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Exhibit visitor: "Unfortunately, I could not see the art because of all the people."
Oscar Wilde: "Unfortunately, I could not see the people because of all the art."
T. was just getting ready to go down to cocktails when he remembered the art show. Today was the public showing of art there at the Institution, and T. would have just as soon missed it. But his roommate had a painting in the exhibit and so T. felt obligated to at least make an appearance. This irked him; but he was consoled by the thought that he would still have time to make it to cocktails provided his art visit was brief.
So he hastened down there -- or at least, as fast as a person who is in a wheelchair and controlling everything with his head can hasten.
Two people were handing out programs at the door. One of them he recognized as Helen, who volunteered to help out during the weekly bridge playing that T. attended. Helen was a retired newspaper woman who was good friends with the columnist Robert Novak -- a man whose politics T. found odious. But T. hit it off splendidly with Helen, with whom he exchanged wit and satire.
T. had no use of his hands and so he politely declined the offer of a program. He entered the hushed ambience of the exhibition room. As usual, they had done a beautiful job hanging the works of art on rug-covered partitions. The discreet intonations of classical guitar music softly enveloped the room.
('Discreet', he thought wryly, in part because the individual tones and chords of the guitar are discrete -- that is, separate from one another and connected only by the fragile acoustics of the instrument itself. So each tone dies before it becomes intrusive.)
T. manipulated his wheelchair up to the first panel in order to view the art. And immediately he found that he had a twofold problem. First of all, since he was using his head to move the wheelchair forward and to the sides, in order to rest his head back on the headrest without engaging the power he had to keep his head off that headrest for ten seconds. And during that ten seconds he could not turn his head to look at the art, lest his head accidentally strike the headrest and move the chair (and start the countdown all over again.) This, he already knew, would be a maddening and exhausting process. Then too, he found that, because of double vision, he could not read the cards next to each painting which identified the painter and the title (as well as the price: the word 'bazaar' came to mind; and T. reminded himself that new pieces of music were not hawked in even these sorts of elegant marketplaces.)
In short, he would not be able to view the works of art.
T. felt a pang of disappointment for a moment; but almost immediately that reaction was accompanied by a feeling of relief: here he had a built-in double excuse for not being able to view the art. But the disappointment lingered; for after all, he was there, ready and willing to view the art.
By some wild coincidence, T. was able to read the placard next to the painting right in front of him: it turned out to be that of his roommate. It was a well done depiction of a lake with jutting land masses. T. knew that this painting was an exact copy of the cover of one of his roommate's art instruction books. But that did not diminish the painting in T.'s eyes: he knew that, in that field as in many others, such slavish imitation was an excellent way to learn the art and craft of the subject.
T. now began looking for other ways to amuse himself. In doing that, he once again became aware of the classical guitar music wafting over the exhibition and its viewers.
Evidently, the guitar music was supposed to have a synergistic effect on the works of art. That is, the art would be seen with more insight when 'framed' by the music. But what if the opposite were to happen and the art 'informed' the music to make it more vital and alive?
This latter is what happened for T.: since he was unable to look at the individual works of art closely, it was their various shapes and pigments -- really, the mileau of their presence -- which lent vibrancy to the guitar music.
There were three corridors of art in the exhibition, of which the middle one contained art on both sides. This allowed the viewers to snake through the exhibit in a W-shape. T. drove his wheelchair between the first two partitions, across the middle aisle, and finally came to rest in the space between two other partitions. There he found the ideal spot for watching the guitarist and listening to his renditions: almost (but not quite: that would be too indiscreet) directly in front and only about fifteen feet away.
The musician was sitting before a large window which looked out onto a garden. Behind him were pink roses in full bloom; there was also a large bush containing scores of deeper pink flowers, a tall thin purple flower, and yellow daffodils. The flowering bush created a sort of halo effect similar to those found in medieval paintings.
The guitarist seated before this luscious backdrop was a fairly young men in casual-but-neat khaki dress, with his hair drawn back into a 'rat's tail' (as T. was wont to call it.)
