the sleeping gypsy

Sleep seems to be the one thing I do really well of late. Or at least with any level of commitment. I awoke at 10:00am on Monday with Kim pounding on the hotel door, which I had apparently bolted in a trance after she'd left that morning. She'd been up since 6:00am to set up, had to change into suitable executive attire and get back to the convention floor immediately. Ever the supportive sister-in-law, I went back to bed and fell asleep. Immediately.

Kim said she didn't need me to help work the convention this time around, assuring me that this was because she had a new assistant and was well-staffed and that it in no way reflected poorly on my prior performance as itinerant booth babe. I am not sure I'm entirely convinced. Still, let it never be said that anyone has to tell me twice not to go to work. Foot loose and fancy-free, I headed for the nearest museum right at the crack of noon-ish.

We were staying at an historic midtown hotel, originally built by William Randolph Hearst for Marion Davies as a Manhattan pied-a-terre for those times, one imagines, when a castle in San Simeon just isn't enough. It is elegant and traditional and has one of my very favorite New York things; a smartly uniformed doorman. This one was young and cute and I swear I caught a trace of a brogue.

"Where is the entrance to MoMA?" I inquired. Just because I could.

"Right across the street, Miss," he replied with a wave of his white-gloved hand. I haven't been called 'miss' since I was twenty. I love this doorman.


I'm not much for video installations as a rule but found myself entranced by one that I wandered into on the first floor. The room was completely blackened, the only light coming from images of solitary nudes, completely submerged underwater, that were projected on several large screens on the wall. On the floor in front of each screen were slabs of polished black marble that reflected the image projected immediately above it.

The effect was that of watching bodies suspended in sensory deprivation tanks, floating in the existential void immediately below the viewer; one step would be all it would take to plunge into the abyss. New-age music surrounded, broken by the occasional explosion as digital bodies took the plunge once again. It was mesmerizing; eternity's mysteries beckoning from the depths of a blackened pool. Beguiling.

But time was not unlimited and color and light beckoned too from the upper floors ~ Gorky, Pollock, Rauschenberg. Van Gogh, Picasso and Cezanne. Humor there, too; Klee, Miro and Magritte. These are the places I go when I don't know where I need to be.

I come to contemplate the incredible imaginative resources of the creative mind; it's ability to communicate yearning or sorrow, wonder and joy. To seek answers when words fail even to form the questions. Or just to find answers to practical issues of line and form.

It is easy to lose oneself in the sensual, tactile application of paint and fiber to canvas. To marvel at the ability of two-dimensional objects to express other-dimensional emotions and ideas. And I am struck that many of these canvases appear more animated to my eye than many of the video installations downstairs.
Studying Rauschenberg, I found a solution to a problem that had led me to put a piece on the back burner for a while. It is a reminder that, in the words of renowned video artist Bill Viola, every project has its own secret destination, and that it is important to stay open when it comes to the act of creation:

"A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together."*

A lot of living is like that too. Being open and receptive to change; to allow one's life to present it's own solutions, in it's own time. Learning patience.

I have always wanted to see Matisse's The Red Studio and it is here. The colors are more muted than I had thought, the red darker, the greens grayer. At first I'm a little disappointed, then I understand. This is private space; his vision, not mine. As anyone who has ever lost themselves in an activity that fully engages the mind knows, time and space are dissolved, rendered meaningless in the artist's studio; here, only the process, and the objects of his own creation have substance and stability. I could live a lifetime in this red studio. This too is mesmerizing. This too beckons.

* LA times West Magazine Jan. 28 2007