art, bitches

On Thursday, I took Ebony, Geoffery and Leodis to the Nelson and Kemper art museums on a whim. Initially, they weren't thrilled with the idea. "We're hetero," Geoffery said.

We went to the Kemper first, because I knew that one is free. As we strode up to the front door, I challenged them to find one piece of art that they like and to say why they like it.

Geooffery came back pretty quickly. He liked this:



It's by Naomi Fisher and it's called, "You Know That It’s Real If You Feel That It’s Real." Geoffery said he liked it because it said "Revolutution!" The fact that she's holding a machette instead of a sword appealed to him. Ebony and Geoffery too.

Ebony and Leodis liked this one, also by Fisher:



My favorite was a painting by Hung Liu, though not this one:



The one I liked showed a monochromatic image of a poor man and woman leading a horse. Overlaying their images were images of ancient Chinese culture, which were colorful and nooble looking. The painting was called "Passage" and I thought it was about oppression.

Geoffery is really into challenging my rhetoric aboout oppression and liberation. His latest rap is that people will always be oppressed. The world needs winners and losers. That's what makes life interesting. "You can't have Foucauult and Freire in the same realm," he said.

"Wait a minute," I said, reaching into my very limted understanding of these matters. "Foucault believed that liberation can occur through micropolitical movements. Yeah, the overall oppressive state structure will remain, but power can be shifted away froom it to the the oppressed through local action. And Freire provides a mechanism for that."

I think I beat him on the point, but he just shifted into a more ornery level of rightwing ideology, because he hadn't raised his first point so much out of conviction as to challenge me. That's Geoffery's thing. He likes to rile adults, pop their bubbles. That's what makes him a great debater and cool teenager.

What I like most about the exchange was that it was very loud, and everyone else in the museum could hear it. And I felt like we were subverting stereotypes, becaus folks don't usually expect teens in school uniforms to just start popping off about Foucault.

Then we went to the nelson (where the above photo was taken). We spent most of our time in the Asian wing. I learned a lot from the guys about Chinese culture, because both Ebony and Geoffery have been to China, and because Leodis is fascinated by Eastern culture and he reads a lot about it. We did make it to the 19th Century American painting section, and Ebony was really taken by the Thomas Hart Benton paintings, especially the ones where the figures are really curvy and colorful.

But all of the guys were taken by the curvy and colorful figures that were strolling around the galleries. As is usually the case, most of the museum goers were women. "See," I said, after we left the museum and they were drooling over the ogling sessiion they'd had, "art is totally hetero."