MUSEUM GIRLIE

Artist's Date #47: Ruth Asawa at SFMOMA

This weekend I met a new friend who said, right off the bat, that she was not a museum girlie. She stretched out on the beach blanket when she told me. Her body was long and slender. She wore an animal print bathing suit: two pieces. I ventured on. “But have you seen the Ruth Asawa exhibit at the SFMOMA?”

I think she might have started to yawn. This ought to have been a sign that she really was not interested, but I continued. I put on an internal timer for three minutes or less to share with her what it was that I had found so moving about the recent show.

“The exhibit begins,” I said, “with the sculptures that she’s well known for.” At least they were the ones I knew her best for - the rounded wire pieces that hang from the ceiling. They are delicate and make cool shadows, and there’s a collection of them at the back of the De Young.

“There was another room set up with a lounge area in front of a big photo of Ruth Asawa’s living room, which famously doubled as her studio. In the photo, you see elements of her home: her table, her dog, her children, all mixed up with her art.”

I could see she was still with me.

“In the same room where you’re lounging, there are sculptures of hers hanging above you, and so you’re kind of put in the same casual environment in which they might have originally been made and enjoyed. I thought this was cool and also that it was the end of the exhibit. But when I left the room I saw it was only the halfway point.

After that point, the work became so different, in my mind more refined, more articulated, more detailed, and sophisticated. It was almost as if – and I tried to put this into words on the spot before I had tried writing about it, which is almost always a mistake – the artwork had eaten her. Like some essence of her had been consumed by her art. Like she had really, after so many years, put her full self into it.”

I think I went on to say something about how amazing it is to see retrospectives of women artists, since we know so little about the long histories of their careers, since they have only now been finally recognized as having them to begin with.

Now she definitely yawned.

Or at the very least, she changed her position, checked her phone, and said, “I love that for you.”

At that point, Olive came back to the blanket, accompanied by her friend and my friend, who had taken them both to the bathroom. The three adult women sat together on the beach, me curled up in my dress, still a bit traumatized from a recent sunburn in Hawaii.

The girls sat down by our feet, offering to give us tattoos with charcoal wood they had found on the beach.

“Ha,” I said, “this is my teenage goth dream come true. The girls have set up their own tattoo stand, instead of a lemonade stand.”

“Were you a goth teenager?” my new friend asked, and I said that I wasn’t and then we moved on to another topic.

If I had had more time to explain I would have said that it was a sensibility more than an aesthetic and one I hadn’t thought deeply about until I had a daughter. Then, it seemed, that my whole parenting vibe came from somewhere different, somewhere deep dark and rebellious which had put me a bit at odds with the other moms I knew well.

After my new friend left I asked my old friend how she liked the same show.

She said she loved it as well however she found the later works to be not as beautiful. For her, it was the round orb-like sculptures that resonated more. She especially liked the way some circles fit into the other. She said, almost apologetically, that the later works seemed a bit barren. In fact, she had seen them sequentially as mirroring the artist’s fertile years and found she liked the earlier ones better.

I was so shocked by this that I didn’t say that I had felt different. I had found the early works - I’d go so far as to say - boring. And the later works more transcendent. It wasn’t until I went back that I wondered, was this too an example of my undocumented goth girl preferences?

The next day I went back to the exhibit. The works after the living room which once had elated me looked a bit witchy, their branches now seemed more delicate and dry. I still felt the very last pieces looked gorgeous and jewel-like but it unsettled me how quickly I latched onto this new gendered narrative. My friend’s husband had gone so far as to say the later works had been sinister, and I thought now how some of the star shapes looked like pentacles wrapped up in brooms.

I felt slightly deflated as I walked through the very last part of the exhibit which were black ink drawings of flowers. Where at first I thought they were painstakingly ornate I now found they were too open and unsatisfying in being just outlines. The placard around these images stated that Asawa found, much later in life, she had not done all she wanted with flowers and watercolors and returned to these subjects for her final life’s work. But there was no mention of the fact that most of the drawings had no paint or color at all.