Sunday Fun: MCA
Today, we finally made it to the Museum of Contemporary Art. There are currently two exhibitions: Thinking About Flying and West of Center (well, there’s part of West of Center — the exhibition is officially over but there’s still some stuff left).
Thinking About Flying goes something like this (from the MCA website):
Thinking About Flying is a project by artist Jon Rubin. For this project the MCA has been provided with a group of young homing pigeons to be cared for by the museum and trained by its visitors. Museum visitors are invited to participate by taking home a pigeon in a carrying case and releasing the pigeon to fly back to its loft on the museum’s roof. As this training process progresses the pigeons will travel distances increasing from a few blocks to over 400 miles.
By sharing in the responsibility of caring for the pigeons, the relationship between the visitors and the institution is made explicit and personal and a collective stake in the ongoing life of the artwork is initiated. At once poetic and practical, the temporary placement of the pigeons in visitors’ homes expands not only the artwork, but also the space of the museum itself. The traditional notion of an art museum is inverted as domestic spaces perform the function of temporary exhibition sites and the institutional space is cast as a domicile and caretaker. In this way the work maps the social and geographic relationship between the institution and its constituent audience.
That’s awesome. (We didn’t get a pigeon today because it was getting late and they don’t fly when it’s dark, but we’ll go back for one soon.)
I’m going through this thing lately where I want to be more creative. Being creative was kind of my thing back in the day. I always thought of myself as a writer with other artistic tendencies — photography where I actually made an effort, maybe a little painting or sewing — and I was all about expressing myself through my crazy-ass wardrobe and hair (see, e.g., this shit).
If you know anything about law school, you know that the point of going is to learn to think like a lawyer. Being the good little law student I was, I learned the hell out of how to think like a lawyer. I can think like a goddamn fantastic lawyer, which, of course, doesn’t mean I actually want to be a lawyer, which is a discussion for another day. The thing is that learning to think like a lawyer made me a kind of facts-and-circumstances kind of person, which is not the same as a creative (in an artsy sense) person.
For whatever reason, lately I want to have less lawyer brain and more fun, creative brain. I’m not sure what this means aside from wearing bigger earrings, dressing like someone who’s on the way to a Mexican Rave (that’s what ASOS is calling what I’m digging these days), and going to art museums, but I guess that’s, well, an exceptionally modest start.
Plus, Soren is really into colors. He knows his colors and he’s not afraid to tell you about them. And I don’t just mean primary shit like red and blue. He knows those, and he’ll tell you when his plate or cup is yellow, but he can also tell you when his socks are beige. When he wants to refer to something and he doesn’t know what it is, he’ll refer to it by color, so that whatever-it-is over there is a “green,” for example.
I assume all parents do this: When your kid is interested in or good at something, you think that has some sort of big, deep meaning. Soren is really into colors! He must be an artist! Let’s make sure he has markers and let’s take him to the art museum! This is incredibly dorky, but I think sometimes we want to go all out to support and encourage our kids however we can, even if we don’t really know what we’re doing. And hey, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little art museum on a chilly Sunday afternoon.
Anyway, here’s what today looked like.
