My Mother the Car Bomb - haberarts.com in New.York: John Haber's ...

Finishing up the semester and finals? It may help to remember that life imitates art. And now life imitates writing about art. No, make that teaching about art based on writing about an entirely fictional performance piece about speaking about art. All based, you see, on real writing and speaking about art.

Before I get to the details and explain, I admit to a personal stake in this, as it concerns an audience for my writing about art. Last month, I heard from the education and tour manager for an upstate museum. The Burchfield Penney Art Center, a name new to me, is on the campus of Buffalo State College. It has, for a while, been using something of mine for docent training (with due credit) and finally asked for permission to continue. I was delighted. I feel like an authority on arts education already.

Only one thing: my docent exercises were meant as a joke. The center was using ?Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Docent,? which I called ?a work for performance in thirteen parts, never to be enacted?but always possible. Perhaps in rehearsal this very moment, to take you by surprise at that very next encounter with art.? My performers would pose alternatively as a tour group and its leader, without informing the museum. Each of the thirteen skits parodies what actual docents do.

In fact, they parody what one docent actually did to me. I had treated myself to that wish of a lifetime?a trip to Houston, its museum, the Rothko Chapel, and the Menil Foundation. The quiet of the last two was truly special, although I hear that tour groups, mostly from abroad, have since turned the Rothko Chapel into a crowd scene. Mark Rothko did not have that in mind. As for the Menil Foundation, I shared it with almost no one except for a docent tour, and we crossed paths only once. And I blew it.

I had successfully avoided them until I came to a Picasso woman, one of those colorful works that still has people arguing about Pablo Picasso, his loves, and a male willingness to take advantage of them. The docent turned not to a member of her tour, but to me, for her group?s pleasure at what some dumb stranger would say. How would I feel, she asked, if this were my mother? Oh, I suppose she would deserve worse, but I stammered something innocuous about what I thought was a fine, inoffensive portrait. At any rate, I fell back on saying so. A few months later, nursing what I wished I had been clever enough to say, I riffed on it (and in my version ?the audience member responds with a long, distraught confessional about his mother?).

I wish I could say that I had created a profound piece of conceptual art or institutional critique. (Whether conceptual art should be realized, or ?materialized,? is actually a fun question.) Mostly, though, I was just having fun and hoping to entertain you, so give it a look. Maybe it is teaching New York State right now to love Picasso. Thankfully, too, the educator did understand that I was trying to be funny, a New Yorker?s prejudices about arts education and upstaters notwithstanding. She said it works all the same?or even because of that.

With luck, it gets me a bit more exposure. And with luck it is helping to expose more students and more of the community to serious art. That is the goal of all my writing and this site. I went online in the first place to extend the boundaries of reviews, from puff pieces and snap judgments, to allow for just that, and it has grown to hundreds of pages about thousands of artists. See, here I go on and on and on even when the subject is humor. Once again, my sorry life imitates art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article (and a funny one, honest) on this site.

Source: http://www.haberarts.com/2012/11/my-mother-the-car-bomb/

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