Art Time

I'm really pleased to say I finally got this one crossed off of our list! Portland Art Museum has, once per month, Baby Hour where you get to go around the museum with a docent who explains things and no one can complain about your fussy little one. However, compared to a lot of the stuff  we do (free) it ain't cheap ($15) so I wanted to have a reason to go there.

Enter Cyclopedia. It's an exhibit featuring all sorts of crazy bike designs. My favorite: A bicycle from Finland with a studded back tire and a skate in place of the front tire. It never caught on due to numerous injury lawsuits, but who hasn't dreamed up something like that? I'm pretty sure I've seen something like that in a Dr. Seuss book, but there it is in metal and rubber reality hanging right in front of you when you go!

However, while our ticket would allow us to go to Cyclopedia, we had to first experience the more traditional art of Gaston Lachaise. Let me just say that Portland really let me down on this one after dissing on Beaverton last week! About 30 adults went on the tour, all female. In my group of about 15 adults and 15 babies, the only Y chromosomes there were me and one baby boy. What's disappointing is there actually was one other dad there at the beginning when we all were at the entrance, but he buggered off somewhere before the tour even started leaving the kid with the grandmother!

Anyhow, Gaston Lachaise. Like many artists, he was a very weird man who died before he experienced any real success.  He graduated art school, became obsessed with a slightly dumpy shaped American woman who was 10 years older than him that he labelled his muse, married her, and almost exclusively sculpted just her. This by itself was pretty cool because she was an authentic female form rather than a female "model". Sure, he made her more powerful in the sculptures, but he didn't slim her down in order to achieve this.

From a psychological point of view, though, he is fascinating. A lot of his sculptures of he and his wife together have poorly defined lines between them (eg: when they kiss, their faces become one), when he was apart from her he sculpted her constantly, and towards the end of his life he got really weird and only sculpted body parts of her (seriously, there's some weird ones featuring just her breasts and vagina only). From my point of view it screams of a man who has lost his own sense of self, defined himself through her, and struggled with this as he got older and realized that other people cannot be the container for your sense of self without losing your sense of them.

After the tour, we hung out in the discovery room and let the babies play. It's always interesting to see the developmental variance! One kid only a few weeks older than Cleo was crawling around while a kid months older was smaller and struggling to sit. These things will all smooth out over the next few years but it's so interesting seeing how each kid has a peak and a valley in terms of development. And yet, some things remain consistent as my little girl continued to be the observer of things. As every child made a mad grab for the toys, she was initially content to watch and figure things out for some time before entering the fray herself.

Afterwards, dad finally got to see the bicycles for a bit before the overstimulated baby was taken home. I'm still not sure what Cleo actually thought of the whole experience, but if nothing else, we both earned our nap that day!