Go See the Diane Arbus Exhibit at the Walker!

Last Thursday I went with my friends Sonja and Andy (who are married, in case it matters) to see the Diane Arbus exhibit at the Walker Art Center, aka the most confusing art museum in the history of the world. That's probably not true, I'm sure there are much more confusing museums, but this is the most confusing one I've ever been in, and as mine is the only opinion that matters, it might as well be the world. While Sonja and Andy didn't see what the big deal was (I believe the phrase they used was "scowling, ugly people being captured living bleak, joyless lives") I disagree. I thought there was intense, simple joy, and dare I say pathos in her pictures. These were ordinary people captured in seemingly ordinary and mundane settings that take on a greater social significance through the lens of time and space (Take that, cultural studies!). I craved the simplicity in the photos, in the raw nakedness and the lack of guile. Even drag queens in dresses, wigs and full faces of makeup seemed desperately, violently exposed, and somehow cleansed in the process. The picture and lives were dirty, but that grit made them seem true and pure in a way I can't really express. Go see the show; you'll see what I mean. Or maybe you'll think they're scowling, ugly people living bleak, joyless lives.

What made the exhibit better (and honestly, I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it as much otherwise) was observing the other exhibit-goers observing the photos. It was two-pronged voyeurism that I really dug. I love people watching. Scratch that, what I really love is people judging, love looking at their clothes and their hair and their posture and their expressions and imagining a life around those things, which I guess when I really think about it, is what I loved about the Diane Arbus photos; her subjects were laid bare in her photos, exposed in all their minutiae, just as people are in real life, right in front of you. The people watching is always great at Art Museums. You of course get the requisite art students with their tragically hip trying oh-so-not-so hard to look accidentally fabulous; the middle age cultural elite, who will go to the opening of an envelope and wear their Walker and MPR Memberships like a badge of liberal honor; the clueless plebian tourists, but then there are the wild cards: the 12 year olds with their hippie parents, trying not to snicker at all the saggy, old boobs in the pictures of the nudist colony; the incredibly awkward first date where the guy is trying really hard not to look at these photos as pornography and the girl is trying really hard to remember why she said yes to the date in the first place; the guards, who are all artists themselves when they aren't trying to pay their rent (as an added bonus, one of the guards told me they loved my hair, so I will refrain from judging them at this juncture) and then everyone else. They are all remarkable.

I should mention that I have a love-hate relationship with people as a whole. I love watching them walk, think, choose, speak... and I am repulsed and yet attracted by much of what they do. In that way people are like a very bad train wreck- you just can't look away. Most people are so weird, so foreign in a fundamental way from each other and from myself, and yet in almost every person I encounter I find some behavior or article of clothing or speech pattern or gait that I want to try out, to emulate, to figure out how that element that so attracts me might be incorporated into the me-ness, like some characteristic magpie. Even with the photos I was trying to do that, catching my reflection in the glass and seeing the images reflected on my skin. How can I see myself through this image? I guess ultimately my desire to emulate them is really a desire to find that within myself- to understand how I and this other person are similar, and how we are different. I think that's what Diane Arbus wanted us to cull from her photos, that sense of difference and sameness living in the same space. As I walked aroung the exhibit, I could see people looking at the photos, examining them, and finding themselves somewhere within. Every so often I could catch the spark of recognition, as though they were seeing themselves as if in a dream, where you see your face but it isn't your face. You know that it is supposed to be your face, and somehow it all makes perfect sense. That was how I saw these photo, and the other patrons... these people were supposed to be me, and we all make some sort of weird, parallel universe sense.