Our mission? To find a painting with an animal, 5 extra points given for specific animals. After glancing over the list, I knew exactly what I wanted.
I was on a Quest for the Dragon. Wandering through the Renaissance and Early European paintings, I found none with a fire-breathing mythical beast. Undeterred, I continued my search into the Modern Art section. I'd been in these rooms before, but they never cease to intrigue me; some are so utterly questionable, others just amazing, and some I will never pretend to understand. I passed some awesome pieces, but none with dragons. In fact, modern art didn't deal much with animals at all... I was beginning to miss the oil paintings from earlier... but not really. I love the mixed media pieces in Modern art. I like the idea of taking things like ashes and charcoal and making a work of art with it.
Finally, something animalistic caught my eye. A giant metal hoop with an unraveling wire grid on one side and an explosion of glossy black feathers on the other was sticking out of the wall, just like that. Intrigued, I edged closer, circling the piece in fascination. It just seemed so bold and... adamant. But it was definitely not a dragon.
"You're just not going to do the assignment, huh?" She asked with a smile. "Just doing your own thing, looking at art?"
"Nope, this IS the assignment!" I laughed in response. "I'm searching for the Dragon!"
"Excuse me," the curator, a young and friendly blonde man, came to ask, "but did you say you're looking for a dragon?"
Hallelujah! I thought. I was finally about to get some help! But no. Apparently there were no dragons currently on exhibit, as far as he knew. I wasn't about to waste time on an impossible search for a nonexistent object when I had a perfectly wonderful candidate in front of me.
I was looking at Single Bound (2000) by Terry Adkins, artist and musician. I sat right down, gazed up at the piece, and started writing.
The metal came from scraps of Fineseilver uniform manufacturing warehouse in San Antonio, and the feathers are rooster feathers acquired from a feather company. Adkins created the piece to tell the story of working people and blues troubadours who have been unjustly treated throughout history. Within the hoop, there is a huge section to the right of a nearly perfect grid, and a line of unraveling wire. The grid is barely attached to the metal hoops, and to the left of the seam, the wiring is seriously coming apart. The left side is composed of an explosion of glossy, lustrous black rooster feathers. This riot has some sort of order with 3 or 4 distinct columns and feathers going in somewhat the same direction, but against the wire, it's wild and beautiful.
Art takes on a new meaning with every viewer's interpretation of it. In this piece, I see a symbol of humanity's attempt to assert order and control over nature and God's way of things. In the juxtaposition of order and disorder, of ugliness and beauty, of mass and void, the extremes of these concepts are highlighted. Like the feathers bursting free of every dimension, the wild side of the human heart and passion cannot be constrained by rational, intellectual reasoning. We have much to learn from nature and from animals.
Of course, while taking notes, it was only inevitable that I'd drift off and start drawing instead...
That was when I heard the tour guide telling the UGS class beside me, "*mumbling*constellation*mumbling*dragon*mumbling*." I only caught the part about dragons and constellations and the fact that she was talking about the art RIGHT BESIDE ME!
Could this be true? Could I have been sitting beside my dragon the entire time and not have even known it?
Yes, indeed it could. Thank you Fate. I verified it with a different museum curator, and gleefully skipped back to take some notes of Sternenfall [Falling Stars] (1998) by Anselm Kiefer of Germany.
This installation is GIGANTIC. It was almost floor to ceiling, and the dragon is actually a constellation of Draco. The triangle at the bottom right is his head, and the long serpentine line is the curve of his back. Kiefer created this as a response to World War II, and it represents the chaos and evil of that time period with its rugged and overwhelming quality. The strings of numbers on slips of paper that make up some of the stars and constellations and slips that litter the bottom of the piece (because they have literally fallen off the canvas) could represent the victims of the Holocaust. THey and the other casualties of the war are beings that have simply fallen off the planet. The entire piece is intense and overwhelming, much like German history as well as human suffering in general.
But there ya go. Art is emotion.
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