The Voyage of Life

As an at-home dad, I don't get a lot of time to myself, and usually when I do take time for myself, I golf or go out shooting or I run errands in peace, savoring a few minutes of uninterrupted sports radio. But recently, I chose to forego that sort of excitement for a more subtly stimulating trip to the museum. I hadn't been feeling very inspired lately, and it had been a few years since I visited the Munson Williams Proctor museum in Utica. Plus, I wanted to visit the only camera shop within two hours of home, so off I went. It was an hour drive each way, meaning I'd have two whole hours of sports radio and music. Uninterrupted. Amazing. From previous visits to MWP, I remembered Jackson Pollack's enormous Number 2 and Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life.

I also remembered wandering around the museum during high school field trips with Mr. C. Looking back, I was even more thankful for those outings -- not only for the escape from school for a few hours, but for the opportunity to wander, to stare, to stand still. This time, I wandered and stared, but also talked to the gallery assistants about when and why Cole's works were moved to an alcove, about the designing of the museum itself, and about Ann Reichlin's 914 Whitesboro Street project, in which she captures "that state between falling apart and building, that tension between what was and what might be." She writes that she is "fascinated by the idea of potential embedded in the states of abandonment, demolition, and buildings in the process of construction. Once a building is falling apart, one imagines what it might have been."

This project hit a nerve with me, as I've always been drawn to abandoned places, trying to recreate their stories, the world in which they thrived, and the moment at which it was decided that people would leave them forever. Ironically, I realize now that her exhibit is no longer at MWP. It's been deconstructed, removed, and all that's left are a few photos, I assume. Needless to say, most of my time that day was spent in that room, thinking about abandonment, the passing of time (the Voyage of Life...), and the bittersweet understanding that nothing will last -- not a photograph, not the memory of someone who took that photograph, not the digital backup file, not the name, nothing. And as depressing as that may sound, it's liberating, too. It's actually a nice thought, when you think about it. Nothing stays, so why stress over it? We're all blips in time (food for worms), and our homes are just piles of wood and stone, and even famous and not-so-famous works of art disintegrate in time, bridges crumble and whole towns are abandoned, so why worry so much? Sometimes I wish we lived closer to museums, but we don't. It's nothing to stress over. G