AZ Day 2 - Indeterminate Art, Infinity Rooms, and Instruments from Around the World
I began today by visiting Heritage Square Park in downtown Phoenix. It was a beautiful park, with a nice shady terrace to hang out under, but the real reason for my visit was a small brick building near the center of the park that happened to house a pretty excellent coffee shop called Royal Coffee Bar. They were known for their signature roasted cold brew, and I had to admit it was royally tasty.
After getting my caffeine fix, I went to visit the Phoenix Art Museum. I knew I was going to like it right from the start because right by the parking lot there was a statue of a T. Rex in a cage, that I really hope was just called “Got Him”
The first special exhibition was actually right in the lobby making a big impression right off the bat. It’s called Black Cloud by Carlos Amorales and featured over 25,000 black moths and butterflies of 30 different species faithfully recreated out of folded paper. The piece was inspired by the migration of monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico and is supposed to look like a spiraling swarm leading out to the other galleries. It’s a neat effect because the black mass is initially off putting, but then the closer you get the more delicate and beautiful the butterflies appear to be. It’s kind of like the museum equivalent of Willy Wonka coming out with a cane but then tripping into a perfect somersault to establish right out the gate that initial appearances can be deceiving.
The first exhibit was a small collection of recent acquisitions including an odd little drawing by Paul Klee, a great surrealist dancer by Carlos Orozco Romero, and a sculpted rooster by Alexander Calder.
The first proper wing I visited was the museum’s collection of Asian art, largely consisting of pieces from Japan and China. My favorite pieces here were landscape paintings on silk scrolls by Qin Bingwen, Wang Zhen, and Dai Ki. They both beautifully simple and stunningly complex all at the same time, and the ability of artists to do be able to draw on such delicate material is so far out of knowledge sphere that it really seems like a magic trick. Other highlights included vessels made out of jade, metal, and ceramics, traditional Tibetan robes, and two figures affectionately referred to as “fat lady figurines”.
The next gallery was all Flemish religious art. I liked this more than a lot of religious art because it mostly focused on the more ghastly biblical imagery like the rapture and Judith holding the head of Holofernes (I think her being naked for it is a bit of artistic license, but it’s a good modern mix of sex and violence. Side note to the side note, Sex and Violence was the original name of the Muppet Show). I loved all the richness of rendering such horrible details. I don’t know enough about art history to say that the Dutch were more focused on these darker images than the more Mary and Baby Jesus focused Italians around that time, but I get that vibe.
The next gallery was interesting because it focused on color lithographs made by Alexander Calder, who’s generally more known for his mobile-like sculptures. This was the first time many of these pieces were on display for the general public. Some of the pieces were more abstract while others were more dreamlike representations of real things like elephants, boats, and the solar system (all the important things). The common thing all the prints had though was amazing uses of unconventional colors. It was like walking through a kaleidoscope.
Up next came a big lobby filled with particularly giant and unusual pieces. These included: an entire replication of the Colorado river made with pushpins snaking up a white wall by Maya Lin ; a “textural sculpture” by Lawrence Weiner; an ominously large hamburger fittingly entitled Big Big Mac by Tom Friedman; a grey amorphous blob sculpted by Anish Kapoor that through a funky optical illusion presents concave and convex mirror images of the viewer at the same time; and a piece called Irruption by Regina Silveira featuring vinyl cut out footprints stuck to the wall in a swirling pattern that looks like the most complicated dance steps ever arranged. It’s a testament to the size of the museum that they made the space for all of these funky larger pieces and still had enough room for everything else you’re gonna read about.
Up next came the museum’s main free special exhibit (there was one paid exhibition on the cutting edge fashion of Iris van Herpen but I’d already seen it in Cincinnati so I opted to save my cashola). This exhibit collected an entire career’s worth of different pieces by a Brazilian artist named Valeska Soares, the largest collection of her work on display in the US since 2003. She was hardly resting on her laurels in between those US exhibitions, however creating an astonishing body of work that blends sculpture, assemblage, collage, videography, smells, conceptual pieces, and ceramics to repeatedly engage all of a viewer’s senses and thoroughly subvert their expectations. I was really wow-ed by this collection, and I like using the term “indeterminate art” to describe Soares’ work (a term I’ll admit to initially coming up with struggling for an alliteration for my title) because just about everything was not what it initially seemed to be and each piece seemed to be operating on at least two realms and appealing to at least two sense, creating an almost dizzying sense of synesthesia.
