I managed to get on the bike just in time for a quick 20-mile evening ride. When I got home there was about 15 minutes of daylight left, so that was well-timed.
I rode my bike to the bank. (I’m doing errands! On a bicycle! So ecologically sound!) I did the local time trial route and then climbed up one side of the town’s biggest hill. (Big is relative. It is actually fairly small.) At the top of that hill I changed my plan and turned left instead of right. And, before long, I saw this:
What is that? And where is that? You can almost make it out in the pond’s reflection. The building behind the art is the local art museum. It is now 10 years old. It is a fine museum. It has this weird, rusted, house.
And the house seems to have thrusters attached. Which explains the satellite dish on the side.
But not the spare tire or the cinder block on the front porch of the rusted house space ship.
Or the chicken wire and large (for scale) water valve:
The medium is, in part, called Found Objects. Which means the artist, professor Robbie Barber had this stuff in his or his neighbors’ yard or an abandoned lot, repurposed it, or recycled, or re-used it to earn an honorable mention in this juried art contest. And we’ll get to see it for a year.
About the art, called Dreams of Flying:
Influenced by science fiction, toy design, both folk and outsider art, and found objects in general, Barber fuses these influences to create hybrid objects of fantasy, the results of which are often humorous, ironic or visually poetic in nature. Dreams of Flying depicts a shotgun shack that is transformed into a spacecraft of dubious reliability. While reminding us of the inherent dangers of space travel, this sculpture also depicts the ultimate escapist dream of flying.
What did you get out of it? I perceived the inherent dangers of going into space in a poorly conceived home. (This was Prince Lonestar’s other spaceship, I guess.) I liked the curved display stand best of all.
Earlier this week Lileks said:
I was going to say something broad and silly like “every type of modern art has failed, except architecture,” but that sounds simplistic. Except it’s true. Atonal music? No one cares. Abstract painting? It had its vogue, reduced everything down to a canvas consisting of one color (Red #3 – a title of a Great Work, or an FDA additive designation?) Modern literature flirted with styles that required no particular aptitude – automatic writing, cutting up bits of newsprint and rearranging them – but words require structure, or it’s phoneme salad. Modern sculpture masked its irrelevance by substituting size for detail, so you’d be overwhelmed into thinking this enormous hunk of metal that looked like the Hulk broke out of a boxcar had significance, but eventually it turned into “installations” and “assemblages” that relied on the artist’s ability to recombine instead of create.
And you nod in understanding, even if you don’t agree. But most of us do. And the rest of us are just too good to acknowledge it, maybe, or smarter than others. You may not know what art is, but you know that an assemblage of pipes, siding and shingles and rust. You know that stuff when you see it. And now you know it can remind you of the perils of interstellar travel
Other works are on display outside the museum. I’m going to show them off on Sunday.
We ran into the owner of our local bike shop out and about tonight. It was every bit one of those situations where your mind recognizes some facial aspect in an encoded memory file. But the file is locked away because you are actually in the next town over. It is night. He’s in a nice shirt. This is a Chinese restaurant (I wanted soup) and he belongs in a polo behind a counter tapping keys and turning wrenches and talking about races.
Context means so much, but you’re relieved because you can see the neurons in his head scrambling to make the exact same connections.
We’re all constructs to one another, in some ways. We were at a dinner party last week and talking about this very thing. When was the first time you saw a school teacher of yours in some place that didn’t have “School” at the end of the name? Mine was at a movie theater. Changed my relationship with that lady forever. She was suddenly more than the person with a classroom at the end of the hall. Now she had interests, great passionate pursuits and a crystalline sense of humor.
I was young. It took a lot to overcome that teachers-exist-only-at-school construct, but only a little to prove the point.
Then earlier today we saw one of the other guests at that dinner party walking down the street. “She looks familiar … Oh that’s … ”
I wonder if she knows Danny, who runs the bike shop.
I wonder if either of them have seen the art at the museum. Probably the woman has. She was an art professor.
Things to read, which I found interesting today … One of our students wrote this about another student. It is a moving piece on a challenging topic. I’m pretty proud for her. Breast health: sophomore’s high risk leads to tough choices.
Matt Waite flies his drone at a journalism conference, and he makes a keen observation.
Here is Waite’s drone journalism manual, if you are interested.
Three tremendous paragraphs, in Life Magazine, written about one of the most contemporaneously important photographs published in the middle of the 20th century. Still important, too.
Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?
Those are not the reasons.
The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .
Quick hits:
Hard numbers, chilling facts: What the government does with your data
Teaching media entrepreneurship: What works, and what gets in the way
And one from the multimedia blog. You saw that one here, first.
Hope you have a great weekend! Come back here tomorrow for football. More in between, of course, on Twitter.
