Touring the University of Iowa Hospital’s
Art Collection as a voyeur to the true intention of the work’s placement in the
hospital left me feeling a bit sick to my stomach. I felt embarrassed and
ashamed to be there touring work, passing by people in stretchers, clearly in
critical condition, doctors stressed and on a lack of sleep, loosing my way,
trying to find the art amidst the signs pointing to trauma, burn units,
ontology, endless ailments, in endless directions. I left feeling that going to
a hospital to look and judge the art was a moral transgression. Any aesthetic experience
I had looking at art, was trumped by the surrounding context, of the reality of
life and death, that art may be only capable of a respite from those thoughts.
A worthy respite at that, but to enter into such a context willingly to such
ends is besides the point of the purpose of the placement of this art. At one
point I was clearly lost and a doctor asked me if I needed help. I replied that
I was on the art tour; he replied that he couldn’t help and quickly lost
interest in my confusion. I felt like a fraud and a joke, and wished I had
chosen a real profession like this doctor.
I did witness the success of the intended
role of art in this setting, to provide the stressed workers, and patients, and
their families a bit of rest amidst this chaos. I saw a young girl and her father, walking away from the
children’s unit, stop and talk and touch William Lasansky’s sculpture, titled
Diana and Muffin. It is a small bronze sculpture of a young girl and her cat. A
few moments later another man waiting for the elevator was on the phone and
seemed to be exhausted and relaying information of a family member’s condition
over the phone, stopped and rested his hand on the sculpture. This sculpture physically served as a
surrogate of comfort. There were
several intricately crafted dollhouses scattered throughout the halls. I watched as people stopped, and let
their eyes gaze at the meticulous work. I heard people praise the amount of
sheer labor and care that went into the houses. A young girl ran up to another
and jumped up and down and moved quickly around one of these houses with great
enthusiasm, I wondered what she was in the hospital for.
I paused for a while at Dick Huss’s piece;
commonly referred to as “the blue bowl” I let my mind get lost into the
unearthly blue, and the intimately cared for and crafted patterns. A lady
passed by and exclaimed, “Wow, that’s amazing”. I thought about the care and precision that this artist, as
well as many others put into their work.
I thought of the patients coming here to the hospital fighting for their
lives, searching for someone to give them such care and precision to extricate
their illness, and certainly if we as humans are willing and able to put such
care and labor into our objects, we know and are reminded that people will do
even more for each other. I understood quickly that seeing a scarred body,
such as recent controversial photographs of women that had undergone mastectomy which were decided against, wouldn’t serve this audience.
Much of the art seemed in need of some dusting
or care. There was a large painting by Clayton Gorde, a double mandala form,
that was shoved behind some couches that we serving to protect it from
obtaining more scars of gurney’s passing by. The surface bared evidence to the
reality of its history of time in that space.
And while I was able to stop and
appreciate and ponder the Sol Le Witt, and the Ellsworth Kelly and think about
these works in relation to the knowledge I have, of the greater continuum of
both of these artists works, my thoughts quickly shifted to ponder their role
in the hospital context. Did the pieces lend themselves as a clearing, an open
pause to the patrons of this place? Or work the just another fleeting austere
moment between instrumental signage. At one moment I passed a piece a mosaic of individual squares
that had been done by patients in collaboration with graduate art students. I
read the list and recognized some of my friends names, including my friend and
former colleague, Megan Dirks, who lost her life in her own battle with cancer
just months after this project was completed.
Feeling pretty depressed, out of place
and anxious to get out of there, I stumbled upon two lithographs, black and
white line drawings of Philip Guston. Both images were drawings of shoes in different
settings, images akin to his well-known paintings. The manner in which they
were drawn, incessant but with a great deal of pathos, spoke to the exhaustion
and mimed the way I was feeling. For a moment, I was that worn out shoe,
pathetically trying to hold itself together. Robert Rauschenberg ‘s piece, Blue Line Swinger, a triptych
of fragile imagery and text alluding to temporality, Past, Present, Future, I
also connected to in a different way than I would have in a different
context. I was heightened in my
awareness of the mundane and meaning, within the ephemeral moment, which this
piece speaks clearly too.
My aesthetic experience was so embedded
in the context of the hospital setting and I refuse to extricate one from the
other, as that is missing the point of the project, the purpose, and placement
of the work there. I find the value of this work as I have stated in its
ability to shift thoughts away from the seriousness of the setting.
Fortunately, at this time in my life, I was a visitor to the seriousness and
therefore trying to force a read that could only ultimately be inaccurate and
inappropriate. This work is there for the patrons and workers of the hospital. There
is a great variety of work, with a variety of aesthetic empathies, some more
attuned to my sensibilities than others, but ultimately this is not the place
for the critic and I feel it a perversion to try to do so.
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