Art and Anticrises

August 20th, 2023 – A Draft I Never Finished and Picked Up Mid-Autumn

Long time, no see! I promise I did my best to commit to writing weekly. I promise. And I’m usually very good at keeping my promises–but September started and life (and work) picked up very fast. Between the change of seasons and adjusting to the pace of what I suppose has become my new life after graduation, I fell behind on writing. And although I’ve kept notes of the art I’ve seen and the beautiful things I’ve felt, I haven’t gotten around to sitting down and pouring my heart out in a while. It feels good to do so again (and from now on, on a more consistent basis, I hope).

This draft had been sitting in my computer files for three months, almost finished but not quite. It was an interesting experience editing it and incorporating notes I hadn’t flushed out three months after I initially wrote the bulk of it. It’s crazy to think how much happened (and changes) in three months. Between fixing frustrating sleep problems, healing a broken heart, finding my place in my new office, learning how to budget (lol), and embracing the beauty of my college-turned-adult friendships, I am so not in the same place I was back in August. As a note, emotionally, I don’t feel as intensely or relate to most of what is written here anymore. 

I went to the New Museum again this past Thursday and thought this needs to be posted now. I can’t write about their new shows (or anything else) unless I do. I think maybe a part of me didn’t want to finish it because of what it would mean, in a personal way, to come to terms with the feelings behind everything that is written here. But time has its magic ways, and life moves forward in spite of all and forces us to face the past (good or bad) whether we want to or not.

Spoiler: This Thursday I didn’t cry at the museum. Quite the opposite. But it’s wonderful to be able to look back, reminisce on the time that I did, and embrace how far we’ve gotten ever since. 

Yours truly y con mucho amor,

Debbie

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I used to have a very close friend with whom I would go to the New Museum every time they opened a new show. We used to say it was our favorite museum in New York. I find that sentences containing the phrase “used to” tend to be very sad. But we used to. We don’t anymore.

When our schedules allowed it, we would do pay-what-you-wish Thursday evenings followed by a good cocktail at my favorite bar, Excuse My French, just a few blocks away in the Lower East Side. Sometimes I would hate the art she loved, and sometimes she wouldn’t be fond of the things that made me excited about certain works. But we always understood why we liked or felt drawn to the things we did, even if we didn’t agree or perceive it that way. Or we used to, anyways. I used to think that was one of the most beautiful aspects of our friendship. I used to.

She was the friend I would call when I was crying and needed someone to hold my hand. For a while, she was one of the few people at school I was very close to who shared my love for culture and the arts (and Taylor Swift). She was the person I would send art exhibition links to every time I came across an interesting one in my inbox. God, I think I even shared with her my art show tracking spreadsheet at some point. This friend is no longer in my life, but my visits to the New Museum continue and Excuse My French to this day is still my favorite bar.

This time, on August 20th, I went to the New Museum by myself. I have no problem going to museums alone and, in fact, often prefer it that way. But I think the New Museum is one of the few museums in the city that I specifically associate with strolling the galleries accompanied. I’ve been to most if not all of their shows for the past three years, and I think this was only the second time that I’ve gone by myself. 

Over the years, visiting the New Museum has become a sort of ritual that I religiously follow every quarter. I have such vivid memories of every single visit, and my August one was no exception. There’s always a highlight that sticks with me every time I go to the New Museum–sometimes it’s a comment whoever I’m with makes (“you always like the big paintings”), sometimes it’s an artwork title I can’t get out of my head (“untitled – still not over you”), sometimes it’s a hyper-specific feeling after walking into one of their galleries (“God, Faith Ringgold is a genius”). For this visit, it was crying halfway through one of the exhibitions and having to rush to the women’s bathroom on the basement floor.

Embarrassing? Perhaps. Cathartic? Absolutely, in the best of ways. Whether it was the art, my history with the building it was held in, or the chaotic circumstances of my life at that point of August, that Sunday afternoon was an emotional experience that left me reflecting  on the temporary nature of most human connections and the power of memories to stay despite people leaving and damage happening. Partially because of the association I have of the New Museum with that girl who used to be my very close friend, partially because of several things in my personal life that had me in a state of unbalance and distress. Back in mid-August, someone I really cared about had discarded me like I was a plastic bottle he couldn’t even bother to put in the recycling bin and one of my closest friends was not on speaking terms with me when we needed each other the most. I had just gotten out of a fight with a good friend over a silly thing that prevented me from being there for her during a difficult moment, and my best friend and I were going through one of those rough patches where we have to sit down and have a difficult conversation neither of us wants to have. In other words, Mercury was really retrograding, and fellow New Museum visitors witnessed it in the form of tears unapologetically streaming down my face while I stood in front of a painting. 

