I recently visited the Princeton Art Museum at Princeton University, a local gem with a remarkable breadth of work spanning both time periods and regional / cultural origin. Since my last visit, a few new exhibitions have been installed, and the ground floor's contemporary collection has been rotated to incorporate new pieces.
I found the Ancient Ivories of the Bering Strait to be particularly beautiful. I have a fascination with small, intricate but simple pieces of work of questionable functionality (containing either vast potential or supreme purposelessness.) This sparked a whole line of inquisition into my interest in these objects, and the idea of creation of artifacts with implied but ambiguous functionality - something I have already been doing with the creation of my story, but have only thought about in the context of the story rather than that of the fascination with artifacts themselves.
The new pieces in the Contemporary Art room also captivated me. William Villalongo's piece "The Last Days of Eden #1" immediately captured my attention. In this large cut-velour-paper piece, the Genesis story of the Fall is restructured. Adam and Eve are black, and Adam, half a ribcage in hand, is cast as persecuted not only by the serpent, who has him around the neck, but by Eve as well. Her feet rest on the roots of a tree (presumably that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) amidst sprouting mushrooms, and she holds a length of the serpent in her hands. In the background are small bombs and explosions. This collage of images casts the story in a new, much darker light. I drew the implication that Eve, having eaten of the tree, knew that what she was doing was evil / against God's command; here, she is shown reveling in her role rather than playing along as an innocent pawn. However, I found one element of the piece to be very weak: a moon in the upper right hand corner, painted in an almost realistic (or at the very least scientific) manner, in contrast with the stylized cut-paper technique of the rest of the entire piece. It was distracting to the point of irritation.
Also on the ground floor were four pieces by Shahzia Sikander, from her series "No Parking Anytime": "Reflect," "Traffic Jam," "Armorial Bearings," and "Bound." Each of these is a print collage of composed and repeated elements of Hindu and Muslim artwork which, passed through her hand, takes on its own new visual, cultural, and spiritual connotations and creates something new. This, too, is a process that fascinates me. In an era in which the earth's cultural and physical makeup is known and leaves little more to be discovered, and in which this knowledge is available for immediate access through various forums, the process of collage and juxtaposition of preexisting forms and conventions to create something entirely new is one which I think is very important in the process of humanity's striving towards truth. It is a process which creates new patterns of relationship and thought, and through which the preexisting elements it derives from can be re-seen and reevaluated.
It was these thoughts, inspired by looking at Sikander's work in this instance and similar pieces previously, which led me to my first appreciation of Roman art - another new addition to the gallery. A mosaic on the wall depicted the head of the Medusa surrounded by concentric, intersecting geometric patterns. Rather than the usual face of contorted wrath that I have usually seen depicted, her eyes were heavy lidded and the corners of her mouth curled in a slight smile; and the images of bodhisattvas from Asian Buddhist artwork was immediately called to mind, and further engrained by the recollection of a statement I had heard a monk make on the stone statues of the Buddha found in religious art. They exist not simply as representative depictions of the Buddha, but moreover as an invitation to become stone, like the Buddha, and share in that sense of stillness. This led to a radical new recasting of my view of Medusa, whose gaze turns those she looks upon to stone.
Overall, I truly love the balance of work in the Princeton Art Museum. The juxtaposition of so many pieces, and the layout in which you move through them, leads to trains of thought and inquisition which I believe are highly important to the modern era.
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