Good post, aimai. I've enjoyed many a transcendent moment in stuffy old museums. (And gotten some good photos there lately too!)
As for moko, Queequeg had (has?) great moko. Representing, I think, his and all of our inscrutable meaning.
I haven't been to the Peabody Museum in 30 years. I remember it being cool then, though.
I went through an origami phase when I was a kid; I found it completely fascinating. Being a complete klutz, I was never any good at it...but I loved the thought of replicating real-world objects or beings in folded paper.
Being an enthusiast of tattooing, I've read a great deal about moko and Maori culture.
One of the reasons I got my sleeve (my first big, publically-viewable tattoo) was to out myself as a member of an alternative culture; I "pass" pretty good. I look a lot like a suburban mom who lives in a condo (because I am). So it became meaningful to me to have something about me that showed all the time, whether I felt like it or not. To represent, just as the Maori do.
Tattooing is a spiritual transformation in many cultures (probably most) and one of the tattooists who works on me has arranged his life so that his tattoo work is exclusively spiritual; no walk-in Yosemite Sams for him!
ahab,
yes, I was talking to the girls about Queequeg and the mystery of his tatoos and the body as book.
Tom,
Its not the peabody museum in Cambridge, which is indeed musty and old, but the Peabody Essex up in Salem, which is old but new with an incredible modern addition and this other remarkable exhibit--an entire three hundred year old chinese merchant house dropped down inside/outside the museum.
Deborah,
the whole exhibit made me think about choosing the representation of ourselves that we project onto the world instead of accepting the one the world thrusts on us. I've been toying with the idea of showing up at the Sadly, No! drinking party next week but I'm not sure I want to "come as I am". I prefer the anonymity of the internet because of the way les femme d'un certain age are pigeonholed by society.
aimai
aimai
aimai: Wow. I usually like what you have to say (as I see you in the various places we inhabit together in the strange world of the internets), but this blew the doors off.
It was stunning, which is why I don't have anything coherent to say.
(Hey, got here through Making Light)
Re: the moko - yeah, that's some fascinating stuff. As a New Zealander I can just affirm that the Maori cultural renaissance over the last couple decades has wrought some pretty profound changes on our society. The facial moko, in particular, is a massively important symbol because of its visibility and unavoidably confrontational nature. As a pakeha (non-Maori), when I'm interacting with a Maori who has facial moko, it cannot fail to introduce a cultural context - maybe one that is always there anyway for Maori, but which as a pakeha I have been historically privileged to ignore.
The origami stuff I've seen on the web in the last couple years blows my mind, too. I can't even do the paper crane right...
This is a gorgeous post. I can't quite make sense of my thoughts about the vectors and intersections of art, the political, the personal, the importance of any and all venues for self-expression, and access and equity. I'm thinking about my own high school students in the Bronx who see "art," at least when it's made by others, as something elitist and far away from them. With small children, no matter who they are or where they come from, it's much easier to take them to the museum, since they assume it all belongs to them anyway. They come home or come back to school and start to draw and paint. With older ones, especially disenfranchised kids, they've become alienated from anything that doesn't resemble their direct experience, whether it's literary, visual, auditory. Of course they are able to connect, it just takes a lot of work and breaking down of artificial barriers that the little ones haven't yet constructed.
Both of the exhibits you're writing about sound as if they would be quite perfect for alienated adolescents.
Hey Julie, cool to "see" you here. Yeah, I think the Maori/Moko exhibit really speaks to alienation on a number of levels. I think you could probably see a lot of the same issues, minus the overt political and historical symbolism, with body builders and anorexics and even cutters. One of the things that is so moving in the Maori exhibit, but which it is too taciturn to really adress, is the recaptured role of the "elders" and the clear movement of the elders, both male and female, to recapture a lost duty to juniors through the imposition of an artificial respect relationship. Some of the guys in the images were clearly lost boys, in a very real sense (one of them had been forcibly taken away from his family as a youth, in one of those classic anti aboriginal/anti gypsy human services moves. He had come to tattooing as a gang thing but later used it to rediscover a respect and a solidarity with his ancestors (imaginary and real) and, to my mind, had come to forgive them for failing to protect him as a child.
anyway,thanks for reading the post. I'm still thinking it over myself.
aimai
thank you. it is a great post.
thank you again
love you
aimai, have you ever read Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize lecture? It starts out as a typical gnomic cautionary tale, but then begins to speak to that place that you mention of youth forgiving elders for failing to give them what they needed, whether because of their own oppression or for other reasons?
I tried to put in the html code to link to the Toni Morrison lecture, which is online, but for some reason it didn't work, and left nothing except a question mark at the end of that last comment. Sorry -- here's the URL, though -- I'll see if this works:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_priz...on-
lecture.html
Julie,
thanks for posting that. I'm printing it out to read. I loved "playing in the dark" which, if I recall, had fantastic things to say about Melville and Moby dick. http://www.amazon.com/Playing-Da.../
0679745424Toni morrison has been on my mind for a long time since then.
aimai
Commenting by HaloScan
