After many months, I finally got my car back from my mechanic. He's great but he keeps on giving me moonshine and I don't know what to do with it all. I drove straight to D.C. I wanted to knock off a couple of places off my list, but I spent too much time looking for parking. I decided on the National Archives.

National Archives is like America's version of the Sistine Chapel. You spend more time in lines than actually seeing what you came to see. I got in line at 4 and didn't leave the museum until 6. The first exhibit consisted of documents pertaining to the Treaty of Kanagawa. The warm and fuzzy treatment of these interactions between America and Japan just made me sick. The newfound trade relations initiated by the West eventually allowed the Japanese to become a military powerhouse which we all know resulted in the occupation of China and Korea and the persecution of its people. They eventually attacked the US and joined the Axis. This knowledge really kept me from feeling that this exhibit was worthwhile.

Now the rotunda that houses all those documents had an even bigger line. I was surprised to see the Articles of Confederacy there. I've always wanted to read through it but it was rolled up. I think it's funny that libertarians continue to insist on minimal government and points to our founding fathers. Of course, a cursory look at American history shows that this approach failed. What the founding fathers discovered was that a central authority was needed to make sure that the rights that were guarenteed to Americans are enforced. A lot of conservatives point to the unfair tax practices leading up to the revolution as inspiration for their policies. The early Americans were opposed more to the reasons they were taxed. King George III used taxation as a very effective means of quelling sedition. In other words, he set up formidable economic barriers to the freedom of expression. The exhibits do not mention that, only the fact that new taxes helped fuel the rebellion.

I had some time to kill before I had to be at the lecture by Ambassador Dennis Ross so I went across the street to the National Gallery's Sculpture Garden - a more fulfilling and gratifying experience than my time spent at the National Archives. Ironically, the works here have a much more modern bent than the ones at the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Graden. Most of the works were minimalist with some elements of pop art thrown in. Now I don't appreciate Minimalism through visual media as much as I do the musical incarnation of it. You can listen to minimalist music passively and just veg out or you can become involved in its process, which doesn't take much more effort than just vegging out(unlike listening to Brahms or bebop, for instance). Either way, it can lull you into a hypnotic state. After a while, you notice nuances on a macro level and it's pretty cool because those phenomena aren't necessarily present on the surface. Minimalist art does the same thing but it's just not as fulfilling for me. These sculptures help change my ideas on it though.

Of course, it took me a while. The first sculpture is supposed to be a gigantic typewriter eraser but it looked like a fucking fallopian tube - if there's a movement in art I hate the most, it's pop art. Mark di Suvero's Aurora showed me that the maxim, "Never let them see you sweat" can be wrong. This brutal discordant twist of metal wears its virtuosity on its sleeve to the point that you can really see the effort the artist put into it and I really appreciated it. The next was a set of granite seats arranged kinda like Stonehendge. They were surprisingly comfortable. There was a family sitting in the other seats. They were on vacation, supposedly. The little boy was feeling neglected because the father was spacing out and the mother was on her cell phone calling into work. She even snapped at her son for interrupting her work and I just wanted to smack both parents upside the head.

It was Joel Shapiro's untitled work was the one that slowly started to persuade me that there just might be something to this minimalism shit. The dissonance between the rigidity of its bronze structure and its precarious pose was powerful. My favorite was Tony Smith's Moondog. The shadows that the sculpture creates in the sunlight is as vital to the work as the actual sculpture. It's so economical in that way and therefore makes the strongest case for minimalism I've ever seen. The very idea of a work of art where its environment and surroundings is an integral part of its aesthetic is pretty damn cool.

The biggest thing I noticed about the Sculpture Garden was that it gave off a vibe that one would never get anywhere in Baltimore - "You may chill here." There is no place within urban Baltimore where I'd feel completely comfortable spending some time outside while there are plenty of places like that in DC. Ok, one more trip to DC before I leave.