Today, we savored a nearly forgotten pleasure - we went to an art museum! It was the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. On a rainy Sunday we were the only visitors - a nice way back in! "The Wex" was designed by deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman, his first major commission after decades of snarky sketches. (Since it was designed to frustrate, I don't know whether to say it succeeds...!)
We especially enjoyed two of the four exhibitions on show, in oddly shaped rooms accessed by narrow stairways along a long sloping corridor. One was Steve McQueen's "Remember Me" (above), part of a series, arrays neon versions of the phrase Remember me in a variety of handwritings, evoking people of different ages and levels of education, victims of unspecified but undeniable erasure.
The other was a sound installation by Taryn Simon, called "Assembled Audience," a randomized combination of the applause of hundreds of individual people at hundreds of different events in Columbus - a big wall was filled with a list of the component events, running the gamut from entertainment to trade to politics - which you encounter surging and subsiding, now a pitter-patter, now a roar, in a pitch-black room (where, if there were more people in the museum, you'd almost certainly collide with someone). It's disorienting but also intoxicating: it's hard not to feel the shifting waves of applause are telling you something meaningful about something important, whether you like it or not. Scary, profound.
