MoIA: Musee d'Art Impenetrable - imaginary wing



this is exactly what silence looks like in my head.

buried behind an uninspiring stack of rubbish & rust. a simple concept intersected by low-hanging pipes -- that clank.

and my brain is that white wall. a canvas with such potential, restless zen, longing to become flypaper with the smudge of a word - not just any word - a glacial lozenge - with layer of honest frost so flesh-ripping it causes you to gasp, catches in your throat, forces you to breath around it, negotiate through its layers in order to survive.

there are other nooks in my head too.

one featuring a giant ruler that likes to measure where i am with where it thinks i ought to be, condemns my progress, decides what letter should go before z, you know, practical things - the marketing department lets it self-promote and wrest control from time to time.

and somewhere i hear a gramophone playing songs tied to ex-lovers - that's a noisy wing.

and you -- here you are -- observing. hello!

welcome to my museee d'art impenetrable - that's impenetrable museum of art - though the "art" bit is all bravado for flourish and consistency in theme - primarily it's just an impenetrable museum. one that i find difficult to access. sometimes.

BUT - enough about me...

the charming and delightful news is that the image above is from an actual museum -- a forgotten one.

years ago, the artist Marcel Bloodstandt started Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles - a conceptual museum with no collection and no permanent location (yep, pretty much the equivalent of my head). this picture was taken in where it once stood in a basement in Berlin; now it's nothing more than a storage shed with accumulations of chairs and random bits and bobs.

but the words are still on the wall and artist Tacita Dean has created a film called "Section Cinema" of what the abandoned museum looks like now.

i love the remnants. but perhaps what I love most is the discovery of Marcel - and how he and i are perhaps more kindred spirits now that his lofty ideas have matured to the point of stagnation, and his concepts become dusty refugees in an inaccessible basement -- which somehow make them all the more sincere and pristine...

and reflective of the modern museums we feel are inside us all...

o, tempus incognitum



"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Tempus incognitum - unknown, uncharted time; that which has never happened nor will be repeated is what awaits us in 2011.

I am remarkably excited for this new year - it's as if the shades have been pulled and the world looks clear and hopeful where once a cynical film of doubt had been growing like algae and increasingly tainting my view. With all the 1-1 possibilities, it is being said that 2011 is the year of balance - weights and measures dropping in to even out the negative marathon of bumpy extremes. So on this never-before-charted day of one of one of one-one - I hope you also feel the world afresh and are excited at the page turning to this new year. Good things are coming...


Photo is an untitled by '50s &'60s street photographer Garry Winogrand.