The time I spend in museums is not enough.
I’ve always been a student of art history, since my adolescent years, but had no interest then in the collecting of fine hobbies. I used to find it pretentious, to roam sterile halls lined with ‘Please Do Not Touch’ signs and to regurgitate facts you read just before walking into the exhibit. And to think yourself more better for it.
I appreciate them much more, now. They are, in their own rights, another sort of journey. Through societies, human intellect and ingenuity.
An admittedly selfish venture to codify the quiet, relic spaces of time.
Sometimes, I still find them too quiet, to the point I notice the presence of absence; like winter nights were the moonlight is just enough to make the darkness heavier. So, during my last visit, I decided to listen to an old televised recording as I browsed, of a conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni.
I had written a long discourse about it, their lambent remarks on rationality in love, racial patricide, Martin Luther King’s “redemptive, unearned suffering.” But I’ll only share a simple comment by Baldwin in response to the topic of revolution.
“What you have to do is concentrate on the essential, not the disturbing details.”
I stood, then, in front of the Plantation Portrait, painted by William Aiken Walker. It was his typtical scenary, black field hands standing along a dirt road, populated cotton fields at their backs, arranged as though posing for his easel.
Absurd, I thought, but I was no less intrigued by the frivolous romantization. It must mean something. Without context one could observe and think that 20 years after the Civil War, freed slaves were at their liberty to pause work to pose for portraits, as the patrons of the Renaissance did. That three generations of black folk could so easily be found at any crossroad, unabashedly on their way to nowhere. Mark Twain’s Gilded Age.
It must mean something, though. That I could even stand there and see it. That some other body stood before me and after, and took their pictures or jotted notes.
There’s something in that, I think, apropos of oral tradition, that the story would be told once more and again and be different with each listener. Or maybe its passed by altogether, for some larger mural, a steadier hand, a louder story.
Something about that feels essential.
twf.
The-Bleu-Bivouac 