Fumbling
In the middle of my walk of life, I found myself standing in front of the Norwegian National Museum. Where the clear way was smudged. Or maybe it was my glasses.
I’d been avoiding going to museums & galleries and am not sure why. It might have something to do with the emotional intensity with which I feel art, or perhaps just not wanting to deal with crowds on a Sunday.
But there I was, standing in front of it. My feet had walked me there from the train station, not a short walk. I decided to give it an hour.
The Piranesi show was still up and that’s what I had wanted to see, despite myself.
Walking into the small exhibition, my eyes filled with tears.
On the opposite wall from the entrance, this wall painted the emerald green of Oz, there they were, the Imaginary Prisons.
Having gone alone to the museum, as is my wont, I made various gasping noises and turned to the security guard to commiserate. He seemed happy that I was happy.
And my eyes were still filled with tears. And I kind of know why.
Back in time we go, but you know this about me now.
Year 1988 I had arrived in a foreign land, the East Coast University. Having come off a vibrant & life-changing & challenging high school exchange year in Italy, which was far less of a culture shock than the East Coast University, I had one skill that I had not felt instantly evaporate by the intimidation of being in such a smart place with such sophisticated people. That skill was being fluent in Italian.
Because of that skill, I got some cool jobs in that East Coast University. I tutored graduate students for their language exams. I graded papers for the Italian department. And best of all, the Art History department hired me to do a special project.
I got to go into their storage and research the provenance of an edition of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons.
Picture that.
Instant seduction: the archive, the dimmed light, the protective layer, the print itself, the deliciousness of special access, the quiet grrr-clang of the flat files opening, the fancy white cotton gloves.
It sounds so good in Italian, just say it out loud, nobody’s listening, give it a try.
Carceri d’invenzione.
What did I do with the prints, all alone, just me and them, in the secret room upstairs from the art gallery where I also had a job as a desk sitter (a skill I had achieved in one of my many boring jobs in high school, doing the midnight-to-6am shifts in my hometown university dorm lobbies during the summers when the students were gone but the fraternities held their spooky reunions. But I digress)?
Looked, touched, caressed, magnified, wondered. I had to see what state of etching, speculate on what edition it might be, note condition, check for damage.
I don’t know how many weeks or months that job lasted. Or even the purpose. Time stopped when I entered that space and still does when I see or hear art that I love.
That was part of the reason for my tears in the National Museum in Oslo on Sunday October 30 of this year.
Maybe another reason for the emotion was that in that space I saw other people were stopping too, staring at this wall of old prints. Maybe they felt it too. A big guy with an even bigger Nikon pointed it at one print and before I could hold back I said “lens cap” because the lens cap was still on.
Those hard truths we must all bear.
And me with my stupid phone camera; all of us trying to take pictures of these prints behind glass and for what? It isn’t like we can’t go online and see incredible high resolution images to our hearts’s content.
Maybe we point those failed lenses at the glass-glared prisons to try to enter them or to have them further enter us.
Another reason I was so emotional is because a year or so ago in the darker times (but now that we are heading for even darker ones, we may soon say those brighter times about the near past), I had been making a short animated film each time I made a chapter of my feature, Bunker.
I made these films because I needed to after the intensity of traveling to film guys living underground (lens cap!). I felt compelled to get my fumbling hands drawing. A pen and paper and nothing more.
Needed to go back into a hybrid world of my own making, fed by other archives. I made a few of these animations. And the last one of this series I decided to take on the challenge I had, unbeknownst to myself, dreamed of for decades.
I tried to copy the Imaginary Prisons. By drawing. An animation. Stop motion. With a thick black permanent marker on plain old cheap paper. Watercolor backdrops.
Forever fumbling, forever failing, the love of what’s out there, me just doing my damndest to try to bring it in here and if I’m lucky, to pass some of that feeling to you.
Here’s that try. It’s called For a voice to speak, it’s 4 minutes long, silent, from way back in the ancient times of 2019.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. If you want to see high resolution images of the different editions of the Carceri, Wikipedia saves the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione