picture from williams college website...To continue with my obsession with giant body parts...
We've moved at last to Williamstown and I've been touring the amazing art museums and galleries the Berkshires have to offer.
One of the two home town piles is the Williams College Art Museum which has blown me away on three occasions already. Such vision! Such scope!
But I lyricize prematurely.
In front of the museum is a piece by Louise Bourgeois, that grand old Surrealist, called Eyes (nine elements). It's a community of eyeballs- four pair and one heap of eight- that the Museum commissioned in 2001. I like the idea of the piece and started filming it. First from the front, then from the side and then, as closely as I could, I filmed what they were looking at. Cool! It opened my eyes, I tell you! (Get it????) Then because I noted the light bulbs inside the orbs, I went back at night to film some more. And much to my surprise, the eyes were blue (except for one that had the filter knocked out and it was clear light. Is this syumbolic or what???)
"Why the eyes?" I wondered. "Obviously it's a reminder to look at what you see in the art museum. But anything else?"
I dug into the archives of surrealism. Eyes, it seems, have a special meaning to the surreals. They're a symbol of perception, my sources said, but also of the female sexual organs. I looked again....
Ah, them artists! What won't they be thinking of next???
