Aesthetics

Aesthetics “Here we contemplate the art which so much love adorns, and we discern the good by reason of which the world below again becomes the world above.” Paradiso IX 106-8

The museum stood out from the rest of the city because it seemed to be made entirely of concrete and devoid of any color. The walls were smooth, tall and a deep authoritarian grey. There were two entrances. The one across from the city park led through a sculpture garden with a reflecting pool that mimicked the movements of the sky above like a shattered mirror or a warped figure staring out of a car window, inverting the world into a fluidic existence. There were statues of Roman emperors and French kings dispersed between contemporary structures with edges that jutted in each direction standing seemingly unbalanced. Small picnic tables speckled the garden and a large concrete bench laid in front of a man-made waterfall that gave the garden a sound of lethargically falling water. A young man in a red cardigan sat and scribbled notes on his yellow sketch pad with droplets clouding his glasses. At the other entrance, which faced the main road, stood two large monoliths that were brown and rigid, framing a colorful mural that ushered cars into the parking deck. Two large revolving doors guarded the atrium, which was immense and epic. The ceiling was an array of inverted domes topped with bulbous frosted glass misdirecting the light to shine in small beams that reached for the floor like long fingers. Each small movement echoed through the atrium like the basilica of a cathedral, bouncing off the 1

frosted white walls up to the ceiling and down against the marble tiled floor. In the direct middle of the atrium there was a white desk, where man sorted through papers and sharpened pencils. She always wore ballet slippers that were black with pink laces that made a slight sound like shuffled gravel as she walked into the enormous atrium. She was delicate but strong, which showed through her stance as she scanned the entrance way, starting at the ceiling then moving to the walls, the steps, and ending at the desk where a man, a little older then herself, was stapling papers, paying no attention to her. She stepped up to the desk and leaned against it with one elbow. “So I have this pass, but I got it a long time ago,” she said as she picked through her pockets until she found the tiny fuchsia card in the back of her jeans. “Do you think it’s still good?” The words fell out of her mouth slowly and sounded like a whisper as they crawled across the room. The clerk didn’t look up at first but stapled five or six more documents together while her gaze reached for the steps behind him. “May I see your card?” he asked as the tapping of the documents bounced off the walls, and down the hall into the gallery. “Well Eloise, that’s a pretty name, you only have a week on this pass.” He looked up at her with a forced smile that crinkled the crow’s feet at the edge of his eyes and framed the cigarette stains on his teeth. “If you’d like to renew your pass, you can go online and pay--“ Maybe she was being pulled by something unseen or she forgot he was there, but when he began speaking she was already heading down the hall. Eloise Lane always wore black ballet slippers with pink laces because Eloise was a dancer. She had always glided with grace and with such confidence that she could make a celibate Franciscan

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monk swoon for her. Although recently it seemed that grace had left her or she had lost it. There were so many ways to say it. When she turned the corner she came upon a single room that looked out on to the reflection pool through a single wall of flawless glass. The wall stretched across the span of the room from the floor to the ceiling, and Eloise could see through the garden gates to the park, where a group of children were in their Sunday best, playing tag. Waves of reflected light flickered across the surrounding grey walls like candlelight. She stepped in slowly and sat down on the marble bench facing the garden. The pool stretched out to a wall that was topped with overhanging skeletal branches from the trees outside. It was frosted over with reflection of fading dense clouds that crept across the sky above. Only remnants of sunlight broke through the clouds, illuminating the day from an uncertain source. A slight wind disturbed the trees and tiny leaves lifted, fell and rippled the water. The clouds began to move rhythmically. As Eloise tucked her legs Indian style, the young man came through the other side of the room. He had thick rimmed glasses that were surrounded by well kempt long hair. He had an air about him that was as heavy as words and carried himself with the strong posture of holding copious amounts of books. Another college boy with a cardigan she thought as she saw his transparent figure on the glass wall. Eloise hadn’t gone to college but instead had run off on a mission trip to the remote reaches of the Peruvian Andes. She spent two years witnessing to indigenous tribes and poverty stricken farmers. When she came back she viewed all her old friends in a different manner holding themselves with a certain ego that she grew to disdain. As a result, Eloise became a loner and as a result took up dancing. She would push her furniture out of the living room of her one

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bedroom apartment and leap, sway, slide across the hard wood floor but she always grew tired, fragile, and then slept. Light swept across her face as he walked up to the bench and said, “I like your shoes.” She looked up briefly at the rims of his glasses. “Thank you” she said and her gaze returned across the pool to the game of tag that was quickly winding down as only two children were still chasing each other in the park. “Are you a dancer?” he asked as he sat down next to her on the bench. She didn’t respond but only nodded slightly giving him the notion that she was and that she didn’t want to continue the conversation any further. He leaned back on his hands and let his head fall back and let out a sigh. “The architecture of this place is really interesting.” He stopped for a beat and swung his head forward. “I think it’s called organic architecture. You see the way the water just goes up to the wall? That’s a perfect example.” Eloise didn’t respond and when he looked over to see her reaction she had already stood up and was halfway up the stairs. ***** When Eloise went on her mission trip she found herself in prayer, but when she came back she didn’t. The part of herself where she kept her prayer was now filled with the guilt of doing something silly, like walking in on a moment between lovers or telling a joke wrong. Every step she took seemed to be off- kilter and unbalanced and like the sculptors in the garden, she didn’t know how she could stand. The disorienting highways, lights, and brick buildings only seemed to imprison her compared to what she found in the mountains. What she had been desperately trying to imitate in her living room.

