How to Enjoy a Trip to the Sheldon

Currently, there are at least two limited-time exhibits at the Sheldon musuem of modern art in Lincoln, NE: The Purpose of Labor by some faculty member whose name i can't remember, and The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye by Elizabeth King. Whether you like modern art or not, it is useful, for purposes of this blog, for us to examine it to develop our command of aesthetic thought.

The Purpose of Labor is a collection of artist made Islamic-style painted porcelain. In the center of the room sits a tresure-chest shaped object. On the walls hang a wallfull of golden dishes about two inches in diameter, a wallful of foot-wide identically shaped but differently painted bowls (probably about 100), and six other dishes with highly detailed paint-work.

It is obivious that this exhibit is a work of talent and skill, as is apparent by the high level of detail in the paint-work. The meda, porcelain and paint, is fulfilled, not contradicted (how one would contradict porcelain is beyond me, but I know it was not done here, for if it was, it would be unbeautiful to have or to make fine china, which is so non-commonsensical that I will not even think about why it is so). The one possible complaint with the exhibit is the wall full of dishes. One might become bored with such a thing. The title of the exhibit, however, explains why this is not something to worry about: the more dishes, the more labor, and as all the dishes are good dishes, and as the way they are made and displayed showcases this, one sees and wants to accept that the purpose of labor, in all its drudgery, is to make good things. Which is, of course, a true statement.

The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye consists of a collection of artist-made hairless mannequins (one has the potential to be very inappropriate, but I do not know enough about such things to tell you yes or no) and mannequin parts displayed in unusual ways. For example, one exhibit has two hands inside a black box, one of which is attached to a rod that is near a spinning magnet. The vast majority of the pieces, however, are mannequin heads (and sometimes shoulders) in glass cases. They all look like the artist herself, to some extent (one also looks like Fr. Kipper, but as the artist is from Virginia, this is probably a conicidence).

It is somewhat difficult to interpret the message of this exhibit (the medium itself is fulfilled very well, as one gets to see very lifelife mannequins in about as close to their pure essence as you can get). However, given the fundamentally morally neutral modern prevalent cult of self-expression, the complete lack of distraction from the faces of the mannequins in many of the very austere and highly detailed exhibits and the fact that the faces are all of the artist, it would seem that she is trying to explore and express the esssence of herself through her main soul-window, her face. Whether she succeeds in her well-intentioned, aesthetically valid endevaour is open to debate. Some of the exhibits, especially the ones with machinery showing, appear to reduce the human represented to an intelligent machine, while others appear to be the faces of those who have seen free thought commit its suicide (read The Maniac in Chesterton's Orthodoxy to find out more about this). Other faces, however, seemto be looking very intently at something, like the pictures of Christian saints that Chesterton says somewhere else are very different from the closed-eye Buddhist pictures, for the saints look at God Himself, as some of these mannequin faces almost seem to do.

One final note: for those of you who live in Pennsylvania or South Dakota or wherever, neither of these exhibits are worth making a special trip here to see.