Art Museum

Emily and I went to the Art Museum yesterday, a sort of last minute decision after we ate of sandwiches for lunch. I had peanut butter and she had jam and so we complement each other.

On the bus ride there, Emily sketched a typical uncle sitting in front of us, in his pin striped cotton shirt and his gelled hair in neat rows separated by the teeth of a comb i imagine was conveniently located in a back pocket somewhere.

The Art Museum reminded me of SCGS because it had tiles that were green ish and it had an aura of sophistication (because art.) I felt a little like an alien because I was wearing touristy clothes (Stripy pants and converse and A CAMERA SLUNG AROUND MY NECK) and also because I sometimes doubt my ability to appreciate art. But anyway, we ventured into the first gallery and saw the "Custos Cavum"

Once upon a time, there were two worlds. They were connected to each other through a number of small holes, as if the worlds were breathing through these holes. However, the holes had a tendency to close up, so there were guardians next to each one to keep them open. The guardians were called “Custos Cavum.” They took the form of seals and had large front teeth, which they used to gnaw the holes to prevent them from closing up.

This was probably my favourite exhibit...The creature was constructed of steel, it's bones looked harsh and forbidding and mechanical and motionless, but it was topped with delicate sort of wings which whirred softly and moved about (motorised) and created the illusion of life despite the death connoted by the seal skeleton. The feather things cast shadows on the walls that looked like the feathery plants in Burma, a natural image in stark contrast to the mechanised nature of the seal. I imagined that the confluence of opposites in this seal symbolised the two different worlds. One natural and alive, the other robotic and dying (or dead) 

-Insert conservationist message/stop global warming campaign here-

Anyway, it was the sort of creature Emily and I would imagine when we were small, and it reminded me of a story by Eva Ibbotson I read, about a train station that was a portal to another world where sweet seal like creatures existed and spun clouds from their breath. 

Talking about clouds, there was a very puzzling/scary exhibit called 'The cloud of unknowing' which had a series of neighbours in an HDB flat, one woman had a house full of grass, another man had curtains of light bulbs hanging from his ceiling, another man fell asleep in a bed that slowly seemed to swallow him, another man wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, another man played the drums and crashed cymbals despite the falling rain, and another woman lived in a house full of sounds - white noises from in between radio stations, a tap left on, the buzz of flies over slowly rotting onions... and below all of them on the first floor lived a man in a room with no doors, the floor pooled in slimy sludgy water, which he used the wash himself dirty and transform into the cloud man. He was really repulsive, sapping the mud and slime and rubbing it into his pink flesh covered with hair like peach and just making himself dirtier and dirtier...and then as the cloud man (White hair, uncanny proclivity to cause clouds of smoke to form where ever he went) he haunted his neighbours, filling their own homes with smoke. This is the explanation for it all (http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/31320) but it just made me think of what terribly degraded lives we all live, our obsessions, and how we are cloistered within ourselves and not brave enough to penetrate the lives of others... One surrounded by light, another by sound, another by nature, another by academia, another by release, and the last one so so trapped ( I actually thought the point of the piece was the trapped man taking his revenge on his selfish neighbours but apparently not)

Emily and I also had a lot of fun creating sentences from word magnets outside the medium-at-large room, sentences like "Where have you been all my life here with some velvet subjects" and  "Let down your soft red hair" and "Find time to break this piece of us"

There was also an interactive exhibit where you could construct your own HDB on a postcard wit stickers and put it onto a shelf with other postcards to make a block of flats, but I kept mine because I suppose I am house proud or maybe just because I wanted to use it as an actual post card to send to someone.

In the 'medium at large' exhibit room the place smelled like bread dough which set my senses A-TINGLING (Bread is love) and also there was a helpful and very bored museum staff person who walked around the near - empty halls singing in a very indie-alternative sort of lazy but intense voice. She explained an exhibit which used painting and video to create sort of a confusion of mediums, and also a huge painting (?) that looked like it was crawling off the wall.

There were various other paintings but I don't think I am very good at art appreciation and also as Emily said "I am so sick of art" meaning abstract and modern art which you have to tease out the meaning of like a bobby pin in tangled hair which gets rather exhausting after a while (especially as there was another video with the cloud man and I thought they were connected and my head was in a complete muddle and then I realised after when i read the explanation outside that they were not linked which actually made me even more confused)

Because of the amazing bread smell Emily and I went to Baker and Cook where Emily bought that-round-loaf-Niki-got-me-for-my-birthday-which-I-ate-in-2-days and then we went to MK bakery and both of us got the banana chocolate loaf (which I finished THAT VERY NIGHT I am a pig indeed but it was ok because then I had salad for dinner)

After that, Emily and I had ballet practice, which was good because we got to sort out some steps in either variation ahead of today when Mrs Cheong made us do them in pairs and choose (Thankfully I am doing variation 2!!!!)