4.08.2025

I did a terrible job of recording artists' names and titles on my museum visit. And I don't have permission to post anything from their press gallery so you're stuck with my wandering verbal descriptions.

Close up photo of a man by a Chinese artist – himself, I think – naked and covered in flies and excrement and dirt. He smeared himself with oils and honey and took up residency in an outhouse for several days. This would just be an interesting stunt like that woman sucking her own toes on a three hour loop at the MCA in Chicago but the outhouse is apparently in the shadow of a brand new gleaming skyscraper for wealthy tenants in Beijing. Take that ya Communist hypocrites.

Iron sculpture, kinda angular with spikes sticking out of it. Reminds me of Joan Miro and I’m thinking he stole his whole style from an ancient tribe. Then I go back later and read the placard (Fr: placard) and it’s from another Spanish guy who was a contemporary of Miro’s so maybe he ripped him off in his own way and the chain of theft goes back to a cave in Lascaux where paleolithic folk painted animals in 2D and alien gods with light shining from their heads. 

Animation by a local artist, history of Africans in the Americas. Don’t know the word for the genre but it’s in a washy transitional style I associate with studio tags before feature films or old PBS bits and the way it rolls from slave ships to plantations to the Underground Railroad to MLK to a kid sitting at a kitchen table with his grandma is hypnotic and next to me a toddler really wants to watch because it's a cartoon so his mom crouches down and gives him a whispered voiceover and he goes still like he understands and for the first time in a while I think we're maybe not yet dead.