ART: I can’t help but go to them JESSE MORSE
As I was traveling through Mexico, it struck me, repeatedly, that the museums were filled with travelers like myself, and not with residents of their respective cities. I’ve never understood this phenomenon, despite my contribution and subjection to it. Why do travelers inherently visit the museums of the cities they wind up in, while the denizens of those cities rarely do?
I am a perfect example. I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon for five and a half years and have been to the downtown Portland Art Museum once. It was stupendous. And a mere ten minute bus ride away. Yet I’ve never thought to go again. In that same time, however, I’ve been to the Louvre, both San Francisco’s and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the Guggenheim, attempted to visit Los Angeles’ downtown Museum of Contemporary Art (though, unfortunately, it was closed), went to five museums in London, saw every possible museum in Barcelona, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This drive to see art or learn a place’s history (while visiting that place) through a museum’s often sterile atmosphere and subjective viewpoint is worth pondering. To be perfectly honest, I occasionally feel sick inside museums. I get grave headaches, most likely the result of the unnatural light and the large amount of reading I do while standing. When I leave museums, I am often exhausted. Or rather, my brain is tired.
Yet I can’t help but go to them.
Like the Sunday I spent in Morelia, in the beautiful state of Michoacán. Museums are free on Sundays in Mexico. So I went to four: La Casa Natal de Morelos, La Casa Museum José María Morelos y Pavón, El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and El Museo de Historia Natural. I walked all over town to find them. It took up my entire day. I was alone and spoke to no one but the museum attendants. The guests I encountered at each museum, laden with cameras and fold-out maps, were clearly visitors, too. Mexican tourists, on holiday in Morelia.
The amount of material to read in La Casa Museum José María Morelos y Pavón is overwhelming. And, as in most museums, I began my reading very closely. I had seen pictures of Morelos in other museums, and other public places, often alongside Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the legendary father of Mexico’s struggle for independence. As I proceeded from room to room, always imagining the next room would be the last, I had to concede that I couldn’t possibly read all of this. The print was small. The panels were huge and long. I’m doubtful I examined any artifacts in this museum. I just read. And wondered, while trying to read, how many had stood before me in the exact same manner, thinking similar thoughts, reading the same text, eyes finally squinting. Or had most visitors passed by this reservoir of knowledge without taking a dip? Simply a quick glance and an exit. I spent an hour standing and reading. I gained a (somewhat) firm grasp on who Morelos was and why this enchanting city is named after him. Yet, admittedly, much of my time was spent contemplating the museum itself, how people interacted with it.
This is an interesting by-product of museums I’ve always wondered about. Never at baseball games or movie theatres, for example, does my mind float into that reflexive space it always reaches in museums. Not to say, in the midst of a three hour baseball game, I am entirely occupied. It’s just a different kind of daydreaming. A happier, light-hearted one. The inability to focus inside the walls of the museum, on the other hand, can be frustrating. And the open structure of museums, the fact that not everyone who attends the museum will take the same route, will interact with the same displays, leaves one with the feeling that there is always more to learn and see. Is this simple engagement with the space - the layout, the route choosing - combined with the lack of a common event (everyone at the baseball game sees the same game) the cause of my reflecting on the museum itself while I am inside it? Why, when staring at Frida Kahlo’s vibrant Viva la Vida in Coyoacán, could I not focus on it? Why was I, instead, fabricating a wild, future domesticity with the woman standing adjacent to me? Her intoxicating accent. Her vivid outline. How might I ask where she was from? And why was she here on this day, at the exact same moment as I, fixed on Frida’s work? Or was she equally absent, lost in idealized scenarios. And is this perchance the point of Frida Kahlo’s work? To focus our lives elsewhere for a fleeting moment. To make us believe and teach us how to dream and feel. And why are there more people in this museum than in any of the others. What is it about Frida Kahlo, about any artist, really, that turns her into an icon. Why her. And where will I eat tonight. And, oh, as she goes into the other room, my mind turns back to Frida’s watermelons and imagines what it was like for her and Diego Rivera to have lived here, in Casa Azul. I wonder if I would have gotten along with them.
The Lonely Planet calls Morelia’s Natural History museum “strange, lifeless.” I found it full of life. So much so I was nearly in tears. It was a childish thing, really. Standing there, alone, ogling at life-like representations of a lion, the massive head of a rhinoceros, the elongated neck and head of a giraffe, a polar bear, a baboon, all clumped together in a bizarre diorama, taking up an entire half of a medium-size room. I was unable to hem my emotions. As if the mammals were once living, were once my family, even, and had been murdered, stuffed and brought to this random location, made eternally immobile, put on display for future visitors to admire or castigate. How could something so absurdly fake fill me with such reverence? How could I be so vulnerable?
