Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Art to the Nth Degree

The first time I visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, even though I was much, much younger than today, my legs just about gave way, and only because my brain, my hypothetical control center, mixed up the directions. At the time, we were supposed to take the elevator to the top floor and walk down the spiraling walkway. Well, I walked up, wondering why everyone was coming down.

I remembered all this when someone told me yesterday that the museum has an audible and visual art piece going on until some time in April. Mind you, I didn’t say on exhibit because exhibits are stationary, and this thing moves and jingles.

This art work, as my friend described it, includes a stack of books, slashed, glued, and tied together in bundles that go on a pulley lifting Tibetan bells on to a carriage that carries them down the banisters on the spirals. Then the pulley gets to work again to lift the bells on to the carriage, and the whole cycle keeps repeating again and again. The carriage has some fancy silk top, and as it moves, the bells ring.

Art is what one makes it to be, and all this bell-ringing news from the museum rang a bell. I remembered an artist friend who used to place odd articles on the couch, and considering diversity an excellence, declared her compilation ‘art.’ This “art of the moment” came to an end when she placed a large tureen full of soup on the seat cushions and some soup cans on the pillows, Andy Warhol inspired, sort of. Her cats, however, toppled the whole thing over when she went to answer the phone. Since the price of a new couch was too high for an artist who practically made no money, on account of living on art, my friend’s instant art came to a full stop. Later on, her artistic ambitions frustrated, she took a job in the post office and married a crazed co-worker.

But then, that’s life, and you never know what hits you as it comes at you in varied versions and at random intervals, sometimes as shafts of sun in winter, other times as mishaps on the ski trail. And those mishaps can be fatal, which makes me remember Sonny Bono, and a few others that have been less than fatal, but those and what else I remember would be better left unsaid.