He was playing entirely from memory, and his playing was the best T. had ever heard live on a guitar. He played with a quiet confidence obviously born of much practice and study. His bridging seemed effortless as he moved up and down the fretboard. In one piece he had to keep jumping back and forth between chords and melody in the lower register, and harmonics in the upper: these were always brought off with unfailing accuracy. In short, this guitarist was a superb musician.
As T. listened to that exquisite playing, he became aware of a poignant difference between music and visual art. For there he was sitting surrounded by framed art works, any one of which (assuming he were healthy) he could look at simply by turning his head. If he turned away from one, he could turn back at any time and the individual work would still be there hanging on its rug-covered partition. Likewise, if he were to look at any one work and allow his eye to wander over it, he knew that he could always go back and look at any part of it again as many times as he pleased.
By contrast, individual musical notes die the moment after they are plucked. They are utterly ephemeral; one can only 'glance back' at them in memory. Likewise, once a piece is played, it is finished; one's ear cannot return and conjure up the piece again. These emotional insights almost brought T. to tears -- until he had an opposite insight, namely: that an individual work of visual art was gone the moment one looked away or turned a corner; whereas the music effortlessly threaded its way around every corner and into every nook and cranny.
As T. continued to watch and listen to the guitarist (as far as he could tell, he was the only one listening), someone walked across his field of vision. Allowing his eyes to be distracted, he saw that the offending party was a tall large-boned young woman who was in the process of viewing the art works on the other side of the panel to his left. She had stopped to look at the first piece there, and so T. had a chance to look at her. She was immediately striking to him in a way that no other woman at the exhibit was. In profile, her face resembled those countenances found on ancient Greek vases -- or in a Picasso. She had the sinuous shape that women have in Modigliani, but she was much more voluptuous. Her clothes, in contrast to the loose spring dresses being worn by all the other women, were tight-fitting: a low-cut embroidered black blouse, and long blue denim shorts reaching almost to her knees. She had a languidness about her that T. found seductive.
He had scarcely begun gazing at her when, too soon, she moved on, behind the partition and out of his sight again.
The guitarist had finished a set of pieces and was resting his instrument on his leg. If he looked up, he would almost certainly notice T. regarding him. But he didn't look up -- at least not overtly. T. (who was watching ultra-closely for every nuance of movement) thought he saw the merest flicker of the man's eyes in his direction for just a fraction of a second. T. knew this flicker well, for he himself had done just that sort of thing when he used to play such gigs as this on the piano: it is called "checking to see if anyone is listening without appearing to be checking." For after all, every musician who works hard at his or her art wants to be heard -- just as the painters in this gallery want their work to be seen.
So T. used this hiatus and the assumed acknowledgment of his presence to approach the guitarist. He began by complimenting the man on his playing; then he asked him a number of questions about his study, his instrument, the music he was playing, and so on. In this way did T. deliberately avoid speaking of his own background as a musician. Or tried to: unfortunately, his questions betrayed a tendency to verge from what the guitarist knew to what T. knew about the guitarist's craft. Thus for example, he asked him whether he was playing music by Fernando Sor, a composer who only wrote guitar music. (No, replied the guitarist, he was playing mostly music by Hector Villa-Lobos -- a much more exciting and contemporary composer. This only served to demonstrate that T. did not know his guitar composers very well.)
But he found out some interesting things about the guitarist as well. For example, T. noticed that the guitar was slightly smaller than usual (it had been made in Maine.) Then too, the guitarist played in what he called a 'choro' (flamenco) ensemble which consisted of violin, Brazilian flute, mandolin, steel-string ukulele (an acoustical oxymoron in T.'s eyes because it effectively ruined the ukulele's sweet sound), seven-string guitar ("for bass notes"), and a regular guitar (himself.) But T. neglected to ask about the sorts of venues at which they might play.
