Loosening up Robert ART
Davis, Murray
scattering that dared to call itself...
...But I didn't kick anything, and after Robert Murray Davis reading the legend identifying the rocks as Richard Long's Sandstone Line, I moved on like a good patron through LOOSENING UP the rooms containing the other exhibits...
...after the concrete -0.6111 BENEATH THE CROSS cured, the circles were to be displayed -ra E11x~r1, The Theology of Ignacio Ellacur~a on edge in some kind of pattern...
...And that Robert Murray Davis teaches at the Unichildren to use as stepping stones...
...It read, "He who is haloes or Tuscan gloss...
...Washington...
...That's as true of mess with, maybe mess up, this unpro- hopscotched in gaps between the stones my doctrinaire leftist acquaintances as tected and at least potentially random from one side to another like a brokenit is of my so-called representatives in field runner...
...Oklahoma, had closed for lack of teachIn Birth of John the Baptist, maids were ers, and some of the parishioners had performing the necessary but usually volunteered to help convert it into a dayCommonweal 26 March 10, 2000 care center for low-income families...
...Can a work of art exist I'm used to the impressionistic use of alism, though welcome, could not be in a form that is neither accidental nor English-try a provincial Hungarian described as "loose...
...raising his arm to fend off the tongue The Catholic grade school in Norman, of flame, like a man attacked by a bee...
...Box 4866, Hampden Station, Baltimore, MD 21211-0866 of black and gray undulated across the Phone: 1-800-246-9606 (US) or 410-516-6995 FAX: 410-516-6998 wall at the far end...
...A restaurant in Oklahoma oR0UlID City had commissioned work from an If IIfA+H THE GROUND +kf environmental artist...
...They VISION AND VALUES were forces of nature...
...paper 517.95 A few days later, at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, I came across another Long RELIGION installation...
...But upstairs there would I have been a vandal...
...Then the his or her shadow and ducked out of signed primarily to be contemplated...
...RED 272 pp...
...gathered around Long's stones...
...At play with contemporary art All were more colorful than what I still had trouble calling Long's "piece...
...And, as I discovered when I took picked up a small wedge-shaped stone, the train west from Lisbon to Sintra, and made as if to put it in his pocket...
...N.1TURE up or mess with the stones...
...Ethical and Social Implications The Portuguese teen-agers had the Erik Parens, Editor same impulse...
...And all looked like something...
...paper...
...had to be from New York or someplace -MARIA PILAR AQUINO, UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO like that because locals couldn't be so- 251 pp...
...Many were more obviously "transgreshere doesn't seem to be a undepicted task of cleaning the floor sive," to use last year's popular term...
...then The great thing about travel is that a slender black kid in glasses walked many of the usual boundaries and lim- from end to end on the stones themits either disappear or don't seem to selves...
...In a Pentecost scene minded me of an incident from the late an apostle at the rear of the group was 1960s that I hadn't thought of in years...
...menu-but this could as easily have sically modernist works on the first floor If I had dislodged one of the rocks, been a philosophical proposition...
...In Lisbon's muse- say "Piker," picked up a stone larger ums, I had examined thousands of than a bread-loaf, and pretended to consquare yards of framed, cased, and ceal it in the fold of his T-shirt...
...gressional delegation is ultraconserva- the second floor lay stones, strewn Did the piece invite, indeed demand, tive in religion and politics, even by the loosely in a rough rectangle about ten such a response...
...police chief speculated that the thieves -'An outstanding contribution...
...that's as true of aesthetics as it is of A second boy grinned, gestured as if to morals and politics...
...is, as the line in the old Latin Mass went, versity of Oklahoma in Norman...
...sometimes overweight downscale shape imposed by framing or welding But one graffito in English showed up at group of real human beings without or clamps...
...he called the police and fessed 1 0 1 T N r' I of human beings, genetics, the duty to die, and ethical theory...
...Fortunately, the artist had a sense of 61 h pp., paper $ 3 S. 00 humor, donated his work to the day-care center, and was photographed watching .4T ENHANCING HUMAN TRAITS the children hop across his stones...
...A portrait of the apos- All had a necessary relationship beT I didn't notice it because tles pictured a very funky-looking and tween part and whole and a definite my Portuguese is minimal...
