Busy, Busy

Yesterday Agnes, Jasmine and I went up to Princeton for the day. We had lunch with Dr. Cooper, who lives in the next town over, at one of the school's cafes (and the food was both pricey and excellent. How Princeton-ish.) Then we spent a few hours in the art library, which was probably the nicest library I have ever seen, anywhere. It's got to be one of the top five, maybe, in the country (I'm thinking that Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley might be able to compete, and I haven't seen any of those). They had so many books. In fact, they had so many all of their stacks were those giant rolling stacks that you have to wheel open. It was an art historian's wet dream. It pretty much made our libary, which of course is not an art library, look like crap, but then again, it's really not hard to make Temple look bad next to Princeton. However I am not like Agnes, who has a serious inferiority complex about Princeton caused by some bitchy grad student she met at the PMA who told her condescendingly, "Oh, that's OK," when Agnes told her what program she was in. Incidentally, we spotted this same person at the reception later that night and she totally looked like a bitch.

The real reason we went was to hear a lecture by Horst Bredekamp on "the activity of the image." I think we all thought it was going to be about relics or icons, which is why Byzantine and Renaissance people like the three of us were interested. However, it turned out to be much more philosophically oriented--and when I say philosophical, let me tell you that in the question and answer, this guy moved effortlessly between talking about Plato and Pliny to Hegel and Freud, among others. We commented to one another afterward that he just seemed devastatingly knowledgeable, and how the hell does one head contain all of that information? Well, surprise surprise, Dr. Bredekamp is German. Sometimes I think those German scholars just sit in their carrels and read for like, 15 years, because they seem to produce such rigorously systematic thinkers who are able to synthesize a vast array of literature.

His talk did in fact do a lot of synthesizing. His examples ranged from Archaic Greek statues to Jan van Eyck's portraits of himself and his wife, up to a 20th-century French sculptor, Niki de Saint Phalle. I doubt I could really sum up his talk well, but he said that he's trying to formulate a philosophical approach to the object as a living entity, specifically objects that have inscriptions that refer to the object in the third person, such as a Greek inscription on a cup that says "I am the cup of Phiedias" or the double inscriptions on van Eyck's self-portrait: "As I can" and "Johann van Eyck made me." He made an interesting point that in its origins, what was written was always meant to be spoken aloud; thus, when we look at van Eyck's portrait and say those words aloud, we are speaking for the object as if it were a real person, endowing it with life.

One of the examples I found most interesting was the one he began with, something Leonardo da Vinci wrote about a painting that was exhibited with a cover over it that read "if you love freedom, do not uncover me." The idea, of course, is that what's under that covering has the power to act on the viewer, to make an object of them, instead of simply being the passive receiver of the viewer's gaze. This would have been a very interesting talk to incorporate into Dr. Cooper's seminar on the spectator last semester. Although Bredekamp definitely began to lose me once he started to talk about "phenomenology" and other weighty philosophical terms, he had the sexiest German accent I think I've ever heard, so I was content to listen. Yes, I know that "sexy" and "German accent" rarely go together, but trust me on this.

After the talk we went to the reception, which was suitably deluxe considering that we weren't just at Princeton, but at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is its own separate and even more deluxe campus. Basically, the Institute just offers fellowships for scholars to come and live for 6 months or a year and do research with all the resources Princeton has to offer. If you're at the Institute, you are officially A Big Deal (and just to make that extra clear, it's located on Einstein Drive).

Now, when you have a reception crowded with well-known scholars and your advisor is there, and your advisor is Dr. Cooper, specifically, she's going to make you introduce yourself to a whole bunch of people and have conversations with them of varying degrees of awkwardness. On the whole, we got off light, since she brought two or three people over to us and we talked in a group. Toward the end, though, she came over and told Jasmine to go talk to Irving Lavin while I was to talk to his wife Marilyn, who's written on fresco cycles. Sigh. Luckily for me, as I walked over the person to whom she was speaking walked away, so I just introduced myself and we chatted for a few minutes at a relatively low awkwardness level. Dr. Cooper had told her about my project, which she thought was interesting, but since she only works on narrative cycles she really didn't have much advice to share, so I thanked her and walked away. Jasmine, meanwhile, had a devil of a time getting a word in with Irving Lavin, and finally had to stalk him to the buffet table to talk to him. It's a rock and a hard place when you don't want to have to introduce yourself randomly to people, but when your adviser is in the same room and will later ask you if you spoke to person X. In other words, you must suck it up and do it.

We didn't end up getting home until about 9:30, which made it an incredibly long day, but it was well worth it. Oh, and the best part was finding out the truth to a certain mystery about Agnes: last year she mentioned offhand having gotten married in Vegas, but I never knew what the deal was. Well, Jasmine sort of spilled the beans for her when she joked about Agnes having married her sister's boyfriend...then she HAD to tell me. As it turns out, Agnes, who is an American citizen, married her sister's boyfriend because both the sister and boyfriend were here illegally. Both now have green cards, (and one baby plus another on the way) but he and Agnes are going to stay married until they both get citizenship. Talk about sisterly devotion! They had to pass that interview last year when the government tries to find out if your marriage is real, and that's the reason she mentioned her marriage to me and Jasmine in the first place--she said she was worried someone would call us and we would profess no knowledge of her marriage. Crafty girl! She was so apologetic about it, but hey, do what you've got to do, I say. Thus ends the great secret of Agnieska!