The first piece, to me, really set the tone for everything that was to come in this collection. It was called Unrest and featured 128 found vintage footstools arranged in a wave-like formation culminating in a single chair made from intensely delicate laboratory glass, and which you can tell by the picture to the left is nearly imperceptible from a distance hence the security guard close by. I liked this a lot because if you’re like me, you probably thought while it was neat to see all those antique footstools it wouldn’t be particularly impressive and probably a little pretentious to just arrange a bunch of things that other people made, but then right when you’re thinking that you’ve gotten to the end of the footstools there’s this insanely fragile thing the artist made thus showcasing her own original talent and then making you kind of double back and look at the footstools all over again in another light. I have no idea if they’re arranged in any kind of pattern, but I do like the sense that they’re leading up to the glass chair, because it then creates this sort of allegory for cultural progress (the title “Unrest” is pretty intentional) because you can see all the personality and craft that went into these footstools, objects that you literally put your gross dirty shoes on without really thinking about, throughout history and when you get to the modern piece, the chair, it’s a bigger and more complex advancement of the form of the footstools, but if you actually tried to sit on it it would shatter instantly. I think it makes a cool statement about how in trying to constantly improve upon things, we sometimes miss the whole point of what that thing was about in the first place. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of footstools, but I like that she leaves it up to you to read as much or as little into it as you want.
The next series of pieces might have actually been my favorite because I have no idea how she did this. The series is called And After, and at first it looks like just a bunch of pillows and a mattress haphazardly left lying around the gallery, but it’s all totally solid marble meticulously hand carved to look like well used bedding. Every wrinkle, crease, and indentation gives the illusion of a well used, cushiony object, but they’re all rock solid. When you think of the shape of a pillow or mattress, they seem like they’d be relatively simple but making them look that believable is really out of this world, and shows that Soares is not only a master sculptor but a master of just completely messing with your brain.
The pieces on the walls around these sculptures were all about re-contextualizing found materials in collages that frequently made interesting use of the negative space provided by a blank canvas. These weren’t as immediately impressive to me as all of the artist’s sculptures thus far, but the way she used familiar things in totally unfamiliar ways did end up sticking with me longer than I expected. A lot of pieces used antique book jackets, bindings, and pages to get at the idea of text and memory while also making visually interesting abstract forms. My favorites of these types of collages was one called America which used red, white, and blue book bindings often taken from books about US history to make a sort of abstract flag and a piece called To For which carefully arranged just the dedication pages from several books in various degrees of fading (and sometimes very sweetly hand-dedicated) into a kind of cloud of appreciation. Another series was called Intervals, and these pieces used red borders and stickers for helping to label and organize notes and completely disregarded that intended purpose by stacking and layering them into totally chaotic, unorganized, abstract forms. Lastly another series, used old sugar cube wrappers and coffee filters to take everyday trash and do something totally out of the ordinary with it.
The next room featured two very diametrically different larger scale pieces, one totally interactive and the other extremely fragile. The interactive piece was entitled Fireflies and featured a grid of lightbulbs with trailing strings to turn them on and off, so that the actual arrangement of which lights were on was always in flux depending on what strings each visitor pulled. It was really neat both going through the gently jangling forest of hanging beads and also watching new visitors encounter the piece and change the light arrangement with looks of wonder. The fragile piece was entitled Finale and featured dozens of antique liquor glasses on a beautiful antique wooden table, but with a custom made mirror in between them doubling every glass and creating an imbuing a classic domestic scene with an otherworldly air of fantasy.
The next series was entitled Unhinged, and featured a blending of antique and handmade headboards all hinged together and painted. I liked the idea of taking something that normally marks the end of something and then stringing several together sort of creating a symbolically constantly ending and endless structure at the same time. I also just like that every serious theme that can be read into any of these pieces, is also complimented by a clear sense of fun and humor. My general metric on how much I like conceptual art is very much whether or not it takes itself deathly serious or whether it does all that conceptual stuff with a bit of a wink and nod.
The next piece was a filmed music and dance piece projected in a dark painted room with mirrors covering the wall opposite the projection to sort of create an all encompassing effect. I’m sure this was also extremely well done, but I got a little claustrophobic in the space so I didn’t really give it a fair chance though I was impressed to see yet another medium Soares is skilled at working in.
