On the third of July, eschewing rockets glaring red, I went to the last day of the Chinese porcelain exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was a fine bunch of images to get anchored between the ears, a collection documenting the continuous development of a multi-layered art form over more than a hundred years of imperial patronage.
We have been trained to love novelty and breaks with the past and new beginnings, and the Fourth of July celebration is part of that training: we rejoice that our collective history goes back only 200 years. It is helpful to be reminded of the fruits of continuous development: eggplant blue, and a public that could appreciate it, because they knew how hard it was to achieve that color in a kiln; a temple vessel that is also a living body. And, along the way, a consciousness of chemical elements as vibrant, particular colors.
Next door to the porcelain exhibit was another, about steamboats on the Mississippi and the economic development of the Mississippi. The porcelain involved was not nearly as good -- cluttered pictures with obligatory eagles. But what was striking was the steamboat, the country it opened up, and how incredibly quickly both were superceded. There's one picture of a river city with many steamboats on the water -- and a lone train chugging along on the bank, the scout for the next technical revolution.
We are being taught to leave thngs behind before we have even begun to understand them. And so much of the substance of formal education, echoing the public culture, is: how to leave things behind, how to move on.
Posted by shea0017 at July 5, 2004 11:11 AM