The background for this story, which may seem unrelated to the military at first blush (but I assure you is totally, intimately related to the Army), is long and complicated. The full telling would probably require me to start far, far further back, and go much deeper than anyone would like--I'll meet everyone more than halfway by going back in time to the first time me and Art Galleries crossed paths.
It was the mid-80s, and Andy Warhol wasn't dead yet. I was crazy about dinosaurs, so everywhere I went with my folks, they were forced to take me to a museum that showcased dinosaurs. This may have taken a toll on their will to live. That did not factor into my decision to vocalize this infantile need for dinosaur. So, when we went down to Washington, D.C., to the Smithsonian, it's no surprise that the first place we visited was the National Museum of Natural History. There was a triceratops out front, even then. I don't remember going through the museum, but I remember being done with it sooner than I wanted--and being brought next, not to more dinosaurs, but to a place my parents called the Art Museum. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, to be exact. I didn't know that then.
This was an awful, traumatic experience--transitioning from the terrible lizard to Cy Twombly. Ripped away from those entrancing bones, those footprints chiseled into the stones of time--Tyrannasaurus Rex teeth, as big as my head--and put in front of a bunch of boring paintings, of god knows what. I'm sure I was a crying terror; I have no idea how my parents bribed me to behave. Perhaps I was beyond bribery, and I was punished instead. That would certainly help further explain my suspicious, even hostile reaction to most art (and especially to anything after the Surrealists).
Fast forward to Italy, 2006. Myself, E. Nelson, J. Quisenberry, and P. Thomas had taken the train from Vicenza down to Venice, to spend a weekend debauching on the main island. It was October, so, the weather was cooling down, and the tourism had fallen off in a serious way. This made debauching a bit problematic, as there were fewer people to share in the debauching, but it also cleared out the streets and bars so that serious drinking could take place. I want to say that some kind of training event was tied to this celebration--a rotation at Grafenwoehr, or something like that--it wasn't E. Nelson's imminent departure, that was later.
In addition to committing ourselves fully to the idea of getting ahold of as much of that good wine as we could lay hands on, E. Nelson (backed wisely by P. Thomas) insisted on our attending an exhibit at the Palazzo Grassi before diving into our cups. Quisenberry seemed skeptical, and I know I expressed nothing but hostility for the idea. At some point one has to put away one's own desires for the good of the group, and sensing that everyone else had committed to the idea at some point, I went along with the visit. There was some modern exhibit that included Japanese anime pornography, a robot that had been picked on and alienated by everyone in a high school and had developed a social inferiority complex, and a statue of Hitler as a man-child, kneeling penitently in a corner. I believe there was also an animal that was sliced into pieces, the slices of which were kept seperate and anatomically correct by means of glass boxes. The exhibit was--thought provoking at best, confusing at worst, and at no moment did I feel inspired or enlightened.
We met up downstairs, and gathered to procure our coats at the coat check. While waiting for my coat to be brought back, I took a seat--rashly, with the insouciance of youth--on the check-counter. Nobody was in the room. Barely anyone was in the gallery. Before the coat-check attendent could return, two of the people from the front desk, a guard and a ticket-lady, walked into the room. They saw me on the counter and were shocked. They told me to dismount, at first in Italian. I did not understand them, told them so, and continued waving my legs saucily. The lady spoke to me in broken English, and told me that sitting on the counter was forbidden.
I guess the argument that followed, and the things I said--things about facists, and Nazis--were the product of the seeming incongruity between the allegedly mind-blowing, boundary erasing artwork on display upstairs, and the boring, hidebound, illogical rules downstairs. It's not like I was hurting anyone by sitting on the counter, yet my actions alarmed the Italian curators, as though I was indicative of the worst sort of danger, some violent, chaotic impulse. So I attempted to fulfill their expectations by using a language they would understand. Eventually my coat came and we all retreated to the outside--everyone was convinced that I had been irrational, and my stance was at best selfish, and at worst put us at risk of incarceration. My mind was at ease. When presented with a situation like that--an art institute that displays avant-garde works yet insists on enforcing draconian rules without regard for circumstance or context--I will take advantage of the opportunity to subvert their existence, by doing my own thing, which should be in keeping with the intent of the artists who are on presentation. And if not, screw them.
To return to the topic of the post--at long last, I had opportunity to re-engage with this sort of behavior. This time, the location was Houston, Texas. I and A. Rose were going into the Menil collection, she holding a nearly-done ice coffee, and I carrying a cup of scalding hot coffee which I needed to interact with the art, yet which was still too hot to drink. Rose turned to me and said "I don't think they're going to let you take that in," as we crossed over some sort of metal trench-system in the grass outside the institute. I said "We'll see," and prepared myself for battle.
Sure enough, when we entered the vestibule that served as the terminal for both wings of the Collection, the man sitting at the counter said: "you can't bring those coffees inside, you have to dump them out. The bathrooms are over there." There was a cushioned seat in the middle of the vestibule with a group of college- and middle-aged couples lounging at it, and a pretentious looking older man was picking up pamphlets about the Collection, and still managing to look down his nose at Rose and I. I wanted to respond to the ticket-guy, and also to the pretentious dickhead in front of us, so I said: "But if I don't have the coffee to drink, the art is too boring, you know? I can't look at the art without something to keep me awake. I mean, that stuff will put me straight to sleep." I said this loudly enough so that everyone could hear.
The group of people sitting by the cushioned seat rose almost as one and began scattering to the different galleries. The pretentious man froze, grimaced, flushed, then went about deliberately picking up the rest of his pamphlets, but with an air of violent disapproval. The ticket man, to his credit, laughed, and said: "well, why don't you finish your coffee at the seat, over there. I won't say nothin'." I thanked him--clearly this was the limit of his authority, and walked over to the seat with Rose, who was going to wait with me before discarding her now-empty cup of iced coffee. Before we could even sit down, we were intercepted by a curator, who had waddled out from behind a partition that was holding the Surrealist painting one sees in the back of the picture in this post.
"You can't sit there with that coffee," she said. "Thas off limits." I had been on the verge of sitting, drinking my coffee in peace, and interacting with the Menil Collection, but--and already knowing the sort of strange, mind-bending Modern and Post-Modern (and possibly, if I was lucky, Post-Post-Modern) Art I was like to see--I couldn't let the situation go as it had unfolded. I pointed at the cushioned octogonal couch. "There? I can't sit there?" I said. "With my coffee?"
"No," this woman said--a tremendously obese woman, I noticed, not merely fat, but the type that would have difficulty moving quickly, and certainly was in no position physically to prevent me from doing anything--"You have to drink the coffee over there." She pointed at the ticket counter. The ticket-man was assiduously avoiding eye contact with me, his authority trumped. Rose began to say "But the man over there said that--" before I interrupted her. "Don't worry, don't worry," I said, not wanting to incriminate the Just Man who had, in fact, attempted to help me to the limit of his ability. "the cushion," I said to the fat woman, "tough to clean, huh?" She laughed, one of those corpulent, nauseating laughs of the morbidly obese: "Yas, yas," she said. "I's espensive, very espensive." I went along with the joke. "Probably more expensive than most of the art in here, am I right?" We shared a laugh over this one, while the pretentious man, who'd experienced a temporary victory in seeing me routed from comfort, now had to flee the building in shame-faced defeat.
The lesson, here, is either that I'm some sort of total social malcontent, which I don't think is true, or that Art Galleries where one is supposed to be totally serious and interact quietly with masterpieces of the sublime are also home to the most ridiculous, anti-humanist laws and rules, most of which seem to exist in direct counterpoint to the message their artwork would like to send.
