MUSEUM

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The primary goals today were to see the Plains Indians exhibit and the China Through the Looking Glass exhibit.  During lunch we learned that the Plains Indians exhibit close two days ago.

Still, there's a lot to see at The Met.

The first exhibit we wanted to see was on the roof and is pretty avant-garde.  Below is a review by the Wall Street Journal.

Installation: No Cat on the Hot Met Roof

By

Ellen Gamerman

May 11, 2015 8:09 p.m. ET

The new rooftop installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is looking a little spare.
Maybe that’s because there is no dead cat.

An outdoor installation by the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe (pronounced “Hweeg”) set to open Tuesday was supposed to feature the carcass of someone’s deceased pet cat—an element that resulted from weeks of research with scientists and other experts to figure out how to effectively turn an animal carcass into a kind of metal sculpture. 

But on Sunday, after the wall text had already gone up describing the feature, the artist scratched it. He also skipped a living addition: a reproduction of the Met’s “Recumbent Anubis,” an ancient Egyptian limestone sculpture of a wild dog, which was to be inhabited by ants.

Now, on the Met rooftop, three elements remain: an aquarium housing two ancient aquatic species with a volcanic rock floating on the surface; a large chunk of Manhattan bedrock and bald spots where granite floor tiles were removed to reveal dirt, pebbles and other debris. 
Met Associate Curator Ian Alteveer, who commissioned the installation with Sheena Wagstaff, chairwoman of the museum’s modern and contemporary art department, said the Met ran the use of living and dead creatures past officials at various animal-welfare organizations, without resistance. Both Mr. Huyghe and Mr. Alteveer said the decision to pull the cat and other elements rested entirely with the artist, who no longer thought the pieces fit into the installation.  

The curators described Mr. Huyghe, 52 years old, as approaching the rooftop like an archaeological dig, attempting to expose the remains from earlier eras—including, around the floor tiles, bits of paint from a previous installation there. The work is what Ms. Wagstaff called “a quiet installation” that she compared to “a short, pithy poem.” 
“I think this will respond to a visitor who pays close attention or who wants to discover something, and I think it will completely go over some people’s heads,” said Mr. Alteveer.  

According to an essay in the exhibit catalog, Mr. Huyghe was inspired to explore the effect of copper on carcasses after learning about a miner from around 550 A.D. known as Copper Man, now at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The mummified body was discovered by accident in 1899, entombed in a hot, airless copper mine in northern Chile. His well-preserved skin and loincloth were coated by copper salts, turning him into what today looks like a greenish mix of flesh and metal.  

The cat that would have gone on display at the Met died from natural causes and was preserved by a taxidermist for an owner who decided not to keep it, allowing the artist to obtain it, Mr. Alteveer said.  

Mr. Huyghe wanted to connect the animal carcass to nature in Central Park, intrigued by the idea of excavating the world lying outside the museum doors, the curator said. 

Mr. Huyghe said he held back the cat and other animals because he was wary of creating a sideshow-like distraction, and because he didn’t think they added to the work. 

“When I’m doing a project, I have a tendency to create a mental landscape I walk through,” he said on Monday, dressed all in black on the hot Met roof. “I see how different components interact with each other and I slowly, slowly decide to remove the ones who are not interesting…Sometimes, it’s the main protagonist who has to go away.” 

Mr. Alteveer called the cat “very beautiful” and said he pressed the artist on why he wanted to cut it at the last minute.  

“I think we as curators, part of our job when we work with a living artist is to sort of challenge them on reasons why. But at a certain point it’s the artist who makes the work, not us,” he said. 

Brian Shapiro, New York state director for the Humane Society of the United States, said he didn’t know if the museum contacted his organization before the exhibit but backed the decision to nix the cat. “People who witness such a display can misconstrue this type of art, and we all strive to enlighten the public on the bond we have with animals.” 

A spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also didn’t know if the Met reached out to the group. In a statement, PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange said if an animal dies of natural causes, the organization isn’t ethically opposed to making its body into art. But she said it still seems disrespectful, adding: “We’d never preserve and display a beloved human family member.” 

Mr. Huyghe also chose not to add carcasses of another domestic cat and a squirrel to the piece—both procured humanely, Mr. Alteveer said. The artist worked on the metal transformation of the dead animals with experts at the Met, Harvard University and Columbia University, the curator said. The idea was to force a copper crystallization on the surface of the animal.

At the Met, the ants that would have made up the Anubis piece were to have been collected by an upstate New York University’s entomology lab, a spokeswoman said. The Anubis sculpture had a personal connection for the artist: The jackal on which it is based may be a distant relative of Mr. Huyghe’s rescue dog, a ghost-white Ibizan hound he named Human. The dog has appeared in Mr. Huyghe’s work in the past, an angular presence with a foreleg colored hot pink with vegetable dye. 

Some living pieces remain, including tadpole shrimp and American brook lamprey, fish species believed to be millions of years old, which can be seen inside the rooftop aquarium.
The installation has an indoor addition: A film by Mr. Huyghe featuring a macaque monkey wearing a wig and human mask. The monkey, which a restaurant owner had trained to do small waitressing tasks in an establishment near the devastated Japanese city of Fukushima, is captured alone in the space in haunting silence. 

Back on the roof, the uneven floor—tiles stacked here, removed there—was meant to evoke the idea of the museum as a ruin. Here was the artist, literally and metaphorically, digging into the Met. 

But in one case on Monday, it had a different effect, tripping a woman who wasn’t looking down at her feet. The Met said it plans to post signs warning about the uneven surfaces.

The project was a bit far out for me.  You can see in the video.

We then went to the China exhibit.

Then to Van Gogh's Lilacs and Roses.

Interestingly, one of my regular visitors from Abilene, Texas asked me to include the experience of a Manhattan bus ride home.  So just for him, here's the bus ride home.

Since I'm talking about a visitor to the blog, I can report that the blog will have its 35,000th visitor sometime in June.