The last room featured several of the strangest and most inventive pieces yet. These included: a piece called Fainting Couch which features a hollow aluminum sculpture in the shape of a bed covered with little holes and filled with lilies on the inside timed to die as the exhibition is wrapping up so that they give off different smells, sad and lovely, through the holes in the bed over their lifespan; a piece called Stop Motion featuring different sized disco balls placed inconveniently low to the ground but hung from strings attached to motors so that they’re constantly spinning at different rates and spreading different light patterns across the floors and walls; a wonderfully impractical Common Chair made of antique chairs fused together by modern wicker-work; a series called Love Stories featuring five bookshelves each containing about a hundred volumes of love poems published by the artist herself with intentionally drab colored bindings to totally undersell the passion contained within the books themselves (when the titles are read all together they even form a sort of love poem of their own); a piece called Fragments which looks like a big pile of nothing, but is actually 8000 handmade ceramic letters that combined make up an essay by Roland Barthes on the theme of love making very literal the idea that the emotion can be difficult, fragile, and intangible; a piece called Spiraling that is similar to the headboard piece but with antique spiral stair cases linked together, spiraling toward nothing, and ending with a handmade marble staircase; and lastly the centerpiece of the whole exhibit a massive whole-wall spanning piece entitled Any Moment Now which features 365 vintage dust jackets mounted on canvases and arranged in a massive grid, the kicker being that every book’s title somehow has something to do with the passage of time (i.e. Tender is the Night, Seize the Day, A Month of Sundays etc.) creating a sort of abstract representation of a single year told through books spanning several decades. Whether every piece strikes a chord with every viewer or not, it’s impossible to deny Soares almost limitless creativity. She’s at least a ten trick pony.
For sheer playfulness though, my favorite piece that I keep coming back to and laughing at was entitled Doubleface (Burnt Umber) and features a vintage painting hung backwards with the rear of the canvas all painted one solid color minus one small square incision causing the face on the other side of the canvas to flop over and play peekaboo. I loved it.
Up next was a gallery highlighting modern Southwestern art. I really liked the way these pieces blended landscapes and cultural references from the Southwest with stylistic flourishes derived from more European art movements like Cubism and Impressionism. While I was looking at this gallery there was also a tour group of school children, and it was very cool getting to see the kids engage with art from where they were growing up. It made the art feel particularly relevant, and it was nice seeing the kids get a little flash of hometown pride.
The highlights for me in this gallery were: a vivid pink abstraction by Georgia O’Keeffe; an etching by Diego Rivera of a woman undressing (I knew about Frida Kahlo, but I had no idea how good an artist her husband was); a dynamic piece by Louisa McElwain called Desert Rain God that looks like it’s so full of motion and momentum for a stationary canvas; and a piece by Rufino Tamayo called Two Figures in Red that looks like a mix between ancient petroglyphs and 50s sci-fi aliens.
In the stair well to the upper galleries, there were two large scale landscape paintings, one interior by Brian Alfred and one exterior by Woody Gwyn, that really showed that this museum was going to fill every possible nook and cranny with interesting with interesting art.
In a similar vein, the landing of that very same staircase had this brightly colored sculpture of a nude man by Viola Frey which did for sure make all the kids and Joes in the museum giggle a little bit.
The next gallery featured an exhibit of etchings by Francisco Goya from his series Los Caprichos, 80 pieces made from 1797-1799 that depict what Goya viewed as the various follies and shortcomings in Spanish society at the time, ranging from the personal such as infidelity and superstition to the societal such as abuses by the ruling class and the clergy, usually with dreamlike or allegorical imagery. The fact that these pieces were made so early and yet feel so modern is a testament to how influential and how controversial they were when they came out. Goya actually had to withdraw the prints from commercial circulation because the Spanish Inquisition was still ongoing (not technically ending until 1834, what?!) and a lot of the pieces were highly critical of organized religion. It’s not a stretch though to see the lines connecting these pieces both in their style and their intent to the Modernist movement around the turn of the 20th century, and I personally see a lot of Dali in these prints. I think it goes without saying that between the technical mastery and the monstrous imagery, I absolutely loved this collection and the fact that it seems like Goya was tapping into ideas of subconscious allusions before Freud even suggested such a thing really blows my mind.
From the second floor you also got a great view of one more of those giant lobby pieces I mentioned, a Sphere Lit From the Top by Sol Lewitt. I always like seeing Sol Lewitt wall drawings, because there’s a huge collection of them in the in museum near where my sister used to live in Western Massachusetts, and beyond being pretty impressive in sheer size they bring back a lot of pleasant memories.
