The anniversary

Day 367: Wednesday 8th January

Funny, isn’t it, how time comes and goes. A week ago, I was waking up after a rather turbulent New Year’s Eve, and in a week’s time I’ll be meeting Bobby in Rio. A month ago I was at the end of the world in Ushuaia, and in a month’s time I’ll be in Italy with Suy. A year ago I was on a flight from London to New York, at the start of a year which has now – quite unbelievably – happened! Who knows where, who, or how I’ll be in a year’s time; that seems more uncertain than the same question was a year ago.

I don’t think there’s much to be said about using this one-year mark as a point for reflection though. How can I, when the game’s still being played? My year won’t finish for a little while yet, and only once I’m back home will I be able to properly look back on it. That said, my two ‘goals’ were first, to travel for a year, and second, to end up in Rio. The first has now been achieved, and on Sunday I shall be in Rio!

Anyway, today isn’t here to be commemorated but to be lived. This morning I went to the MASP art museum on Avenida Paulista, one of the best museums or galleries I’ve been to in the entire 12 months of my travels. The reason? Not just the art on display, but more so, how it was displayed. The permanent exhibition on the second floor is a large open space with artworks arranged in aisles, held into place by glass easels. Thus, you can walk between them, loop in and out of the different rows without having to follow a stultifying wall of artwork like you do pretty much everywhere else.

Moreover, the description was on the back of the artwork, which has such a transformative effect on the experience. The pretention of art museums is what I hate so much about them. They are such performative spaces, in which a piece of art that a person might not bat a second eyelid at suddenly becomes revered because they read the label and find out it was painted by someone ‘big’. Now because of its name it requires attention and a stupid faux-intellectual pose as if they knew all along it was a so-called masterpiece.

So often labels on walls are read before the work is even looked at, and any museum in which visitors read the labels half as much as they look at what’s on display has manifestly failed. MASP is so wonderful because the artwork stands alone and is always first and foremost. You look at a painting, often without knowing who it’s by (unless you spot the long neck of Modigliani!) and take it on its merits. If you like it, you might then go round the back and see who it’s by and read about it. Then, informed by this knowledge, you might take a second appraisal. Art-description-art is the pattern of experience, not description-art-move on. The art is seen before anything else comes into play.

My highlights were three: Picasso’s Bust of a Man (The Athlete) with its brilliantly muscular and angled subject, but without the usual Picasso levels of abstraction. Second, Van Gogh’s A Walk at Twilight with its wonderful crisp of a moon amidst the turquoise and oranges swirls, whilst below the two figures dancing bring the scene to life. Finally, there was Gainsborough’s Drinkstone Park. The scene was so familiar to me that it felt apt to have seen it on the day that marked a full year since I was last home. The cows drinking from the pond, the man lying on his back on the ground, the murky clouds, the colour of the trees and their shadows, it was just so identifiably English, and I gazed into the scene for an age, transfixed by the landscape I know to be my own.