...But is it Art?

Art.

There's a lot of controversy in that word. What is "art" anyway? Even if you set aside performing arts like music and dance, you'll still find argument over the meaning of art. There was a time when art meant realistic reproduction of flowers on a table, a woman with her dog, or Christ's last supper. More recently, artists shifted their focus from realistic representation to the capture of fleeting impressions of a scene, but they still attempted to represent reality in a literal way.

Then the Modern artists came in and turned everything upside down. Picasso deconstructed his subjects into cubes and colors, Miro represented reality in psychological terms, and Warhol completely demolished the concepts of art and artist.

It's easy enough to look at the books in the library or search the Artstor collection to see images by Modern artists, but you need to see the actual works up close to get a sense of how they work in reality. It's one thing to pass by the replica of Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" hanging upstairs in the library, but it's entirely different to see the size of the original, to get close enough to see the brush strokes, the subtle changes in hue, and how thick the paint is on the canvas. Fortunately, the Picasso to Warhol exhibit at the High Museum offers a selection of works from 14 artists including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock. Several works from each artist show how they each developed stylistically within their own careers, and relates them to major 20th century artistic developments including Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism.
I have to admit that standing in front of Jackson Pollock's work did not suddenly elicit a deep love of his paintings, but I did get a better grasp of his direct physical involvement with the material he used when I saw the scale of the work and his handprints on the canvas. And, while I've always questioned the validity given to Warhol's factory approach that separated the art from the artist, I do see how his reconstruction of everyday commercial logos cleverly poses the question, "but is it art?"

If you don't have time to visit the Museum of Modern Art in person, the Picasso to Warhol exhibit at the High Museum is the next best thing.

How To Play Football With No Feet

I feel like I'm writing the proverbial "What I Did for my Summer Vacation" essay, only my summer vacation included a very rewarding road trip to Florida where I had the opportunity to do something I thought I'd only ever read about and maybe watch from the side of a pool.

About a half hour from St. Augustine, along the A1A (which is a frustrating road when you get tucked behind one of those retirees, in an old Cadillac, who likes to whip down the highway at a blistering 40 miles per hour; I am certain AARP has an underground drag-racing program set up in Florida) there's a dolphin preservation center called Marineland that began operation in 1938 as an underwater film studio. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was filmed there in 1954, and trained dolphin shows were a hit at Marineland years before SeaWorld opened. Marineland no longer offers aquatic-themed shows; instead it's the home of twelve dolphins, including Nellie, who at 57 is the oldest dolphin in any oceanarium in the world.

Did I mention that Marineland is also a hands-on educational facility?

That's right, at Marineland visitors can feed, touch and swim with dolphins. (If you go at the right time of year, you can even paint with the dolphins.) The program begins with information about dolphin biology, the way they live in the wild, dangers they face, and how the biologists and trainers care for the dolphins living at Marineland. As you can tell by Nellie's age, the Marineland dolphins are well taken care of, and can live twice as long as dolphins in the wild. One of the important things the guide pointed out, is that visiting Marineland to see dolphins actually protects wild dolphins. People sometimes feed dolphins in the ocean, which attracts dolphins to boats where they are often seriously injured.

My dolphin companion at Marineland was Aqe, a two year old bottlenose dolphin born at the facility. He was a puckish little guy who loved attention (and fish), and he showed us how to swim, dive, make friends, play football (with no feet even) and eat.



I've seen dolphins up close in aquariums, but it's a whole different world when you're actually swimming next to one.

I found out later that Marineland partnered with the Georgia Aquarium to set up the Dolphin Conservation Field Station dedicated to research, rescue, rehabilitation and release of dolphins and small whales. You can find out more about dolphins, sea mammal conservation, and how you can swim with dolphins at the Marineland website.

Da Vinci in Atlanta

Everyone loves Da Vinci, right? The mirror-writing genius who painted enigmatic women, sculpted magnificent men, and invented things that didn't exist until the twentieth century. So, the High Museum in Atlanta hosts this exhibit of Da Vinci's genius, only it's a bit of a con. Like so many of the exhibits at the High, it seems they were given the cast-offs, the flotsam that other museums said, "yeah, go ahead and send that to Atlanta, we don't care if they get barbecue sauce on it."




Don't get me wrong, there's a HUGE horse outside, patterned after Da Vinci's own design. And, it's cool to see pages out of this phenomenal man's notebooks, to get a close-up look at the ink he put on the paper with his own astounding hand. Still...Atlanta's a major metropolitan city, can't we wrangle a visiting Annunciation or a mobile Madonna?

