I went to the Mint Museum yesterday, alone, and I am glad I did. There is something reverent about museums; they are sacred buildings like churches of old. The gods of Myers Park and Corporate America bestow upon us souls splashed across canvases, minds dissected and bits mounted, presented for our curiosity, amusement…maybe…our salvation. I am not sure. Museums, like churches, lend themselves to the process of self-discovery. Why do I gravitate to this piece? What does this say about the world of which I am part? How does art reflect nature? There were two pieces that struck me in this (how? what? why?) way.
The first piece was a painting hanging in the first room I entered. The artist was an American painter named Milne Ramsey; the painting was called Route en Bretagne (Road in Brittany) 1882. I cannot talk about how it was made; I only can tell how I felt as I remember it now. It is a picture of a dirt road, on both sides of the road, there are trees lining the road as far as I can see. Behind the road, there is a stonewall and behind the wall there is a pasture. The sun is shining as it would on a late summer afternoon. There are no people, only me on this road and it the temperature is now just cooling. I can feel, as I walk under the trees, the warm sunlight on my face change from hot to cool as I pass under their shadows. The air is clean, the ground is rocky and it crunches as my heels dig into it and push away. I can hear birds sing and the sound of the wind slightly rusting leaves and tiny branches of the trees. Insects buzz by. I hear them in the background in somewhat of a harmony. I have been here before, as a child. We were on our bikes riding down this road, my sisters, my cousins and me, our mothers walking, talking to each other, lagging somewhere behind us. We did not care to wait for them either, the breeze felt too good on our faces as we rode through the light-speckled shadows, giggling with freedom. It was us and it was nature (or what we knew of nature in its manmade glory). This is one of the last days I remember with my cousins in our youth, before our kindred spirits were ripped apart by the move. I will forever regard the day they moved as an eternal loss, we so innocent and it was totally out of our control. But today is perfect, I say to myself, and continue on…the road that leads to anywhere.
A second piece, called Perpetual (2001) by Siobhan Hapanska, caught my eye. It was a dead pine tree on display in a clear case. From a distance, I saw it had goldish ornaments hanging from the branches. As I approached the tree for a better look, I realized that they were not gold ornaments, but clear, hollow ornaments that had been filled with the tree’s pine needles. It shocked me at first, the sight of the needles, once a part of the tree, crammed into the ornaments, now separated by glass, hanging off the tip of each branch in decoration. What was wrong with the way it had been in the forest? It was adorned with those needles in the first place. Though, they had then been green and fragrant. It made me think of Christmas, too. I have gone only one Christmas in my life without a Christmas tree. A couple of years, we had tried a new tradition, cutting them down ourselves. Yes, we became cold-blooded tree murderers. Surely, the pagans, those nature lovers, did not start this horrible thing. I do not know the group to blame, but it caught on: the mass murder of various evergreens for one day, left to dry out in our family rooms under the glow of colorful lights, glitter, ribbon and other trinkets, and then thrown out onto the streets for the garbage man to pick up. It a ritual as unusual as the single display I encountered; the duality of the evergreen as life in winter versus the death of that tree. It is like when you know you have a problem, but until somebody points is out plainly, you go on unaware or the damage you are causing.
So it was the lonely tree, so lonely and dead, exposed to the branches, that had me thinking on my car ride home, of nature’s impact on us and, in turn, our impact on nature.
Antoinette, you "painted" a lovely picture of your experience at the Mint. Thanks for including the "Road in Brittany" picture. I like it a lot! I set it as my desktop wallpaper. :) LOL
ReplyDeleteI have not had a Christmas tree for 4 years. The only reason is because I got a dog four years ago and she is such a puppy, I was afraid she would simply eat all the ornaments. I love Christmas and I love decorating the tree. I haven't given much thought to the fact that it's dead. I love cut flowers in a vase on my desk, but I don't think of them as dead either. Although they are.
I wonder sometimes if we've gotten so concerned about our impact on nature that we lose sight of the fact that we are part of it ourselves. That humans are just as much a part of the natural order of things as any other living creature. We are in a survival of the fittest. Yes we have caused much too much destruction - killing mountains for coal, tossing our garbage in the oceans, destroying insects that eat our crops, thereby upsetting the natural balance of things. We certainly do need to think about what we're doing. But also remember that Christmas trees do a lot of good to the environment. Tree farms provide work/jobs for folks. Trees are recycled by the city and produce lots of mulch for our gardens. I think in the last twent years, humans are getting smarter about what we are doing to the planet and taking steps to improve our interaction with nature. We have a long way to go, but we are going in the right direction. Good food for thought though!