low key hemmed and hawed about reading it— did I need that knowledge? I decided so— I was still reeling from wondering if people thought I was incurious. I had to prove the imaginary them wrong.
Thus I learned that Emil Nolde was a Nazi.
The title card tries to garner sympathy, that this painting (—my favorite painting!—) was taken by the Nazis and put in a museum of degenerate art. That Nolde tried to argue that such free expressions of creativity were necessary, even within the reich. And like, okay, sure. He’s not wrong about that. He’s just wrong about the whole “joining the Nazi party” thing, which usually takes precedence.
I stared back and forth between this card and the painting, which I realized (and I am not making this up) seemed dimmer than I remembered. I opened my phone to take a photo, remembering then that the painting is what my lock screen is set to, and whatever google image I downloaded of it had its colors bumped up to maximum.
It wasn’t quite that I had fallen in love with a lie. Or rather, I didn’t have a problem with that. And the revelation that Emil Nolde was a Nazi was never putting my love of the painting in risk. I didn’t love that, but I still loved the painting. And I now had that idea of a man arguing that his wild, “degenerate” painting deserved to exist. And I also had the knowledge that it was then a miracle that the painting made it out alive. I was lucky to have seen it in 2004, I was lucky to keep seeing it.
As I walked out of the room I thought, “why didn’t I know before.” All the time I spent learning about art, those four years in which these walls of the museum were held up as the absolute pinnacle of wealth and knowledge, did no one tell me this seemingly crucial fact about my “favorite painting.” I knew the answer; it was that context didn’t matter as long as the painting was “good.” I would have agreed with them then, but I didn’t now.
It was the context of those early, “bad” paintings of Jesus, etc. that made me love them. The knowledge that they were painted with all the skill the world had, up to (and including) the breaking point of human talent, in the name of that greater thing, in pursuit of that ecstasy. It makes for me now a greater story than “Nazi still loves a free handed brushstroke,” or “Painters make Paintings About Paintings,” or “Paintings about Famous People that became More Famous through the Painting which then is Famous for being a Famous Painting of a Famous Painted Person.” But loving a painting made by a sort of famous Nazi wouldn’t escape a part of my brain.
I thought again of old renaissance painters saving the bones of their cornish game hens to dry them out, crush them, and use them for pigment. The phrase “reject modernity, embrace tradition” fluttered through my head, and I enjoyed it. Then I remembered hearing (where did I hear it, in a video? Someone did not have this conversation with me in real life, this much I know) that the saying is something that fascists say. It makes sense that they’d say that, and I can see the exact way they would mean it.
But then I think of “The Gleaners” and I think of “The Song of the Lark” and I think of a painter crushing up his dried chicken bones for pigment and I think of people being so in love with God that they carved his face into a literal nut and I think “maybe tradition isn’t so bad.” Maybe you do not have to “embrace tradition” with murder. Maybe you can reject cynicism, maybe you can reject the voices that tell us we’re only worth our weight in labor, maybe you can make something out of love again. Maybe you can go back to a time where we didn’t gather these monuments to love and craft and God under clinical lights in rooms that cost 25 dollars to go into, that deny so many people the opportunity to have any of these scattered, disgusting thoughts I spent the afternoon having. Or maybe not, maybe you can’t, maybe a museum is just a history of violence, and that’s all it can ever be.
I walked out of the Modern Wing, walked through Millennium Park. My eye caught Cloud Gate and I started crying. Since the last time I was down here, in May of 2021, they had taken the guardrails down. You could touch it again. A hundred people were there, smiling and taking pictures and making faces at their own reflection. A woman had set up a tripod and was making poses into her timer-set phone. No one looked unhappy, no one looked bored, no one looked fettered by the ideas of a lack of ecstasy in the day to day, because they had it right there in front of them, out in the open, for free, without charge, out in the real, honest daylight, away from the big-bought walls and awful tepid lights and glass boxes that were nothing but see-through monuments to violence.
I got back on the train to go home and tried to look at the river; all I could see was Trump Tower, so I looked back down at my phone.