After a bit of this sort of oblique interaction, T. returned to his ideal listening spot as the guitarist began to play again -- this time using sheet music. And as he watched the guitarist's hands on the strings, T. thought of his own instrument and how it compared to this one. The comparison was not favorable to the piano, whose tones are produced by hammers striking high-tension steel strings. Piano music (he sadly realized), no matter how softly the pianist's touch or how delicate her hands may be, is produced by a sort of violence. Whereas a guitarist plucks and strums -- in essence caresses -- the strings of his instrument directly with his hands, thereby seducing the tones from it.
As T. was ruminating on those exotic (and erotic) things, someone passed in front of his gaze a second time, this time in the opposite direction. It was The Woman once again: she had stepped through the opening between the two partitions and walked right past him up to the partition in the middle corridor just to his right. He hardly had to turn his head at all to look at her.
She was gazing at a work of art -- or at least appeared to be so gazing. But unlike all the other viewers, who would look at any given work for a few seconds and move on, the woman was immobile, in essence rooted in place. T. looked at her face: the faintest suggestion of a smile hovered about her lips. He wondered why it seemed so familiar. And then it hit him: it was The Smile.
For the second time she had placed herself, whether by accident or design, in a position where he could look at her without having to move at all. "Accident or design": T. wondered which it was. If the latter, it was a fairly brazen act on her part.
T. decided to look at her fully, without flinching. Yes, he had been taught not to stare at people and he had always obeyed that dictum -- until this moment. Now he looked frankly, openly, almost challenging her to acknowledge his slight presence. (And if she had, would he have looked away? No.) She didn't: there was not a hint of a glance in his direction; she just stood there, coolly immobile, while appearing to look at an artwork. Did she know that she herself was being looked at and admired? T. did not see how she couldn't -- unless...
it was something that T. had to face, that he had to admit to himself: the possibility that he was, for all intents and purposes, invisible to her. He was, after all, a man in a wheelchair -- a physically stunted (yes, he was being brutally honest with himself here) man with, for all she knew, stunted feelings. There was a good chance that she didn't even see him.
But then another scenario presented itself, and with its shades of irony it appealed to him: that she was displaying herself to him precisely because he was in a wheelchair. For the fact that he was relatively immobile was what made the experience they were having possible to begin with: he could stare at her without shame or embarrassment because that was the way he happened to be facing when she placed herself there; it would have taken a lot of effort just to turn himself away. Was she flirting with him? No, because she never caught his eye with hers. she was just enjoying being looked at by him, and enjoying as well the thought that looking at her gave him pleasure.
This extended mutual trance went on for a good long time; it was only broken when a friend of hers came over and spoke to her. Then those two, chatting quietly, continued to view the art while walking away from him.
T. was now at a loss as to what to do: the guitarist went on a break (he walked right by T. without looking at him: to this man, apparently, T. had become invisible), and his obscure object of desire had left as well. Luckily, Helen appeared and, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, asked him whether he had gotten any strawberry shortcake? He replied that he had not, the problem being that he couldn't feed himself. Helen: "Oh that's not a problem at all! Come with me to the Pavilion -- I'll get some for you and feed it to you."
He followed her out of the main exhibition room. The hall leading to the Pavilion had five huge masks hanging in it. They had all been fashioned by grade school students in Dorchester for giant puppet theater; each was sculpted and painted differently from the others and they were all humorously grotesque. T. looked at them (he found a vantage point from which he could view all five at once) while Helen went to get his shortcake. Other than his roommate's painting, these were the only artworks he would look at today.
At length Helen returned. As she fed T. the strawberry shortcake (it was very good: it had been made with real whipped cream and fresh strawberries), T. regarded her face: it seemed ancient, with deep fissures. Yet she almost immediately began talking about her 93-year-old father, with whom she assumedly lived: he was, she lamented, "getting old and beginning to fail." T. muttered something about "the older one gets, the more possibility there is for something to go wrong."
Helen asked T. whether he had found anything of interest there at the art exhibit? He pondered for a moment, then replied:
"I had two experiences that, as far as I know, no one else here has had. One was as an ecouteur, the other as a voyeur. I can't decide which experience I liked better."
T. never did make it down to cocktails.
(26 June 2008)
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