MoMA

After visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and submerge myself in my first museum experience, I have ravenous sense of appetite. It all begins before getting to the artwork, with the imposing space, able to receive an enormous amount of people. It really was like a tireless machine that produced every kind of human being that transited restlessly through each of the spaces. And even though visiting a museum among so many people can’t be the best scenario, I enjoyed watching the important gathering generated by the formal spaces of exhibition. See that they’re active in a transversal form, from the public to the Museum. The scene changes when you begin to look around the rooms and every space transports you to an intimate encounter with the work. When you manage to silence the masses and introduce yourself to such a personal world, in which, no matter how many people there are, they do not intervene in your visit. One is alone with the work, that idealized object. It’s just that, being in front of a historical referent, which you hadn’t been able to dimension in its real size until now, its texture and it strength, is surely one of the most indefinable sensations I’ve faced. It’s all a constant game with emotion, mental integrity and the years of a vulnerable gathering of information and images, versus the reality that will never come out of your head. Standing in front of Pollock’s powerful work, observing every stoke and chronological process in his development as an artist, the wonderful silence of Rothko, that made me go back to make sure it was real, the tireless imagination of Picasso, his skill and his delirious Demoiselles d’Avignon, gigantic and dramatic, Cézanne, that I’d see in a book of no more than 20x20 when I was a girl, Man Ray subtle and delicate, so distant as I had intuited, Wesselmann and Irving Penn en a hallucinatory space only destined to the kitchen, the utensils and artifacts produced the best of the domestic scenes and the artwork made me reopen the pages of my favorite Contemporary Art books and feel that that instant was not a dream, Dalí and that surrealism that I don’t like but that gave me emotion, it’s just that it’s not only strokes and shapes, it’s what’s there and that through reproductions I had never been able to admire, the Jasper Johns flag, wonderful, powerful, I went through every line and every star trying to get soaked from it. A whole floor dedicated to photography, Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, Barbara KRuger, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank among so many others, that is like a neverending bath of emotion. Of course there was Warhol, Linschenstein, Lauri Anderson, Keel, Monet, Modigdliani and an eternal list of names and works that completed the six floors of a gigantic museum. Among them the only Chilean representative of that world is Roberto Matta and other two works that make you feel proud and give you a gigantic desire to incorporate others. Being able to see pieces that are a historical referent, live, allows you to grow and comprehend art from the beginnings of a work, to understand the creative process of an artist, to open an area of exploration, to begin a new endless process of seeing more, of learning more. It’s opening the appetite to the learning of history, of materials, of every pigment and every object that participates in the construction of the work and the spaces.