The next gallery was a cool exhibit of artwork made in America during the Great Depression funded by the WPA in an effort to levy hope, regional pride, and community engagement. Public works projects were to me one of the most brilliant New Deal programs FDR established, because they not only created thousands of jobs when they were needed most, but also led to the construction of so many much needed public building really effectively killing two birds with one stone. The fact that all these amazing artists were federally funded to help consult, design, and spruce up these public work projects is a real masterstroke, because when the finished product looks amazing people are much more likely to feel proud of it, and maybe they don’t mind so much that they’ve been doing hard labor as opposed to the more professional work they might have had before the depression. That civic pride also helps keep communities together and maybe strengthens their likelihood of participating in other New Deal programs and considering to vote for FDR again in the future, because as much as I love the program it’s not like FDR was totally doing everything out of a love for the arts or the poor, there always had to be something in it for him as well. Whatever FDR’s motivations were though, even a cynical old chunk of coal like me has to be a little bit touched by the idea of laborers and (at least some contingent of) the federal government all rallying behind common goals and good art in the face of national crisis. At least right now, it doesn’t seem like something I can really imagine happening anytime soon, but I hold out hope. I’m sure it helped back then that the art really was very, very good, and this gallery illustrated that with pieces by John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, Margaret Lowengrund, George Biddle, Lew Davis, and Paul Sample that painted dignified portraits of hard workers without shying away from the harsh realities of life at the moment in history.
The main focus of the WPA gallery was a series of water colors by Philip C. Curtis, who through the WPA helped found a little community arts center in Phoenix that would eventually become this very art museum. I loved these pieces for the way they combined both a gritty realism and a highly abstract and lyrical approach to line and color. They looked to me how early Tom Waits songs sound.
From that gallery, I kind of went down what I thought was a dead end hallway but then I looked out the window and saw an animated LED display of two stick figures walking on a constant loop tacked on to the building across the street. The piece is called Julian and Suzanne Walking by Julian Opie, and it’s such a neat little hidden treat and I hope people can see it from the street and get really confused by what it is.
Next up was the contemporary art wing. My favorites here were: a piece by Jude Tallichet called There’s Honey on the Moon which featured two plexiglass towers that were secretly a speaker playing a constant loop of music (the piece was made in 1999 though, so it’s not in anyway a reference to 9/11 unless the artist has some serious explaining to do); a flowery portrait by Kehinde Wiley of two men who could be lovers but might also be twins (?); some wonderfully disorienting shadowy trees by Paul Morrison; a sprawling untitled dreamscape by Ahmed Alsoudani that I can’t really describe but I couldn’t stop looking at; an oil painting of High Speed Gardening (a concept I find fascinating) by pop luminary Ed Ruscha; and two spooky reimaginings of a pregnant Mona Lisa by Yasumasa Morimura.
The star attraction of the contemporary wing though, recommended to me by the Atlas Obscura and just about anyone I knew who had been to Phoenix recently, was the Infinity Mirror Room designed by Yayoi Kusama entitled You Who Are Getting Obliterated by the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies. The title seems very poetic but it’s oddly an almost perfectly literal description of what it’s like walking into this immersive experience. The piece is a small room dark with a winding corridor made of mirrors leading from the entrance to the exit and it is pitch black except for thousands of dangling LED lights that change colors and brightness seemingly at random. The effect is breathtaking and discombobulating, making you feel like you’re alternatingly in a peaceful field of fireflies and surrounded by the vast infinite nothingness of the solar system. I wish I had thought to take a picture of what the piece looks like from the outside because it just seems like a totally unassuming 5’ X 5’ room tucked into the corner of the gallery, which makes the effect of walking into a seemingly infinite space much more jarring. I also have to admit that even though the piece really isn’t that big and there’s only one way to go from the entrance to exit, I still somehow managed to walk into the mirrors about 15 times which I think says more about me than the artwork. While I was writing this I looked up the artist, because I knew I’d seen her work elsewhere but couldn’t quite place my finger on it and I discovered some really wonderful facts about this quirky 89 year old woman who rose to prominence in the 1960s counterculture but still continues making influential work today. My favorite facts are that in the 70s she wrote a letter to Richard Nixon promising to have vigorous sex with him if he ended the Vietnam war, and that since she returned to Japan for mental health reasons, she’s been continuing to work, even becoming a successful entrepreneur on top of being an artist, all from the confines of a mental hospital where she has been voluntarily checked in as a permanent resident since 1977. What a one-of-a-kind person.
