Every time I’ve visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I’ve wandered through the first floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum like a weird moth to a weird flame.   The flame, in this case, is two giant sculptures called Sequence and Band, by an artist named Richard Serra.   Both are copper colored, made out of steel, and fill an entire gallery.   They are twice or two-and-a-half times as tall as me, and they are made to be gone inside of.   That is to say, the sculptures by design invite you inside; in order to view them, you must enter them.

The first time I went inside Bend, I remembered a sculpture in the Centre Pompidou, the contemporary art museum in Paris.   I visited the Centre only once, in the summer of 2000.   I was 14.   My little brother was 12 and my little sister was 10.   My mother led us through the museum, most of which I have forgotten, and into a large white sculpture that looked to 14-year-old me like what a really cool, abstract igloo would look like if Pablo Picasso painted it, then someone made a sculpture out of the painting.   My mother took a picture of my brother, sister, and I in the sculpture.   I don’t remember the artist or what the sculpture was called, but I remember being tired, and I remember enjoying the rest of sitting inside the sculpture, swaddled by the dome over my head.

I remember only two works of art from the Centre Pompidou: the red bull because it’s on all of the Centre’s advertisements and is really ostentatious looking, and the sculpture I sat inside of.   The sculpture is memorable because it makes you interact.   Your memories of the art aren’t just mental, they’re physical.   When your body is forced to interact, your subjective experience of the art is more vivid, more personal, more functional.

Two years ago, I visited the “first significant survey of the work” of the artist Karen Kilimnik at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA).   I had never seen Kilimnik’s art before, but I loved it.   I wandered through the galleries of her “scatter-art installations of various bits of pop culture detritus” and lingered in front of her paintings that “combine art historical tradition, modern topicality, and an awkward intimacy and fragility.”   My favorite part of the exhibit was “The Red Room.”   The circular room was actually pink, not red, and the walls were covered with around 50 smallish paintings.   In the center of the room was a round circular couch, and I sat on it and starred at the paintings for a while.   I didn’t want to leave the room.   I liked the way it made me felt.   I let Kilimnik’s aesthetic define my space, my body, my experience — I liked the kind of person that I was when I sat in her room.

In an interview on the LACMA website, Serra said of his sculptures: “The content or the subject to a great degree is you.   And that subject is your experience, and that experience is not prescriptive, nor is it depictive, or illustrational, nor is it representational, but it’s your experience–

“I’m not building playgrounds, and I’m not building theaters, and there’s no beginning or end, there’s no narrative here, there’s no hierarchy in terms of parts or wholes.   I mean, it’s up for everybody to go where they want, or not go, so you’re not programmed in anyway about the beginning or the end or whatever.”

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Unattributed quotes are from the MCA’s website.

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Catie Disabato lives 2 miles from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2,044 miles from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and 5,700 miles from the Centre Pompidou in Paris.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.

Congratulations to Jen Michalski whose novella MAY-SEPTEMBER has been chosen as the co-winner (a first) of the  Press 53 Open Awards Contest and will be published in October 2010 by Press 53. Her novel, THE SUMMER SHE WAS UNDER WATER, has been chosen as a finalist for the  2010 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Winners will be announced in September.

In the July issue of Emprise Review, you will find Reynard Seifert. He is joined by Jennifer Spiegel, and the featured writer is Anne Valente who has not one, not two, but three stories and she is interviewed by Amber Sparks.

The massive summer issue of JMWW includes work from PANK contributors like Jensen Beach, Ryan Ridge, RA Allen,  Andrew Borgstrom, Luca Dipierro, Lily Hoang, Sean Loveleace one two three times,  and JA Tyler one two three times.

Myfanwy Collins has written a beautiful essay on new motherhood.

Buffalo Artvoice this week features Amber Sparks with a stunning story.

The Reassessment by John Bruce is live at vis a tergo.

At The Rumpus, Kathleen Heil writes about the last book she loved.

William Walsh is the July Writer in Residence. He kicks things off with Sleepwalking Man.

The July issue of decomP boasts writing from Gary Moshimer, JA Tyler, and others.

It’s the beginning of the month so there’s also a new issue of Hobart with writing from Brian Allen Carr, Matthew Salesses and more.

The Plagiarist, by David LaBounty appears at Metazen.

Quick Fiction 17 is now on sale and includes Ben Loory, Gabe Durham, JA Tyler, and others.

Issue 1.3 of The Medulla Review will wow you with words from Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, Laura LeHew, Eric Burke, Eric Beeny, Kyle Hemmings, and others.

