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The stories that bodies tell
August 12, 2005
Since I wrote last, I’ve spent time in three different countries (France, Germany, Austria) and learned to saw “ham and cheese” in three different languages (Dutch, French, German). I’m damn exhausted, and this evening James and I are continuing on to one last city - Prague. As per usual I’ve acquired more books as I’ve moved along, including a museum catalog, which though heavy is totally worth it.
The way I travel is this: I wander through a city, sometimes without the aid of a map, I stop when things look interesting. I eat food from markets, food that I can point at without having to know the words to call it by. I make a list of things to see - heavy with museums, ranging from the Louvre and to nearly hidden Medical Museums tucked into sprawling universities. I observe and I write, journaling obsessively (though I did a better job of that last year when I traveled solo). I sit on lawns, I watch people.
Everywhere I go, and not just because I’m a perv (though my traveling partner would say otherwise), I look at bodies - the living ones walking around the cities, the sculptured and allegorical ones capping off palaces, the twisted painterly renderings in the museums. Possibly because of my completely inadequate foreign-language skills or possibly because of this inadequacy I’m opened up to other ways stories are told, I read bodies and the stories they tell.
In the major museums of art, bodies are conduits for stories, allegorical figures stretch high and the gods and goddesses posture, frozen in moments of the oft-told tales; Jesus weeps everywhere. Bodies in these marble sculptures are solid and present in their impossible poses, but tell other stories, not the stories of bodies and bodily experiences.
In the medical museums and in the catacombs I’ve seen on this trip (I’m always on the lookout for babies in jars or underground places decorated with bones, I can’t help myself), bodies and their fragments as well as abnormal specimens tell the story of the physical inevitabilities of death and disease. They aren’t specific to the people the parts once belonged to - but at the same time nothing could be more specific. These pieces tell the story of experience - but they are merely traces, bodies and lives shored up to be one thing, one experience, one ailment, reduced to dust, bones or gray parts in a jar.
In Vienna, I went to see a show at the Leopold Museum called “The Naked Truth” (“Die Nackte Wahrheit” in German), and I can’t remember the last time I was so utterly taken in by an exhibition. I was most obsessed by the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele - their nudes, Schiele’s self portraits, and both of their erotic sketches, many never intended to be seen by the public. This stuff - just wow. In the show, there’s a movement from the allegory - Klimt’s posters for an art show featuring Theseus and the Minotaur - and then a sharp turn towards personal erotic explorations. Visceral images, pelvises in the foreground, making the contention of art vs porn so clear, yet so not. Bodies haunt the paper, the canvas, the artists tell their stories and the stories of their subjects.
It’s not a matter of historical progress, though I’ve laid these all out on a bit of a time line; these stories all swirl together, though ostensbily they occupy separate spaces. And, of course, its impossible to ignore the great body-story of the last hundred years, the Holocaust, which underscores it all, peeks in from the edges everywhere, taints present day conceptions of art histories. The sotires bodies tell or can be used to tell, the theories they can be manipulated to support or deny, the politics imbued in their representations - I can’t get enough of it.
Posted by Dacia at August 12, 2005 05:49 AM
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Comments
and i can’t get enough of you… i love your writing, lovely to have this laid in this way for us, your experience of this topic ranging through different cities…
oh london has such bodies for you… if only you’d come over the english channel…
x
Posted by: orgasmcurious at August 12, 2005 10:03 AM
Wish I could have seen that show, I love those mad austrians.
But you didn’t mention the unique admission policy. Did you strip down to get in for free?
Posted by: Dfly at August 12, 2005 12:08 PM
Jealous!
Come home soon. Come home safe.
Posted by: Todd at August 12, 2005 04:12 PM
Oh, yes, I am jealous as well. I can’t wait until the day I am able to travel abroad - but until then, I’m satisfied living vicariously through you and your adventures. I am SO glad to see that you posted today - I was going through “Dacia Withdrawal,” and didn’t know how much longer I could last.
Posted by: Layla at August 12, 2005 10:49 PM
Vienna is a lot like Klimt’s paintings: sweet, gilded, emotionally sterile. You might not believe it, but I love both, though I can see their deficiencies. Klimt’s sketches are often better than the finished products, though “The Kiss” is enough to make him famous. The portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer or his heavy-handed myths (“Water Sprites”) are cloying to me.
Schiele is under-rated in the States. His erotic drawings are superb.
Posted by: W. S. Cross at August 13, 2005 11:31 AM
ahhh….a little fix of dacia. Nice to see a post. Traveling is good for the soul, nice to see you enjoying the journey…
Posted by: nhcareyjr at August 15, 2005 02:48 PM
Roundup: Woods wins award…
Posted by: Cristian Mcfall at December 31, 2006 03:06 PM
