One of the things that annoys me about Tina Howe’s Museum is that it calls for any number of unrealistic behaviors on the part of the museum-goers and guards, specifically (at least in the production I saw recently) for a couple of the viewers to become entranced by the view out the museum’s window. And yet, and yet…
I took a visual break from this year’s Artomatic, held this year on two floors of a Crystal City office building, lately the precincts of the Patent and Trademark Office. (I was particularly taken by Jennifer Foley’s photographs of decaying New England mills.) I looked out the eighth-floor window to the east, onto a parking structure by the airport, bracketed by hardwoods lining the parkway in the foreground and the river and some of the grimier bits of the District in the background. There was something about the sweep of the scene and the flat light of this overcast Saturday. I looked out on the top level of the parking structure, nearly full of cars blue-white-black with a occassional dot of red, none of them moving, the scene a frozen bit of hustle-bustle. The scene had the timeless grandeur of an image by Jeff Wall.