Identity

A 1970 issue of ArtForum quoted Frank Stella in conversation. Regarding his retrospective, then on view at MoMA, he said: “The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity…but an identity big enough for everyone to share in.” I wonder, then, as I traipse the roof of the Metropolitan Museum: What identity am I sharing in as I wander between massive kinetic sculptures by this painter-turned-architect? They’re dirty and massive. All welding and unpolished metal. Bombed out jungle gyms, post-war death stars, remnants of tank battles and exploded mines. Except for one: Chinese Pavilion. Unfinished, the piece is accompanied by a 1993 model of Stella’s intentions. Even unfinished, it more than doubles the size of the others. Black webbing makes up a smooth and hollow skeleton—something like a deflating zeppelin lifted up on posts so it hovers a meter or two above the ground. I figure if there’s a shared identity anywhere on this roof, it’s inside of this.

Sameness

The word ‘identity’ comes from the late-Latin identitas, which itself came from the old-Latin idem, meaning ‘same.’ Surprising, isn’t it? One associates the concept of identity as a thing of uniqueness, specialty; a thing individual to each person. A person’s identity, it could be said, reflects their soul. An inner, truer self. Emerson wrote of the Oversoul; Carl Jung wrote of the Collective Unconscious. Just as Gospel writers wrote of the Holy Spirit, and Creationists still write of evolution. The communal “truth” in all this arises out of the mutual creation stories and theories that describe human and nature’s creation as descendants from the same basic stuff. Descendants of Adam and Eve, the Big Bang, something else. Scientifically, our identity is in the order of carbon-based molecules that bounce rapidly off one another in tight quarters to create the matter we call our body. So no matter what we call the divisions, or how we describe the first cleaving of division, there’s connectivity between us. And yet, we know there’s something unique about ourselves. Don’t we? There’s something the I, and only the I, can see/ hear/ feel/ think, isn’t there? Are we all not special? Somehow? We must be! Identification

Methods and metaphors of unique identification:

Names

Names serve the purpose of differentiating ourselves from others, despite there not being enough to go around. Names are popularized—sometimes a child is named after a grandparent to pay honor to that grandparent; sometimes a lot of girls get named “Emma” one year because that’s what a celebrity’s fictional character named her baby on a sitcom. Names carry the deepest and heaviest meanings, more than any words. Napoleon. Henry VIII. Shakespeare. Hitler. Jesus. Bush. This is because they come to represent not just the person they’re meant to identify, but everything that person has done. “How was the play?” someone might ask. And the answer comes back, “Oh, you know. It was a Shakespeare.” A perfectly acceptable answer.

Parentage

I stand inside this mammoth Stella and look out over the rooftop—to Central Park, to the towers on Central Park West rising like a mountain range over a green valley. I love art you don’t feel bad about touching, and I put my hands all over the piece. It’s nice to think the artist touched this in the same way. To set these pieces together, to do exactly the same thing I’m doing maybe. Not a lot of art is touchable. The viewer doesn’t get to make a physical connection with most art. And while I connect to Rodin’s sculptures and Gauguin’s paintings on deep sensory levels just through sight, I don’t touch them. The reason of course is that the oils on my fingers could damage them, deteriorate them, and I’d be denying future viewers the experience of seeing. But still—that’s a whole sense I don’t get to experience. Perhaps identity lies in one’s ability to experience the world through our unique senses. Perhaps it’s human nature to want to be special because we simply cannot fathom another person’s experience—we’re too engrossed in our own. That’s bleak.We only get a tiny bit of art’s identity at most art shows, with most art forms. Taking too much would mean denying others. So I rub my hands all over the Chinese Pavilion, although what’s Chinese or pavillial about this, I have no idea. But I share in it. The dirtiness of the sculpture makes it okay, I think. And, I don’t know why, but I feel like I get it. Like I’m sharing in something. I smile to myself, walk out from inside the piece, and someone else climbs in after me, takes a picture of the same view I just had. We make brief eye contact. Is she thinking what I’m thinking? On my way out I notice a sign: Please Do Not Touch The Sculptures.

fall 07photo: Lindsay Moroney