Be Brave Project, Day 30: Hanging Meat and Mailing Letters

Last week I wandered into my building's front hallway, and found two "City Pass" booklets propped up on top of the mailboxes. Looking through them I saw that they contained what seemed to be free tickets to The Guggenheim, The Empire State Building, and The State of Liberty + Ellis Island. Hmmm. The books were half-used, and due to expire in 4 days.

So a friend and I went to the Guggenheim yesterday. I'm ashamed to admit that I'd never been there before; every time I have tried to become a fan of modern art art I end up with the frustrated feeling that either someone's onto a really good con game, or they're taking the piss. An example: A few years back an ex and I went to the Tate Modern in London. Absolutely lovely building, but once I looked at an art installation that consisted of a pile of bricks, and another that was a film of a naked German man jumping up and down, I felt I'd got the point.

Was I simply an irretrievable philistine, or was someone laughing at me? Annoying, when you don't quite get the joke. So, I approached the Gugg with trepidation. CityPass turns out to be brilliant--we didn't have to wait in line and just swanned in. Got our free audio phones, put the earphones on, and pressed 1. As we stood on the ground floor near a 10 foot sculpture of a spider, we looked up the spiraling ramps towards Frank Lloyd Wright's famous ceiling (in the picture above). It conveniently resembles nothing so much as a large crystalline web from which the bronze arachnid has dropped, fully formed.

The exhibit on now is of Louise Bourgeois' work, and the spider represents her mother, a tapestry weaver. To Bourgeois the spider is a symbol of industry, ingenuity, and frailty. We walked up the ramps, looking at early art work of women who are becoming houses, their hair in flames and their arms flailing out of the windows. The "New York in the 40's" exhibit was vaguely disappointing (though there was a Picardie painting), but the Thannhauser collection absolutely thrilled--Cezanne, Manet, Picasso, Pissaro.

I was sighingly dragged out of the Thannhauser rooms back up the ramps, to more Bourgeois works. Sculptures of slender wooden planks huddled together; enormous pods and what look like piles of shit. Here was where I realized, --Oh, this is about rage! I get rage, and can channel it in my girlish way, so we were off to the races. Bourgeois' father had abandoned his family when she was young, and then returned to allow his wife to support him. At the same time, he moved in an "English Tutor" for his daughters--namely, his mistress. One of Bourgeois' most famous pieces was of a dinner table with glowing red seats--everything in the room is glowing red with rage and vengeance. On the dining room table there are dismembered bits of the father that will be gnawed to the bone as a meal.

But the most interesting piece in terms of the reactions it got, where my friend and I mooned around for ages (so did a lot of guards), was one of her later works--I cannot remember the title, so I'll just call it what it is: Penis on a Meathook. Holy Crow! You round the corner and there it is, hanging. The reactions of various museum visitors varied from the studiedly intellectual to the sniggeringly embarrassed. My definite favorite falls to the middle-aged woman who was wearing yellow hair, yellow trousers, and shiny yellow shoes. She walked right up to it, studied the dangling object at a very close range, then turned around to shout to her friend. "Come here, Sean--take a look at this ham!"

I liked the Guggenheim.

Today I am doing a very brave thing indeed; launching into the unknown. I have done this before but never when I was sober, and never when I had so many possessions (a sofa! 2 coffee tables! 2 bookcases, a bed!) and a cat to look after. . .today I am mailing in my notice to vacate this apartment. I am scared of ending up homeless, but if I don't jump at this opportunity I would be kicking myself next summer, when the price goes up again on this place and I am again looking in Inwood. . .it's a risk, so I need to take a deep breath and leap.