Diagram 10.3 is, by all accounts, hot and witless. Not quite sure what that means but there are great stories by JA Tyler and Sutherland Douglass.

Enjoy The Music of Moving Furniture by David Peak at Dark Sky.

July elimae includes Kristina Marie Darling, Kirsty Logan, Joseph Riippi, and more.

There’s another section of Jac Jemc’s long poem, “this disturbed evening,” up at Bone Bouquet where she is joined by Elizabeth Hildreth who offers a translation.

Mudluscious Twelve brings the heat with Nicelle Davis, George Moore, Sean Lovelace, and other hotness. Sean also writes of Dive Bars, Briefly at Metazen.

The Summer Issue of Per Contra includes writing from David Erlewine.

Erin Fitzgerald’s Rethink appears at LitSnack.

Jen Michalski’s  Boy Stuff is in The New Yinzer.

Check out Sternum as 3  from Jason Jordan in Issue 34.1 of The 2nd Hand.

The debut issue of the Prose Poem Project includes writing from Michelle Reale.

Three poems by Melissa Broder appear at On Earth As It Is.

The year is 1562 for one Mel Bosworth.

Anne Leigh Parrish’s An Undiscovered Country, which received an honorable mention from The Writing Site’s contest, is now online.

Rusty Truck includes poetry from Eric Burke.

Are you going to be in the Bay Area on July 12? Lauren Wheeler is reading at the July Monthly Rumpus. Get tickets here. It’s only $10!

This week Annalemma features Eric McKinley’s Veils and Elephants.

Typo 14 includes poetry from Maureen Alsop.

At Dark Sky, JA Tyler is the focus of Ethel Rohan’s spotlight.

In a recent episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor and his companion Amy Pond visited a museum.   For on the un-geeky, Doctor Who is a British, time-travel sci-fi series in which a man called the Doctor travels through space and time fighting or protecting aliens, accompanied by a lady friend.

A recent episode of Doctor Who begins in a wet dream of a museum exhibit, with every single one of Vincent Van Gogh’s most iconic paintings collected at the Muse d’Orsay, with total disregard for the lending politics of Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Van Gogh Museum of Amsterdam (among other museums’ whose Impressionist collection is represented).   As the Doctor examines Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers, he notices a malevolent alien face in a window of the church.   The Doctor demands that the exhibit’s tour guide, played by a bow-tied Bill Nighy, tell him the date the church was painted, and off the Doctor and Amy go, back in time, to fight aliens with Vincent Van Gogh.

In between battles with giant invisible alien bird things, the Doctor and Amy go on a real-life tour of the works hanging in the museum.   They pass by the Bedroom in Arles, as finished as it will ever be, in the moments before they actually visit Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles.   Amy brings Van Gogh the sunflowers he will paint again and again; and they even get to watch him as he paints The Church at Auvers.   Amy actually walks through 1890 with her guidebook from the museum, matching the image of Cafe Terrace at Night with the physical cafe terrace, which she encounters at night.   Also, throughout the whole episode, we are constantly reminded that the townspeople of Arles hate Van Gogh and think he’s a hack, and Van Gogh himself believes he’s a lousy painter.   It’s a clever trick, the viewer and the main time-traveling characters share a secret.   The viewer is taken through this living museum as well; not only do we get to see the paintings as they would hang on our museum walls, we also get a fully characterized version of the man who painted them, everything from his painting techniques, to his madness, to the depression that eventually drove him to suicide.

At the end of the episode, after the battles are fought and won, the Doctor and Amy take Van Gogh into their time machine and bring him to his own museum exhibit in 2010.   He gets to see his work glorified and hear Bill Nighy say that he’s the most important painter that ever lived.

The museum exhibit seems to bookend the episode, both kick-starting the adventure and creating the emotional resolution, but the museum actually, metaphorically, encloses every scene in the episode.   When museums provide biographical notes on the artists and descriptions on how the art was made, distributed, and critically received, they are attempting to insert the viewer into the life of the art and artist, the way a fictional TV show about time travel can.   Every moment that aliens aren’t on-screen is like a performance on the notes of a museum wall.

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Catie Disabato lives 120 years from Vincent Van Gogh’s Arles.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.

“I’ve got someone to make reports that tell me how my money’s spent.  To book my stays and draw my blinds  so I can’t tell what’s really there.”

MGMT, “Congratulations”

Purchased and purposeful self delusion. Sad, I guess there are many that do so.

But the video makes me happier …