sketchI hooked up with an artist from South Africa a while ago. She introduced me to J. M. Coetzee and lent me a copy of Waiting for the Barbarians. I read that about a week ago & just finished The Master of Petersburg. I started Disgrace today.
Wednesday I caught a ride to Milwaukee to see the Francis Bacon exhibit. I saw an image of the "Owls" painting for the first time. I didn't know he even had images of owls. I was excited.
My friends and I walked the museum, the nicest museum space I've been in, really, skirting this trail of ancient women with rubber stoppers on their walkers that screamed in a staccato pattern when the ladies strained to shove them forward to take a step. They were always on top of us, somehow. Slow, but right there in step. I wondered if they were proving something to us, to themselves.
A year or so ago I went to see the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute. Each packed corridor led to rooms swarming with mute watchers with their headsets on gathering in swarms around the paintings apparently indicated as stopping-and-listening points by the museum's headset tour. The cumulative effect of the hundreds of headsets produced a soft uniform murmur. No one spoke to each other. No one seemed to notice what I heard except my friends, who were like me, headset-less. A guy somehow arrived at each piece of art within a few feet of us no matter how long we dallied or how briefly we glanced at it, the guy with a mechanism set in his neck that I think was a phlegm percolator. We split up, but he seemed to be everywhere.
I drew this earlier.
