Garbo says:
Here is my question to you? When you look at a string of dixie cups hanging on a gallery wall or a series interlocking bands of naugahyde that are arranged across a corner of a museum, do you get the same kind of feeling I got when I first saw El Greco. Is there the same paralyzing feeling I get in the pit of my stomach. The same sort of wonder or the level of respect I get when I see Re!mbrandt. Is it like that ? is it visceral?
Or do you admire something else in the Dixie cups? Is it something that you can love like I have come to love in Velazquez. Do you see neon tubes like I see brush strokes in Manet? Is that what it is? That you ‘get it’ the way I get Caravaggio. And are they the same kind of genius… and Michelangelo did it on a ceiling and your guy does it with grafitti or squirts of piss?
If it is so, that the deepest recesses of your soul resonates upon being witness to a giant slab of cor-ten steel somehow precariously placed corner to corner in a sixty foot room having been designed by an artist using a maquette of foam core and sent to a steel mill (ratio: one to a hundred). Then I envy you because you can get yours from so many sources and I have to travel so far.
Last trip to Madrid I wrote to the Director of del Prado Museum. He granted me permission(vis a vis) my 'Museum Suite' series, to be alone with the rooms and the paintings I so love. Alone with Goya and Zurburan. Just us. On a Monday when the museum was closed, save for me.
I had been there when I was twenty. Obtained permission to copy. I told the director . He said ‘come’. I paid my respects to Velazquez as did John Sargent earlier. I didn’t know it then but we made copies of the same ones.
It’s tradition. It’s homage and respect for ones ancestors.
What have your guys built lately?... I forgot…. a stuffed shark. Whoopee!