The next special exhibit was called The Logic of the Copy, and focused on the co-evolution of photography and printmaking techniques over the past 40 years and how the different techniques influenced each other. Innovations in printmaking allowed artists to mass produce photographs much easier and the ability to manipulate these copies in new and interesting ways opened up worlds of possibilities. The Highlights for me were: magazines combining surrealist photos by Man Ray with Surrealist poems by Paul Eluard; a photo of a sunset by Andy Warhol that he then took and silk screen printed hundreds of different color combinations creating totally different tones all with the same image; a series of high contrast black and white specialty prints called photogravures by David Levinthal that feature scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin meticulously staged using children’s toys and figurines; a print ominously juxtaposing homes and prisons by James Casebere; a series of subversive prints by Robert Heinecken where the artist took readily available commercial products like magazines and printed over the pages with a grisly image of a Viet Cong soldier holding a decapitated head and smiling and then replacing the altered magazines back into circulation or in dentists waiting rooms so people wouldn’t be able to ignore what was happening during the war; an issue of the multimedia arts magazine Aspen with a cover and box designed by Andy Warhol to look like laundry detergent packaging as well as a 7” record by John Cale of the Velvet Underground; some surrealist collages of photographs and drawings found and/or made by Robert Rauschenburg that really captured my eye; and a collaboration of etchings by Jime Dine and photographs by Lee Friedlander that don’t seem to have anything to do with one another but sort of take on weird meaning and connection with their pairings. A lot of the more technical aspects of print making that featured heavily in this exhibit went over my head, but I greatly enjoyed the finished products.
The next gallery was a small showcase of abstract pieces called Poetry in Motion that tried to highlight pieces that had more lyrical qualities than people might suspect from abstract paintings.
My favorites were these two pieces by Roberto Matta that had a blend of totally abstract shapes and figures with more cartoonish characters that I got a kick out of.
The next room I saw featured a really special segment of the museum’s permanent collection called the Thorne Rooms. Designed by Narcissa Niblack Thorne, these 20 miniature rooms replicate in precise miniature details different styles of rooms throughout history and around the world. Ranging from austere colonial New England Homes to lavish French parlors from Louis XVI to more modern art deco sitting rooms, each of these rooms were incredible portals into other times and spaces with every tiny piece perfectly in its place from the tapestries on the walls to the forks and knives on the tables. The attention to detail and craftsmanship was just incredible.
The next gallery was a little alcove filled with works from impressionist masters, including Monet, Degas, Millet, Corot, and Redon to name a few. I will never understand how works that are so clearly aesthetic were considered vulgar and incendiary when they first came out. I guess it really was a different time.
My favorite piece here was also the one that least fit in with the others. It’s called Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) by Jean-Luc Gerome and it features a dazzling scene of a riled up crowd deciding the grizzly end of a fallen gladiator. Quite a bit darker than the surrounding flowers and provincial landscapes, but no less visually stunning. You really feel like every single bloodlusting face in the crowd is a unique individual which is so impressive.
Next there was a room filled with medieval religious paintings. They lacked the density of nightmare creatures that the Flemish paintings had but they made up for it with much more bizarrely proportioned babies, so I was still pretty happy with the gallery overall.
Lastly there were some impressive three dimensional objects in the hallways including a beautifully adorned antique Chinese vase and an incredibly ornate German decorative cabinet hand made out of wood with inlaid ivory and copper panels covered in religious oil paintings. The paintings on either piece would be amazing enough, but the additional craftsmanship really blew me away.
After the museum, I had quite an appetite worked up so I went to a local lunchtime favorite called Bobby Q. Despite the real casual sounding name, Bobby Q proved to be a real classy little BBQ joint with great atmosphere and service to compliment that good slow roasted meat. They also had great lunch deals for those traveling comedians wanting a lot of great food on a budget. I ordered the Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwich with a side of creamy Mac and Cheese. Everything was excellent. The bun was perfectly toasted and piled high with tender, juicy rotisserie chicken slathered in house BBQ sauce. The surprise show-stealer of the meal though was the toasted cornbread that came as a free appetizer. I almost always find cornbread too dry for my tastes, but I was so hungry that I ate it anyway and I was stunned to bite into perfectly crispy, just-moist-enough cornbread. It was out of this world.
