Road Trip with Art

By the time my daughter and I became log-jammed in two hours of traffic south of D.C., we’d had a chance to visit the Hirshhorn Museum and we were still high on having our minds boggled.  I was pondering the two great elephants in the gray room, and the way I was irresistibly drawn to walk between Gordon’s screens, uneasily safe while the beasts were captive, with their natural beauty trapped in a barren, dizzying world.  I liked how Samaras’s book made of needles looked both soft and prickly, the way a real book can both lure me in and prove dangerous.

At the Hirshhorn

I liked how I would still be discovering new things about Jan Dibbets’s “The Shortest Day of the Year” much later when I was explaining for my sister the long installation of sequential photographs, each taken of the same window view six minutes apart.  It’s about time, and light, and the spectator is part of the art because you have to move along it to experience it, so time and space are married there, pace after pace.  It changes you.  I love stuff like that.

On the road, I like how memories expand like fog within the car.  I like eating cold red grapes while I drive, picking them from their stems by feel.  When it’s my turn to be the passenger, I like how I can write on my computer, glance up, and see green trees whizzing by, mile after mile.  There, too, time and miles add up to the same thing, like an old math problem come alive, like an art piece.  I check the estimated arrival time on Garvin to see it adjust for every pit stop or slow toll when we’re accidentally not in the EZ-Pass lane.  I like how it doesn’t really matter whether we’ll arrive at 9:07 or 11:02.  The point is, we’ll arrive, and even better, along the road we’ve been happy.  More than happy.