The museum had several exhibitions on at that time, and I decided to start with Mire Lee: Black Sun. What stood out to me the most was the cement-like smell that inundated the high-ceiling gallery room and the very visceral, very material nature of the installation on display. I personally really dislike that type of art, not because I don’t see its value but because aesthetically and symbolically it’s just not the art that I’m into, but I’ve found that it’s something that the New Museum seems to love. My old friend used to like it a lot; I thought of her in that room. Following Lee’s show, I moved on to the next floor to see Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, a very political, community storytelling-driven exhibition that was a lot more aligned with what touches me in a show. I would have enjoyed it more had I not started crying. This was where I started getting emotional, not because of the exhibition content. I was so overwhelmed with feelings that the words Vietnam and displacement and memory come to mind when thinking of the show but, between the tears and my overflowing heart, the objects and exhibition labels are blurry in my mind. I strolled through the gallery trying to stop my tears by focusing on the art, but I couldn’t. I rushed to the nearest exit and took the stairs to the basement as fast as I could so I could cry in peace.

The highlight of Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot was an incredibly large painting that took up most of the wall space in the small gallery room in the New Museum’s ground floor. Made by a Peruvian-born artist, the painting mildly reminded me of Abstract Expressionism but was a lot more contemporary and meaningful in terms of its subject matter. I love a good Adam and Eve (and/or Lilith) reference, so despite my tears, the artist’s take on the myth presented through a feminist, anti-patriarchal perspective and beautifully portrayed through colorful abstraction (including lots of pink on the canvas!) was a favorite of my visit. I must admit I low key started sobbing as I took in the pinks, blues, and purples on Mynerva’s work.  But with my keenness for dramatic flair and my conviction that I’m the most connected to my emotions when I have tears streaming down my cheeks, it made experiencing the work more intense, in a good way. I stayed longer in that room than I otherwise would have, but that allowed me to appreciate the painting more than I otherwise would have. I suppose there are silver linings to everything, even instances of crying in public.

I wrapped up my visit after calming down by going back upstairs and seeing Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart / Mi corazón latiente, the show that I was most excited about because it highlighted a Puerto Rican artist and I simply loved the exhibition title. So human and honest, just like my eyes perceived the exhibition to be. Osorio’s works on view had the right dose of political commentary blended with the perfect use of Latinx iconography for the issues he was trying to make a point for. His in-your-face, sometimes over-the-top installations were so successful in making complex messages of struggle crystal clear to anyone paying attention. My favorite part of the show was the work after which the exhibition was titled, My beating heart. The work was an oversized, heart-shaped red piñata. With a streak of blue across it representing veins, the piñata hung from the gallery’s roof, and its shadows reflected on the plain white gallery walls that surrounded it. 

I thought it was poetic with a hint of irony. A piñata as an object that is created to be destroyed, in the shape of a heart, a human’s most fragile organ, both physically and emotionally. Poetic, slightly ironic, but ultimately very real. The sculpture had speakers that played sounds of a beating heart for viewers. That made me smile.

After I left the museum, all I could think about was fragility. Largely because of Osorio’s anatomic heart sculpture that was all about that, but especially because seeing it wrapped up an art visit that for me was all about fragility. The fragility of human life, the fragility of the heart, and the fragility of human relationships. It made me reflect on how we take for granted what’s always there and appreciate it more until it feels distant and out of reach. It made me think about how anything and anyone can be taken away from us in the blink of an eye. It made me come face to face with the fragility of stability in a world where the only constant is change, and that perhaps the only way through is to learn to accept the state of delicacy and vulnerability that we are doomed to live with.

Importantly for me, this visit was about the fragility of myself and what it means to break down, something I am no stranger to. The fragility of my emotions and what it means to sometimes be so sensitive that I’m one tear away from a public display of crying.  I’m not sure if it’s a weakness or a strength–I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure that out,– but I know for sure that there is a bittersweet beauty in fragility. Maybe that was part of Osorio’s point.