...In a darkened space curtained off from the main hall was a CD-projection of Ange GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS Leccia's The Sea, shifting, fluid shades P.O...
...sculpted objects ranging from the pre- In any other museum I know of, there historic to the postmodern...
...constricting or confining...
...just By the time I had finished walking the Baptist church...
...scattering that dared to call itself art...
...But a boy, about eight, started But unlike the Rembrandt or even the young man named Gabe Huck (even in delight, waved his hand in front of wrappings of Christo, they are looser...
...Their horseplay retive on old themes...
...cloth 555.110 ow - phisticated enough to realize the value Announcing the Second Edition ofof the art...
...All pleasure, even joy...
...various locations...
...1 loading them into a pickup, and in- you can do with a Rembrandt or Verstalled them on the playground for the meer, for example, is look at it...
...A girl used it as an obstacle course...
...This and theorists...
...But even this kind of faith-based re- scattered stones...
...LIFE Paper still in hand, I dialed Gabe...
...519.115 olutely modern art in Budapest...
...Ethical Viewpoints in the Catholic Tradition I was given another perspective on alues Judith A. Dwyer, Editor this experience at an exhibit of res- 108 pp...
...No frame or rope or any- through the second-floor galleries, a are tiresomely evident in the editorial thing else to separate the rubble from group of teen-age schoolchildren had and letters columns of Oklahoma's the rabble...
...Then one boy reached down, apply...
...Scorn C. ALEXANDER, INOI.ANA UM1IVF12s11Y information solved two problems: what 224 pp., paper $21.95 term to use for what Long does and YE1E -3-RA n md what to think about the teen-agers...
...The legend explaining this The Classical Theories one noted that Long photographs "his James Thrower interventions as a means of preserving `A qualify introduction to the truly wide range of major theories what nature will eventually undo...
...they didn't care...
...they just Hastings Center Studies in Ethics wanted to mess around with them...
...And that poscrete circles lying in a field at the former Of course, this kind of interaction sibility allows for a different kind of Navy air base north of town, got help wouldn't work in most museums...
...Flannery O'Connor would have been the projector, and ran toward the shad- They admit, even anticipate, the possiembarrassed to make up a name like ow of his head, becoming, at least tem- bility that boundaries don't have to be that) found some very rough-cast con- porarily, in and of the work...
...CHOICES LIFE CHOICES "Uh, Gabe...
...We passed in front of the light used in pro- "fitting indeed and just...
...The same attitudes lying there...
...standards of the Republican party and feet long and four or five wide...
...When I unrolled the newspaper the next morning, I read "Major Art Theft in TXf Norman...
...So it seems self-evi- My first and very strong impulse was stood looking at each other until one dent that faith, at least of a certain kind, to kick one of the stones-in fact, to boy stuck out his arms for balance and constricts and narrows...
...The Kevin F. Burke, S.J...
...Every adult who Commonweal 27 March 10, 2000...
...Nor were the clas- fixed-in other words, can art be loose...
...To be sure, cleaned and sawed and collected equip- jecting Leccia's images flinched at seeing the works of Long and Leccia are dement from garages and attics...
...Christian education director, an earnest the way...
...And I noticed that the Some, especially that of Portuguese kids didn't molest or play with any of artists new to me, had a fresh perspec- the other pieces...
...I've of the Sintra museum...
...On the landing possible to vandalize a work that was, American Bible Belt, where the con- of the museum's last flight of stairs to in legal terms, an attractive nuisance...
...Joseph H. Howell and William F. Sale, Editors IPI S 11~11YM New topics include the goals and allocation of medicine, the cloning After various gulps and "Oh, my To Gods...
...They largest newspaper...
...lot of graffiti in Lisbon, or after the delivery...
...Some were would have been guards, alarms, Doberby artists whose work I'd seen and been mans, admonitions, expulsions...
...But none stuck in my mind like Long's without faith is the looser...
...Was it even lived for more than thirty years in the was something different...
...You might be interested in A MA T! P1 1 A Hastings Center Introduction to Bioethics, Second Edition this story...
...But eiimpressed by elsewhere, some were de- ther the Portuguese are very tolerant or rivative in depressingly obvious ways...
...Hasrings Center Studies in Ethics up...
...They didn't want to mess -'A fascinating, challenging and important book...
...That emboldened the rest...
Vol. 127 • March 2000 • No. 5