After lunch, I went to see Phoenix’s Museum of Musical Instruments or MIM, one of their top attractions. It closes at 5 and I got there right around 3, and the woman at the front desk said, “Are you sure you have enough time?” This was the first indication that, while I had been recommended this museum by several people, I had no real idea of the scope of what I was getting into. It’s a good thing that admission is good for two days, because, spoiler alert, she was right and I did not give myself enough time to see everything. The museum is massive, and features an extensive collection of instruments from every continent (minus Antarctica) with in depth descriptions, videos, and excerpts bringing to life the craft and function of each instrument and the role it plays in its respective culture. It’s a cliche that people like to throw out from time to time that music is the universal language, but when you’re confronted with this much evidence under one roof of every culture having its own musical traditions, it really starts to seem like there’s something to that. My expectation was that the museum might be sort of like a curiosity cabinet of unusual or exceptional instruments (which it for sure does contain) but the levels of analysis go so much deeper making this also one of the best anthropology and world history museums I’ve ever been to as well as a pretty damn good art museum to boot when you get a good look at some of these babies. Every visitor is also given a special little headset that is designed to know your location in the museum and either synch to whatever videos are playing in that gallery or just stream audio examples of nearby instruments, so it’s really an immersive experience walking around and catching snippets of different music from all over the world. It’s also very helpful that they have audio and videos, because as you will see, if you’re not already familiar with some of these bad boys, it’s nearly impossible to intuit what they’re gonna sound like.
The first gallery I went to was a special display just focused on cultural variations of instruments in the guitar family. There were ornate loots and mandolins with incredible patterns inlaid into the sound holes, sitars, specialty Indian slide guitars called Chaturangui, vibrolas, a weird little thing called a Gittler designed to have no unnecessary shapes or pieces, and a special Yamaha “silent” guitar with just the outline of a body so that it’s very lightweight and relatively quiet when not plugged in for ease of transport and fiddling around. I think if you’re someone more like my dad who really knows a lot about different guitar brands and models I’m sure there would have been even more exciting pieces here that I didn’t fully appreciate as a layman.
Up next was a little orientation gallery to just give visitors a taste for things to look out for with all the instruments to come. They highlighted a cross-section of instruments that were either aesthetically significant, culturally significant, historically significant, or just bizarre or unique in some way. These included an original steinway piano, a beautiful and massive alphorn from the swiss alps, early versions of saxophones and strohviolins (a violin attached to a gramophone for amplification); delicatley custom made concert zithers and Norwegian violins; harps from the Ubangi River region in Central africa carved to look like complementary male and female figures (without losing any functionality); and instruments made from animal parts including an armadillo-bodied guitar and a horse jawbone percussion instrument; and the oldest instrument in the entire museum a ceramic drum dating back to around 4000 B.C.E. !
The star of this little gallery for me though was the truly gargantuan Octobass. This 12 ft. tall behemoth is one of only a very few built in the world, it’s lowest notes are outside the range of average human hearing, and the strings are so high up and heavy that there are actually special pedals that help you fret the dang thing. It was awe inspiring.
On the other end of the spectrum was a display case of exceptionally small instruments, most notably the “Little Lady” probably the tiniest harmonica I have ever or will ever see. I can’t believe that thing is fully functional.
Up next I went upstairs to view MIM’s international galleries. This floor was arranged roughly by continent so I just picked the first one I saw and started with Asia. Things sarted off with a bang with instruments, robes, masks, and puppets from different Japanese musical theater traditions. One tradition was called Noh Theater and it is the oldest continually performed dramatic art in Japan dating back to roughly the 14th century. Noh plays usually tell mythological stories and feature elaborate masks and silk costumes and performers doing intricate choreographed dances and chants to tell their stories. Another tradition is called Bunraku which is an over three hundred year art form in which entire musicals are performed entirely with puppets. Seeing the videos of bunraku and noh performances in action was really incredible. The amount of craft and skill that goes into every level of the performance in both forms is really mind boggling. The other thing traditional musical art on display was called shakuhachi, and this one had my favorite backstory. Apparently in the 17th century, the new shoguns began reducing the military role of samurais, so all these bad ass warriors were out of job. To compensate, many became traveling monks of a sect that revered “emptiness and nothingness” and so when they would play their music as they traveled they work special baskets over their heads to symbolize their detachment from the material world. Can you even imagine if the entire military just stopped fighting and walked around playing clarinets with baskets on their heads? I don’t mean to make light of a respected cultural tradition, but I think you gotta appreciate the whimsy of it.
After Japan, I explored the instruments of Southeast Asia. The museum did a very good job of highlighting instruments from just about every country, but I didn’t do as good a job taking notes so I’ll probably miss a few. I know Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia were all accounted for. One thing I really liked about grouping the instruments by country, beyond just learning about the cultural significance of the instrument, was that you frequently got to see how different instruments changed over time as different materials and crafting techniques became available. Older instruments were practical and usually made out of cheap and abundant materials, in particular I was impressed by the versatility of bamboo as a building material for both wind and string instruments across several countries. As time progressed, functionality was more of a given and musical artisans could get a bit flashier making sillier more inventive things like double necked lutes.
