PICK OF THE WEEK

Today is the pick of the week. The day was a fun one for the child and I.

First, we visited Elliott Bay Book Company. I had a gift certificate that I received from my boss. I was able to pick out four books today, which still left me a little bit to use in the future. This allows me to have new reading material for the winter and spring, along with the books I received for Christmas. Today I picked up:

*What is the What by Dave Eggers. Subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, this is a novel based upon the life of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Eggers extensively interviewed Deng, had access to pieces Deng had written himself, used other source material written about the Sudanese civil war, and then fictionalized it. It reminds me of William T. Vollmann's Afghanistan Picture Show, which was a blend of "fiction" and reportage, humility and bravado.

*Red the Fiend by Gilbert Sorrentino. A novel about victimization and abuse. Red is transformed into Red the Fiend through the physical and emotional torments of his grandmother, as well as others.

*I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch. A man is framed by authorities for crimes he did not commit. Or did he? He insists that he is not Stiller.

*Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence by Richard Halpern. A critical look at the work of Rockwell and the subversion contained within his art.

Next, we visited the Frye Art Museum. Our main reason for visiting was to see the sound sculpture by Trimpin. His installation, entitled Klompen, consists of 120 Dutch wooden clogs that contain wooden mallets. Each clog is suspended from a thin computer cable that also serves to tie the mallet to the computer that runs the compositions. Each "play" of the sculpture cost 25 cents, the proceeds of which are donated to charity. Different sized clogs and different sized mallets allow for different notes. The percussive songs were short, each about a minute in length.

The child was intrigued by "the dancing shoes" "that make music." She was also intrigued by her "interaction" in inserting quarters into its box to make it function.

We also had fun at the Erwin Wurm exhibit, I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm. It included photographs, video, sculptures, and spectator-involvement performance pieces, all of which bordered on the absurd. The child sat on one of the spectator-involvement sculptures and contemplated Spinoza. The child asked questions about some of the photographs and videos. I attempted to explain them to the child as best as possible. The child would watch me as I laughed at some of the photographs.

The child also really enjoyed a couple of video sculptures created by children inspired by the work of Wurm. Collectively entitled Pieces of Clothing, the child enjoyed stop-motion animations of clothing, shoes, and infant outfits that moved about. The child kept asking to go back and look at them.

Another exhibit that intrigued me was Spectatorship and Desire: Loss. These were rooms in the front galleries filled with paintings from the Frye's permanent collection. The layout of the paintings was such that it looked as though some pieces were missing, which upon more exploration I discovered was the case. The exhibit "catalogs" in the rooms duplicated the layouts of the walls, naming the artist and title for each painting, as well as for each negative space! The idea was that the "hole" was the size that the painting it represented would take up if it were hanging on the wall. Loss, indeed. I found it an interesting way to make the spectator think about the pieces that we see, or remember seeing in the past.

Later in the evening, at home, the child took a box, flipped it over, and began making her shoes "dance" on the box by dangling them from their laces like some strange marionettes. She insisted that she was "doing a puppet show." I would consider that the perfect end to a wonderful day: life imitating art.

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The pictures of Elliott Bay, the Klompen exhibit, and the Spectatorship and Desire: Loss exhibit were taken with the pocket digital camera. This allowed the child and I to continue our surreptitious photography in art museums and galleries. I don't think either Elliott Bay or the Frye would have objected to our camera, but it felt good to be continuing our own art project. The purple in one of the Klompen pictures is just one of the "hiccups" of a low-resolution digital camera. The darkness of the others is due to reliance upon ambient lighting.