With his typical frenetic energy, AYT has crossed the country in search of images that will burn into his retinas, images to be received in wide-eyed wonder and may provide fuel for his blistering social critique.
Part One | Delving into the recent happenings in the artistic life of America's Young Theologian...HoustonAYT visits
The Menil Collection.
"...the collection consists of nearly 15,000 works dating from the Paleolithic era to the present day. Although historically vast, it uniquely resists the conventional museum model of the encyclopedia. Instead, within the four areas that largely define the collection—Antiquity, Byzantine and Medieval, Tribal, and Twentieth-Century Art (with a concentration in Surrealism)—one finds a selective approach to acquisition that yields depth with regard to particular areas and artists."
One room details the kind of objects that the Surrealists collected:
AYT notes on the back of a DC Metro card: Ethnic, religious, and strange artifacts, crucifix, mounted butterflies, pocket knife, pocket watches, faded button reading "peace now," marbles, miniature boxes, seashells, sand dollars, decorated eggs, feathers, phrenology, dice.
Later, AYT visits the Rothko Chapel and Byzantine Fresco Chapel.
(above: the interior of the Rothko Chapel; below: Byzantine Fresco Chapel)"The Rothko Chapel, founded by the de Menils, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate, nondenominational sanctuary. The chapel was designed by Howard Barnstone based on an earlier design by Philip Johnson and houses fourteen Mark Rothko paintings. Finally, designed by Francois de Menil and opened in February 1997, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel is a repository for the only two thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes in the entire western hemisphere."
After seeing these two chapels and visiting the
Chapel of St. Basil on the campus of University of St. Thomas (Houston), AYT is profoundly moved and profoundly saddened. These are beautiful, hopeful spaces insofar as they exemplify the resources we may draw upon for making beautiful churches. The aesthetic matters but these days is too often ignored in the spirit of functionality.
Before leaving Houston, AYT has one more important stop,
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The event attended is for the closing of a special exhibit celebrating the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in NYC, and then as an important and successful avant-garde artist in the international art scene of the 1980s.
Here, Basquiat's "Per Capita" shows a black boxer carrying a (Olympic?) torch wearing Everlast shorts while phrases like 'Per Capita' and 'E Pluribus' haunt the painting and economic disparity is displayed by the numbers at left.
The event is DJed by none other than hip-hop artist and DJ legend
Grand Master Flash, one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing, cutting, and mixing:
To be continued in part two where AYT returns to the nation's capital and reflects on the absurdity of war with a much needed reminder from Dada, that artistic "protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society." [1]==========[1] Wikipedia contributors, "Dada," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dada&oldid=44541020 (accessed March 21, 2006).