One thing that really struck me was the almost infinite number of ways different cultures solved the same core problems of making music, such as how to get different pitches, tones, and volumes out of just one instrument. Some of the solutions I never would have dreamed of which is I was very grateful for the videos showing people actually playing these instruments. One such initially baffling instrument was the phin phia from Northern Thailand. This deceptively simple plucked string instrument has on average as few as one or as many as four strings, but it is able to produce a variety of tones do the unique addition of half a coconut (more modern versions might use fancier wood) that when placed on the chest becomes a resonator essentially transforming the whole body into giant wah-wah peddle. It’s so strange and otherworldly but really beautiful. Here’s a good short clip that gives a better picture than I really could.
One of the big centerpieces of the Southeast Asian instruments was this gamelan set from Indonesia. The gamelan comes from the largest Indonesian island, Java, and is not one instrument but an ensemble of largely percussive instruments. The core pieces are different metallophones (similar to a xylophone but with metal bars and tuned to a different scale than is common in Western music), large doubled-headed drums called kendhang, and specially arranged and tuned kettle shaped gongs called bonang. Gamelan is one of the oldest musical traditions in Indonesia, and is still associated with formal and traditional ceremonies today. There was something just really powerful about the size of the ensemble and how much detail was put into making it all feel like one unified set. It was stunning, and to see it played in videos like this is really like watching a well oiled machine.
Up next I went a bit farther North in the world to Mongolia where I was most impressed by a giant ceremonial reindeer head costume and a fiddle-like instrument called a khuur with incredible dragon figures painted on the body and carved on the headstock (the swastika like shapes are calling to mind a symbol from Mongolian shamanistic religion not Nazis, but it’s real unfortunate that they took a pretty simple geometric shape and really ruined it).
The largest collection of instruments in the Asian galleries came from China which isn’t exactly surprising since it is the largest country on the continent (not counting Russia which was grouped musically with the European countries). These instruments featured a plethora of forms and functions but roughly broke down into categories of reed and bamboo based wind instruments called fangsheng, the huqin family of bowed string instruments, and dulcimer like instruments called yangqin. Other highlights included a drum with ram’s horns on the side of it, exceptionally long horns used by Tibetan monks called dong chen, and an array of gongs (not pictured) complete with a fascinating video on all the work that goes into getting that authentic sound. Again the artistry employed in every single detail of these instruments was really amazing.
For the Koreas, a lot of the instruments were derived from traditional Chinese instruments but with Korean stylistic flourishes evolving over time. These included two really terrific sets of pyeonjong (tuned bells) and pyeongyeong (tuned stone chimes) that were really aesthetic marvels. These beauties are more commonly used formal settings, but the non-chime related video showed Korean mask dancing which gave a nice picture of the lighter side of the cultural traditions.
My favorites from the Korean section though were these two modern percussion instruments that just whole heartedly leaned into being art as much as instruments with very pop-art inspired takes on traditional representations of tigers and landscapes.
Lastly, I managed to get to Turkey and the Stans before my phone’s battery died. The big ticket items here, were the different ornate string instruments (my favorite being one called an ūd) and the insane amount of detailing on the sound holes and the bodies to incorporate different religious artwork and motifs. Some of the instruments were even carved to look like birds which probably has deeper significance but also might just have been done because it could be.
Lastly, since I’ve talked a bit about incredible detailing, I’d like to just share my favorite pieces for sheer decorative splendor, a Japanese mandolin-like instrument with lavish patterns of flowers and peacocks all up the body and neck and another Mongolian khuur specially commissioned by the museum to pay homage to Mongolia’s tradition of horse breeding with a majestic horse carving boldly galloping out of the neck stock. I actually saw a decent bit more, doing a quick run through the Americas before closing time, but since I came back tomorrow and got pictures of anything I’d summarize here, I’ll just save it for the next post.
After the museum, I went to meet up with my college roommate, Kathryn’s, parents who live in a suburb a little outside of Phoenix called Scottsdale and were nice enough to agree to put me up for most of the week. Kathryn and I have been close friends since our freshman year, but she happens to also be on a post-graduate travel fellowship this year adventuring all over South America and Europe, so I feel like now we have an even stronger kin-ship of shared mutually strange experiences. It was really great getting to see her family, who I’d met a few times over the years, and I think much like my mom back in Boston, they’ve spent a good amount of the year worrying about their little globetrotter, so I think (or at least I hoped) they also enjoyed having a kid around to be parents to. They live in a really nice condominium that shocked me by actually walking the walk and feeling like a real bustling neighborhood in a single building. I think because people have to spend so much time indoors during the summer when it becomes insanely hot, that there’s probably a bit more incentive to foster that level of community to prevent residents from going stir crazy but I was still really impressed to see it pulled off so well. Plus they gorgeous pool which always helps.
