alien drifter

Yesterday it was cold and rained all day. So I went to the Robert Lazzarini exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. I thought I was ready for this. There are pictures of the phone booth plastered all over town as well as in the newspapers. I thought that when I saw the skewed booth in person it would be disappointing, but it wasn't. When I came into the room I thought for a second that the ground had tipped. I know that seems cliche but that's what happened. The way the exhibit is set up you have to kind of curve around into the room and then it's right in front of you. Everything is white -- the floor, the walls, the ceiling, so you lose your sense of perspective. It's like being on the deck of a ship at sea. I guess if you've never been at sea you might not have that same experience. I could also compare it to being in a plane and watching the sky tip when the plane banks. It's a lot more sudden than that, though.

It's really weird to be close up to something that looks like it's been squished in a wet magazine. I did have a moment where I thought how easy it would be to make these images on the computer. That's what Goo is for. But these were real things, not pictures of them. It was like looking through crack in space and seeing another dimension. It made me wonder how I look to those in a different space-time. Maybe I look all stretched like that.

The guns were unbelievable. I had to go back to the sign on the wall and read the description, and, yep, sure enough, they really are made out of steel and wood. I just can't fathom how someone could make something so crooked but so right.

The skulls evoked a different sensation. They look more like crafted pieces; probably because warped skulls crumble. These had to be fabricated. It was still weird, though. I was impressed by the teeth. They were hand painted and looked just like teeth.

What strikes me is here's a guy spending a lot of time making these detailed, structurally correct skewed items and making them perfectly real. In the real world we have real people making things unskewed but not perfectly. It's sort of like a commentary on the quality of work these days or on the amount of effort people put into comprehending the whole. Whatever else the artist might be trying to achieve, he definitely changes the viewer's perspective.

After that experience, I took a walk through the Dutch and Flemish art to reorient myself. Whew!