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***** When she reached the top of the steps she came upon a sign that read: Yves Kline in Retrospect May 15th – December 18th “Color is sensitivity materialized” was written in quotes above the entrance way. She stepped in and saw a large white room that was separated into quarters by impartial walls. The walls didn’t reach the ceiling which was crafting a soft light throughout the gallery, and stopped in the middle at what seemed like sandbox full of coarse blue pigment. The sandbox was shadowed by a large blank canvas that stood on its own and shared the same blinding void as the surrounding walls. She hesitated a right but veered left, suddenly stumbled four steps, and found herself surrounded by tiny panels, the size of her pass card, that were solid in color. She walked across the wall looking at these tiny blocks of vermillion, mustard yellow, turquoise, then a deep monochromatic blue and every shade between ending again at the gigantic canvas in the middle of the room. ***** The canvas reminded Eloise of the mural she saw in the mountains. Her guide told her that there were ancient ruins on the other side of the ridge of the mountain village where she was staying. He said it was once a great place of worship for his people and compared the power of these ruins to that of her prayer. He said it belonged to a civilization of shamans called the Chavín ***** She rounded the wall and continued following it in a slow trance-like walk. Each step was taken delicately from toe to heel while she examined the framed photos. A large

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canvas hung before her and required her to step back to view it completely. It was erratic with shadows of female figures seemingly leaping around the canvas. With arms wide and legs in action the figures swayed, glided across the canvas with charred outlines. Their forms were distinct and she couldn’t help but think about her naked living room. “I long to be freed from I know not what horrible cage.” Eloise blinked and saw that the college boy from before was sitting on a bench that rested before the painting. “Excuse me?” she said still trying to gather her senses. He beckoned for her to sit down on the bench next to him and she followed. She sat down and brought her legs in an Indian position but never took her eyes off the canvas. “Van Gogh said it. The cage bit. That was Van Gogh.” He looked at her briefly and wrote a few words down on a yellow sketch pad in his lap. “I was just doing some research when you came in. My name is Peter. Nice to meet you.” He presented his hand and she shook it and kept looking. This left a lull in the conversation so deep that his greeting seemed to have been dropped into the aqueous blue of a quarry, but the echo of the splash brought him to say, “Do you like this painting?” “Yeah,” she responded. “How do you like Yves Kline? He’s pretty strange.” he fell back onto his hands again, and his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. I’m not really that into art.” He pushed his glasses up and slid himself to a more refined posture. “That’s right, you’re a dancer. I really like art. I’m actually working on my masters in Art History right now.” He sucked in his chest and peered over at her again to see her reaction but she just kept staring lifelessly at the canvas. “Kline was an interesting guy, kind of like

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Pollack, but a little more intense and less of a drunk.” Eloise blinked and imagined this Pollack as some prophetic artist screaming his heart out on the edge of a mountain with whisky on his breath. She began to say something but it seemed that Peter was starting to talk to only himself. “Although, Pollack never called himself, ‘The Initiate’ like Kline did, so who’s to say who’s crazier.” He wrote a few bulleted thoughts onto the sketch pad again. “I was a dancer” she responded simply. She pointed at the painting in front of them and asked quietly, “What do you see in this?” He paused for a second and sorted through his memory like a card catalogue, flipping frantically to K for Kline, Yves under the Art History section of his mind. Then he prepared his best lecture voice by clearing his throat and said, “Well, Kline was all about color. He wanted to show the true power of color. So he painted this, because in his mind it was suppose to invoke something within the viewer.” He stopped for a second to see if she was listening and then adjusted his glasses slightly and continued, “He was a pretty strange guy who read a lot of esoteric Christian philosophy, so that shows throughout his work. He pretty much thought he was a prophet of the end of a ‘solid’ existence and that soon our world would ‘transcend beyond matter.’” Peter said the last part in a mocking tone and laughed as he held up his hands making the sign for quotations. “I just read something about how he believed that lines and figures just imprisoned the form of the painting, the very essence… or something. It wasn’t really that interesting,” he paused and then leaned back again on his hands. “He was heavily influenced by the Dadaist too and unless you have some time, I don’t think we should get into that.”

