Still Inside the Museum

This continues an earlier entry on a visit to Berkeley Art Museum...

The Buddhist art gallery was a Bardo plain in microcosm--a cosmological palette-cleanser or a destination of its own. By the next level, the exhibits had returned to conceptual art science projects, so to speak. The effect of the ropes installed in the open atrium got even better from above; they were like oblique harp-strings.
The highest gallery was certainly the most wiggy of them all--Joan Jonas' fun house. Three two-sided flat-screens hung at intervals. They featured tableaux of the artist and her dog superimposed on landscapes of ocean waves or desert chaparral. Beyond them a projection screen rises from the floor with a mountainous landscape, as uneventful as the shoulder of a desert road. In an opposite alcove, another film with sound consisted of a performance by Jonas. She whirled lots of fabric around on poles and was wrapped in it, I was reminded of George Herms' similar art actions. A life-size cardboard cut-out dog keep watch should anyone else try to act-out. Before any sense of meaning in it all could stick with me, I stepped into the small elevator down.

I drifted like a dandelion down to the lowest-level galleries. Matrix Redux, a retrospective of the museums most innovative series, seduced fifteen minutes of my voyeurism. The piece-de-resistance for me was a nearly transparent piece made out of roplex (kind of like rubber cement). A fluted drape of it hung beneath elaborate shoulder panels like humming-bird wings, with almost invisible stenciled decoration. It looked like a an evening gown shed by an insect-fairy.
I noted with relief that those billboard-sized Hans Hoffman monstrosities are now hung in an off-the-beaten-path gallery where few ever venture.

My last stop was to be in the ring-side gallery where Matrix usually goes down. There were the enlarged photographs of space showing the clandestine satellites of our black-budget secret government. They were riveting in themselves but the heart of this work, Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky, was in a black chamber of its own. Entered through curtains, the space is dominated by a spinning globe, surrounded by white cubes for spectators to sit on. As the globe spins the continent nearest the viewer gets brighter, and throughout one sees crowded satellite traffic projected onto it, as if observed from deeper in the solar system. I was transfixed for ten minutes or so and I began to feel light-headed, almost zero-gravity.
Paglen is an academic here in geography as well as an artist having his first solo show. He has produced a book based on his photographs taken from great distances of secret government installations throughout the Southwest mainly. It is entitled "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World." Another book documents CIA "special rendition" torture flights.
His work makes a statement larger than the one made by Manuel Botero's paintings of chubby people being tortured as inspired by Abu Ghraib. They were exhibited in segregated room at the University library and were almost as cute as alarming, somehow normalizing, evil made more banal.
Paglen's work is unsettling in a way more vague but deeper; it portends an overarching agenda of no-good.

This cultural sojourn just got more and more cosmic as I went along. I was glad I smoked before leaving home.