In the room adjacent to this Disney-like still-life were fetuses. Human ones. And these were real. Honest. There were, as well, smaller animals preserved in jars of what must have been a formaldehyde-like substance. Rats. Flayed-open rabbits, as in a biology lab. Baby birds. And the human fetuses, all but one, were deformed. Put on display as something other than normal. There was no one else in this museum in the hour I spent there. I wondered how long the museum had been there, on the outskirts of Morelia. It wasn’t near anything really. I wondered how long the museum would remain.
Extricating myself from these bizarre shelves was difficult. I left and returned a couple times. That double-back I so often make in museums to ensure I don’t miss anything. I just couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at. So I went outside. It was a large space that felt as if it were invisibly fenced. The displays scattered among the trees dealt with dinosaurs. I couldn’t understand the very technical Spanish. I looked up and into the eyes of a life-size Stegosaurus. Then a Triceratops. And there a Velociraptor. Where was I? Why was no one here to explain? How could a museum be this strange?
On my way out, near the entrance, comments in the guest book read, among other things, “Feo. Bueno y feo.” So other people had been here. I signed my name.
Is it simply an issue of time and space? Without a familiar home to reside in, or the usual responsibilities to attend to, travelers find themselves out and about. No one but the gravely self-indulgent (I suspect) travel to spend the day in a hotel. Museums are a public space in which to kill some time. And, of course, learn something. Though I’d like to think the residents of a given city would be as interested in their city’s history as a tourist passing through. But perhaps not. Perhaps it is something in the unfamiliarity people feel while traveling that drives them to the museums to, in fact, make themselves more familiar. If I know something of this place, I will feel more comfortable here. Residents acquire that comfort simply by living there.
I spent that night in the hostel, over a plate of fresh, hand-made tortillas, Mexican rice, refried beans and seasoned pork, watching Monterrey dispose of Santos in the Primera División final. The hostel was lively and the game was being shown all over Morelia, all over Mexico. Much like football in the U.S., specifically the Super Bowl, fútbol in Mexico has a colossal fan base. Yet the nostalgia I felt was overwhelming. Awake and alive, engulfed in the game and lively conversation, proud of my quickly improving Spanish, my mind nonetheless fled to the Orozco paintings I had viewed alone in Guadalajara, and the hundreds of representations of Don Quixote I had seen in Guanajuato. I was there in the hostel but I wasn’t. I was lost in discernment at how effortlessly a nation’s people rally around a game, and how quietly a nation’s art and history (what we find in museums) go unnoticed.
Writing this now, I wonder what it would be like to take a museum census. If I could poll the people of Portland to simply ask, “What museums have you been to in your life, and what museums have you seen in Portland?” I wonder what differences would arise, and I wonder how age groups would variously influence the results. Perhaps, even, my theory would be disproved. And the Portland Art Museum would have been frequented more than any other. But I doubt it. I’ve been home a month now, and the only museums I’ve thought of are elsewhere.
I imagine, then, we are simply more vulnerable, more susceptible to feeling, when we are traveling. Far from our comfort zones, the inability to ignore the surrounding environment (not having our own space to hide in) opens us up to it. Museums are a place to run to in that openness. They encourage it. They encourage us to think and feel, to literally take time. So we flock to them. At least I do. Even if they give me headaches.
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Jesse Morse lives in Portland, Oregon but is moving to Denver soon. His work has recently appeared in Past Simple and Page Boy. He’ll have two chapbooks out this year: Rotations (C_L Press) and paragraphs for dolphins (Thuggery & Grace). He runs the Smorg reading series. He plays guitar and sings in The Whirlies. He spends a lot of time outside with his dog Hank.
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Leora Lutz’s visual art, shown at the top of the page, accompanies Jesse’s writing. This piece, from the “Point Taken” series, pertains to language mapping and abstracting the landscape.
My ideas question and explore man’s communication with one another and his interaction with nature. I am particularly fascinated with the secrets that man-made or natural ephemeral lines reveal: plane flights that eventually end at a destination, words that disappear into the void of hearing, a fable gone wrong, a memory. In the wake of these actions and situations, we become aware of the metaphorical lines that are drawn. The narratives I create are stories for others to read. - Leora Lutz
Each embroidered dot is a meditation in covering up the chosen letters for the map - in this case r-o-l-e. Visually the maps create cyclical, tactile reminders of the seen and the unknown. To learn more about Leora and her art, click here.
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***All other images & video used in this piece are courtesy of an Internet search and collaged here, most notably is “Viva la Vida” (1954) a painting by Frida Kahlo, followed by a photo of the artist and Diego Rivera.
***If you are the owner of one of these images and would like the work removed, please contact us, and we will sadly oblige.