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She had begun to lose interest when she felt like she was getting lectured. She began to stretch back behind her until she was upside down with her hands touching the floor, exposing a thin line of skin above her jeans. Peter glanced quickly until she reared up again. Her toes began to itch. She began to stroke the lobe of her ear when he asked, “What do you see?” She didn’t respond but sat quietly. He sat there for a moment waiting, until he began to follow her eyes back towards the painting before him. Peter crossed his legs like hers and began to quietly stare into the painting. Something he realized he hadn’t done in a long time. Eloise left Peter at the bench and began a twirl but only stumbled and found herself walking into the third quarter of the room. Form? she thought. A caged essence? ***** The guide had told her that the trail to the ruins was hidden and only marked by an assortment of flowers that hung from the lower branches of the jungle. He said following the flowers was part of his journey. “Since you shared your journey with me, I will share mine with you,” he said while packing his knapsack with the supplies he needed for a day’s hike. A pilgrimage, Eloise thought as they hiked through the underbrush. He would stop every so often and gaze into the green thick vines, leaves, trunks, and ferns until he spotted a flower blazing in color. He told her about the Chavín and how thousands of years ago they built an empire without any war. He told her how they were a civilization of spirituality and found an order in the chaotic jungle. “They were bigger then Rome and much more forgiving,” he said. As they ascended the

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mountain, the petals changed from a deep red to bright yellow and finally she saw an electric blue flower that hung gingerly in front of a clearing in the brush. ***** The walls were almost bare except for a few black and white photographs and plaques that were titled in stanch bold letters: “Art”, “Vision”, “Nouveau Realisme” and “A Leap into the Void.” She followed the wall as she did before but without the same delicate steps. Her steps were firm and she let out a sigh as she brushed over what was written on the plaques, only absorbing every few lines. “I felt imprisoned and I believe it is because of that same feeling of imprisonment that van Gogh exclaimed…” “…had waited for something to become stable within me before I could reveal or verify what it was.” “… discovered in the Basilica of Francis of Assisi’s frescoes which are scrupulously monochromatic, uniform and blue…” “…has no dimensions it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colors are not…” “I have little by little become acquainted with the Immaterial.” She stopped briefly in front of a single black and white photograph that was about the size of single sheet of notebook paper, but framed in black and hanging alone in the center of the wall. A small caption next to the photograph read: Leap into the Void, near Paris, October 23, 1960. The photograph was simple and only had two occupants within the frame. Eloise didn’t believe it was in Paris because the photograph didn’t have a cafe with the Eiffel tower behind it or the Place de l'Étoile but just a simple side street. The street stopped at an intersection with a single man on a bike deciding between taking a

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left or a right. In the foreground there was a man in midair with his toes only slightly touching the edge of a building, paralleling himself with street below. His arms were spread wide open as if to catch a thermal and soar out of the frame, into the gallery, brushing the ceiling’s domed lights. The falling man’s face was tranquil as if experience had taught him that he would inevitably hit the ground below, but for now he was flying. ***** The guide had plucked the blue flower and arranged it so that it lay comfortably through Eloise’s hair and behind her ear. He looked up to take note of the position of the setting sun. “It’s beginning to get dark. I’m going to make a torch so we can see the ruins, and then we’ll camp here tonight.” She nodded and he went back into the brush. Eloise sat at dusk in the clearing and looked across the green rolling mounds that made up the Andes. She heard unnatural, strange calls that traveled from the canopy below up to the fiery red clouds above. The sunlight speckled the clearing briefly in flashes as it dissipated over the horizon. She began to get scared and mutter to herself until she saw a flash of red and a rush of light coalesce from the guide’s hand. “This way.” he said beckoning her with the torch. The sun had left the sky and it was entirely night when she saw the gigantic stone wall tower above her. It was grey and spotted with brown and red that washed over a mural of weathered figures; the wall was covered in a myriad of humans convening with large animals and strange creatures. At first she couldn’t see any reasoning behind the arrangement of the figures, because it just seemed like they were placed absently on the wall without any purpose. The light from the torch flickered and sputtered across the wall giving the figures depth, shadow and movement. The figures seemed awakened and began to move rhythmically with the

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fluttering of the light. Then Eloise decided that her prayer was not enough; it failed to reach the depths of what she needed. ***** Eloise stepped into the fourth quarter of the room and stood silently with her hands hanging by her side, gazing into the single large painting that hung in the middle of the wall. The painting was simple. It was only a deep piercing blue from edge to edge with the same coarse texture of the pigment in the sandbox. It had no lines, figures or human faces, but was monochromatic, simple and elegant. For a moment, Eloise couldn’t move but stared into the painting until she honed down where inside of her it was affecting. She thought of the mural and the flickering light on the figures, she thought of dancing and she thought of the tranquil face on the flying man. The imprisoned feeling, the silly guilt was lifted and she felt limber, flexible and excited and more importantly Eloise felt graceful. She stared motionless while the filter light from the ceiling grew dimmer and the gallery lights came on, washing out the shadow of the pigments on the canvas. She didn’t seem to notice; she just sat and looked as if her mind was elsewhere. The clearing of a mountain, the city park, the naked living room, somewhere else. Outside in the garden, the reflection pool was a filled with a deep, undisturbed darkness. The stars flickered and the moon shone above but the pool was a flawless void that seemed to leap through the earth.

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