August 2nd, 2005
Lost in Meguro
Aug. 2nd, 2005 at 11:42 PM
Today was a day for remembering that the best travel discoveries are made spontaneously. I had planned to see the 8-foot tapeworm at the Tokyo Parasite Museum, but I got lost and found the Teien Museum of Modern Art instead. Avant-garde ceramics isn't an artistic medium I'd normally seek out for myself, and I spent much of the first floor underwhelmed by the exhibition and overwhelmed with envy for the family that had once lived in the beautiful Art Deco mansion that housed the museum. I've always preferred depictive art to modern art -- the presence of realistic objects or people gives me something to hold on to; my ability to analyze depends on being able to make judgments about the way an artist has chosen to represent people and moments from our world. Strangely patterned vases didn't give me much chance to do that, and I slouched through the first 3 rooms feeling bored and disconnected. Finally, I remembered the way my freshman year writing workshop TA taught us to look at art -- to sit down in front of it and choose one detail to study, the same way you'd start writing a paper by examining a passage of a book. Grudgingly, I sat before a photo of a curvy ivory vase covered with squiggly lines and checks. To my surprise, it suddenly came alive. I discerned hands and feet, voluptuous breasts and thighs, a woman's pageboy haircut lapping against her cheeks. The vase vanished, replaced by a mental image of a curvaceous cartoon woman, descending a staircase backed by jazz from the twenties. That sense of movement and voluptousness shaped the way I looked at everything in the museum, influenced, no doubt by my 1920s-era surroundings. It was only in the last room that I noticed most of the exhibits were produced in the late sixties rather than the twenties.My favorite part of the museum was the series of book sculptures on the second floor. From a distance, I mistook the first for a bird until I saw its title was "First Page." It was housed alone in a glass case in the middle of a sunlit sitting room. One bronze page was raised in the air, just like a wing. Poised in front of a huge window, it looked ready to soar into the sky. The next room also housed a single sculpture of a book. It was book with power, a tome really, carved from deep gray granite. It sat on an empty desk in front of an empty chair and each person who looked into the room was reflected in the glass case on the wall behind it, cut off at the waist as if they were sitting at the desk, reading the book. The heavy stone pages curved upward, away from the cover and the binding did not touch the spine. It looked ready to leap up and launch itself at the world. The other sculptures were smaller, housed together in a single display case. There were broken books, waterlogged with pages torn. Others seemed to communicate the individual experience of reading -- one covered with the imprints of a dozen differently-sized fingers, another with a pair of bronze reading glasses on top. Each one seemed to describe something true about the intellectual process of rading.