After Kathyrn’s parents provided me with some great conversation and a delicious home cooked meal (two things I’d been sorely missing on the road), it was time to set out for the night’s open mic. The mic was a sport’s bar called Catalina Cafe, and it was relatively close. I was also able to meet up with another friend from college named Tina, who ended up in the Phoenix area so we got to do a lot of catching up before the mic, which was really nice. She also invited a friend from work, so I had a little cheering section at the bar which was a pleasant change of pace.
The mic was a bit on the tougher side, even though a lot of the comics were really strong, because the acoustics of the place were a little off. You could hear the comics fine close to the stage, but if you were closer to the bar you couldn’t really hear anything, which led to people at the bar not really noticing the show and talking louder than they might have otherwise which was a tad disruptive and occasionally led to some choice words between comics and bar patrons. Also one older male comic talked a lot about wanting to sleep with young girls (his unfortunate phrasing, as really just substituting women wouldn’t have saved the bit but it would have gone a long way to saving the vibe) which noticeably made a lot of the women uncomfortable. The comic right after him though, immediately addressed this and made a joke about hime coming across creepy, so I got the feeling that that was just that one guy more than any sort of reflection on the Phoenix scene as a whole, which I continued to find very welcoming.
Again I don’t mean to paint to bad a picture, because for all the oddness of the venue the actual comedy was quite strong and a lot of the comics actually pulled pretty decent laughs out of the waxing and waning crowd. I think my personal favorite line of the night came from the host, Derek McFarland and it was “I know I’m getting old because I actually really enjoy talking to old ladies about produce sales at safeway”
Of the non-hosting comics, I thought a guy named Arthur Gustafson did the best job of totally commanding the room with both incredible stage presence and really clever material, my favorite line being “I’m massive but guys just come up to me to tell me they’re not intimidated by me”. I’m very sad to learn upon writing this that Arthur has recently passed away. I really didn’t talk to him much, but I know he was very loved in the Phoenix scene and in the brief time we overlapped he made me laugh a lot.
The other comic who probably did the best according to my friends was a guy named Lou Moon, who’s set I was unfortunately in the bathroom for most of (I have a knack for doing this during great sets). I saw Lou later in the week, so I can imagine him doing very well because he has just boundless positive energy and the one line I did hear as I was coming back to stage area cracked me up: “Party of one? Damn right!”
Other highlights:
Reese Muniz- Morgan Freeman has been 65 his whole life
Andrew Maynard - I look like the guy in a movie who knocks on the girl’s window and says “Hey Trevor’s got a keg out in the dessert”
My own set went pretty well (I’m sure having friends there helped a bit) and I chose to just do a lot of my silliest jokes because I thought that would be a good sort of energy change up. It’s a weird meta-thing to consider, but no matter how good your material is, if it’s too stylistically similar to the comics that go before you, the audience is probably going to check out on you so it’s important to not just do a good set but also the right set for where you are in the night. The two guys before me were strong but on the darker side, so I thought going lighthearted and silly would be a good curve. Sometimes people do just like what they like though, so a hard change up might come across as more jarring than welcome, but this time it happened to pay off and I was able to walk away from the mic feeling pretty good.
There was another mic tonight hosted by one of my favorite comics from the night before, but I was totally exhausted so I hugged my friends goodbye and immediately passed out upon getting back to Kathryn’s parents’ place.
Favorite Random Sightings: A man just standing in the middle of the street intently looking at a single dollar bill; Big Tiger Fuel (fuel for big tigers presumably); Mattress Stores are Greedy Billboard (these are everywhere all across the country, someone really hates mattress stores); Nut Sack (hilariously poorly named trail mix); Furniture for the Brave!
Regional Observations: Phoenix has an unusually large number of skateboarders
Albums Listened To: Sandinista! by the Clash (not the whole triple album just the tracks that made it down from my siblings to me); Sandman by Harry Nilsson (a very sadly forgotten album where Harry actually gets most of his voice back after having previously injured himself partying too hard with John Lennon); Saturation by BROCKHAMPTON (the first of three very impressive albums all the more impressively dropped in the a single year by these breakout stars)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
Here’s one from the internet:
A grasshopper walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Hey, we have a drink named after you!"
The grasshopper looks surprised and asks, "You have a drink named Steve?"
Songs of the Day:
One of the last performances by the original quartet
“I’m the black Tom Hanks” is the strangest and best rap brag I’v ever heard