The Museum



Robert Roth

Story One

I went with my friend Miriam to the Guggenheim Museum.
It was to one of those huge exhibits that draws thousands of people.
Allen Ginsberg was there responding, taking it all in.
There was a lightness and intensity in his response to the work.
Miriam rented a headset with a tape that walked her through the exhibit.
She was unfamiliar with the work.
I didn't know the work and I didn't order the headset.

Subtext:

Allen Ginsberg world famous poet.
An artist. Philosopher. Photographer. Buddhist. Political activist. Middle aged Jew. Homosexual.
Responding to, connected to , breathing with, continuous with the works on display.
He wouldn't be bogged down by headphones, which either were going to tell him things he already knew and if he didn't would interfere with his reactions by superimposing a grid through which he would see the work.

Miriam is a linguist. In the beginning of a career that has moved her into something like the third-tier of fame in international academic circles.
A feminist. A Jew.
She has a deep alertness.
She has powerful responses to music, art, literature etc.
She didn't want to take in the work in ignorance.
It allowed her the freedom to have a response.

Me. I was caught in a sense of myself that a great artist doesn't need an uptight, academic guide on tape.
But I had no idea what I was seeing.
Nothing to help me have an orientation.
I wanted to be like Ginsberg.
But he was free. Miriam took care of herself.
I succumbed to ignorance.

Story Two

I went with my mother and father to the Guggenheim Museum.
It was to one of those huge exhibits that draws thousands of people.
My mother walked me through the exhibit explaining things to me about the painters and the paintings.
I knew one or two of the people who had also come to the museum.
One was a quite famous, sensitive left-wing writer and psychoanalyst.
My father sat on a bench, looked at the paper and then dozed off as parts of the Sunday Times hung from his lap.

Subtext:

My mother was my guide.
In fact that is what she did two times a week.
She worked at the Guggenheim as a volunteer.
One of her jobs was walking people around and giving talks on the various exhibits.
To see my mother possess such presence and focus and knowledge was a bit unsettling.
I really only knew her inside a space of wild, often bitter, always tumultuous emotions.

She felt great dignity working at the museum. Working for free I think diminished this to a degree.

My mother guided me through the exhibit.
It helped me respond to the work.
My father was exhausted and he was bored.
No amount of stimulation certainly not in this context was going to pull him out of this state.
His exhaustion seemed to me a kind of rebellion.
It was a rebellion that kept him ignorant.
And yet knowledge would integrate him into a system of subjugation.

Beneath the subtext of two interrelated stories:

Allen: On the world stage.
Has a stature comparable to artists whose work are displayed.
Out there. Bad boy. World-transformer.
Has sense of entitlement.
Father a poet.
Even in his defiance very attached and nurtured by powerful social institutions.
Also over the years put himself at risk both physically and psychically.

Miriam: Young woman with big ambitions.
Yet confined to very narrow terrain.
She was just beginning her academic climb that at 50 has brought her to a place of being almost famous.
She comes from an upper middle-class family.
She is very aggressive, combative, always jockeying for position.
But when she is not feeling threatened is incredibly generous and responsive to other people's work.
Odds more against her than they had been against Allen.
Though Allen operated on a much larger scale.
Her striving looked more harsh than Allen's.
Probably because his sense of entitlement more secure.
Both Miriam and Allen move in and out of places of resistance.
Allen more fluidly. More securely. He had the run of the museum.

The Museum: Deeply stratified Cultural Zone.
Artists selected, separated as more special than almost all other artists.
Work is brought in this case to thousands upon thousands of people.
There to give pleasure, expand understanding and secure a structure that keeps people in places of deep insecurity and obedience.
Allen is probably one of the few people on the planet who could walk with such ease inside the museum.
He was there as an equal.

Miriam was in her way very obedient to her place.
Well educated, curious, intelligent - a deeply responsive viewer.

Recently a friend of mine went with a group of artists with whom she regularly meets to a museum.
Work of two well known artists were being displayed.
One who died maybe twenty years ago.
The other was still alive.
Each had a floor to themselves.
There was much heated discussion about which artist was better.
The artists from the group all work very hard and respect each other's work.
There was in the discussion the unstated assumption that none among them would have work that belonged in the museum.
And none could question whether or not this type of place should even exist.
Or what does it mean that the separation between them and the artists on display was so marked and complete.

My mother as a housewife was cut off from the world.
She had gotten a master degree in art history having gone back to college at 45.
But in her mid- fifties she was dying of boredom in her apartment.
She began to volunteer in the museum.
Her vast knowledge of art history was put to good use.
She learned to speak in front of a group.
Her confidence increased.
Groups wrote letters to the museum praising her for her fine work.
But as a volunteer she was a source of free labor allowing the museum not to hire someone, the someone could just as well be her (though as a middle-aged women without a resume probably not), to do the job.
So on the one hand she was brought out of an arid isolation.
On the other hand she functioned as an anti-labor tool.

In the museum my father felt utterly estranged.
A man in his seventies, still in business, tired in most places, coming alive when a deal needed to be made or a politically charged subject came up for discussion.
An orthodox Jew. He worked since he was thirteen.
He was there in the museum with his wife and his son.
He never deeply resented his wife going back to school.
Never resented too deeply what she was learning.
He did not in any way try to sabotage her working as a volunteer.
But neither was he curious as to what she could now teach him.
I doubt there was a moment he asked her any question about what she knew or let himself expand with what she had to offer.
He knew very well he was in alien hostile territory.
Still he could not stretch himself towards her.

Robert thinks of himself as a writer, an artist.
Political activist.
Feels wildly estranged from the energy in the museum.
Feels half asleep.
Bored like in a classroom.
Physically uncomfortable.
Resentful.

As for his heart: Heart beats excitedly as he watches Allen move through the museum.
Though it aches slightly for a time before he understood how much Allen belonged to the museum.

Toward Miriam there was a feeling of affection and a kind of shut down sadness for the time that they had been lovers.
For his mother it felt a joy for the pleasure she had in sharing her knowledge and her ability to appreciate as she showed Robert around with such confidence and flair.
For the work itself she opened his heart to the pleasures of appreciation.

For his father his heart felt pure unadulterated love - not even a trace of embarrassment - as his father sat schloomped on the bench, an old Jewish businessman, wrinkled newspaper hanging from his lap as all that engaged energy moved in and around him.
Inside the citadel of culture a figure of pure resistance.

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