Museum Review: 10 To The First Power - Celebrating Miami Art Museum's 10th Year Acquisitions - Page 4

This one is a different scale, but still has the set of three separated by the same sort of distance and, at first, the feeling that someone copied them. Not bad, this copy; but then the copy resolves into cut and pasted images that are not of water lilies small enough to become the eye's trick.

There is a sweet Sol Lewitt called “Open Cube,” and the magnificent Fernand Leger mounted on the outside of the building near a pool of vanishing perspective that becomes a defining element of the entire museum, historical museum, and library complex.

Finally, I slipped into a dark room where the movie of the New York outdoor projection installation, Sleepwalkers, is played, which will become part of the new museum in “Museum Park.” Sleepwalkers is a movie of a set of movies projected on the walls of MOMA that follows six New Yorkers as they live their lives in the Big Apple from morning through the city-night, shown in the night of the city sometimes with snow falling in front of the projectors, screens split, images split between buildings and all working, all successful, the pulse of the City, the feel of the City, the architecture of the city reflected and reflecting those who inhabit it.

Tired and bone weary from negotiating a car-culture city by public transport, I fell onto the bench happy for any excuse to rest and was yanked back to the reality that is art, wide awake and alert to the sleepwalking nature of those who begin to live lives as if sleepwalking. I left happier than I entered.

That is the test of a museum experience. As Picasso wrote, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Dust the cupboards of your soul, even in south Florida.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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