My cynicism aside, the Da Vinci exhibit makes for a fine afternoon in downtown Atlanta, and the High's permanent collection of contemporary and classical pieces will fill more hours than you've set aside in the day.



Heck, even the building is an exhibit in itself.

Magdalen College

Our final tour took us around Magdalen, a college founded in 1458. The current Magdalen library building looks like it's suffering an identity crisis; from the outside the building appears to date from around the early days of the college, students even enter through an inches thick solid wood door, but the interior looks like pretty much any 20th century library with an 8-foot ceiling, carpet, modern shelving, a DVD collection, but wait! The ceiling of the upstairs room stretches up-up-up, crossed with thick dark beams, stone walls, ornate windows...what happened here?

Turns out, that Charles Goodwin Scott had the library building renovated in the 1920s. He took the single tall hall and divided it horizontally with the installation of a second floor. Looking closely, visitors may notice that the rectangular windows on the first floor actually continue up through the ceiling into the upper floor. While the design offers a lot more space than the single large hall, it's not very attractive, and the library still need more room. Plans are in the works for a renovation that will open up the second floor atrium-style, add another level, adding usable space while returning the building closer to its original design.

The old library building is still on the campus and used as a manuscript archive. It's a beautiful space with crenelated wood shelving packed with old leather-bound tomes that look like something Hermione Granger would enjoy reading. A point of interest, the library was also used as the detention center, where miscreants would sit and write lines in punishment for their offenses. (Images of a medieval Bart Simpson spring to mind.)

Christine also showed us to the Magdalen archives housed in yet another old building on the campus. I'm so jealous of these librarians who get to work in beautiful places steeped in history.

In addition to the library tours, Christine showed us around campus with the keys to several very imposing doors including the one to the bell tower. I neglected to count the steps up the tower because my brain was occupied by more pressing thoughts, such as not falling and tumbling all the way to the bottom, but someone else said they thought there were about seven hundred and eighty three, not including the ladder at the top. This count may be subject to argument. Regardless, the views were spectacular.



We also had a chance to see the chapel, which houses a contemporary copy of DaVinci's last supper. There is some speculation that DaVinci may have had a hand in the copy, although this hasn't been proven, but when restoration work was done on the original, conservationists consulted Magdalen's copy to make sure they were getting things right.

The Same, Yet Different

Friday found us visiting two librarians focused on serving two distinctly different populations. Ruth Bird operates the Bodleian law library, part of the Social Sciences division of University Library Services (ULS), which is unaffiliated with a specific college and provides legal research resources for all of the university students. This frees up individual college libraries to tailor their collections for their students specific needs without worrying about housing back issues of every publication on the planet. Interestingly, the law library does not circulate its resources. Students may access anything in the library, but it cannot leave the building. This ensures that all materials are available for all students at any given time. Given the nature of law resources, most of the materials wouldn't circulate anyway, and the majority of the library's constituents prefer this setup.

The law library houses around 450,000 volumes and 90% of the materials are serial--journals, monographs, reports, etc. All this information is organized using an in-house classification system, and although ULS is converting to the Library of Congress classification system, the law library will use the Moy's system, which classifies materials according to type of law.

ULS receives legal deposit, which means that publishers have to provide a free copy of every publication in the United Kingdom. That's a lot of material. The university only makes relevant material available for student use, but maintains a storage collection for items such as fiction books that aren't related to university programs.

Opened in 1964, the library has a modern style with large open floors, vast skylights, sleek brass lamps, and lots of light colored walnut. Benefactors of the building included the Rockefeller foundation, the Oppenheimer Trustees and the government of Pakistan. The furnishings are listed, which means they hold historical value, and indeed the library looks like a showroom of mid-20th century decor.

While Ruth handles students from across the university program, Naomi van Loo serves the students of New College. Despite the name, the New College is actually one of the older colleges in Oxford, founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham. The current library building opened in 1939 and besides housing the school's research materials it is also a World War I memorial. Thanks to the associate program for American students who want to complete part of their college experience at Oxford, New College library serves more undergraduates than any other college library.

Naomi firmly believes in the value of physical books as opposed to digital resources, noting that she already has some 500 book requests that will have to wait for the new fiscal year begins. New College is a lending library, so in that aspect it is more like what students in the U.S. are accustomed to, but the collection is organized using an in-house subject classification scheme that's a little different from the Dewey system.

I'm saving what's left of my camera battery, so I'll be relying on the other librarians for pictures from this visit and will post images as soon as I have access to them. We're all very busy, so be patient.

Nice and Tidy Libraries

I felt like I should have worn a jacket and tie today because the libraries were so elegant. They are the sort of places one sees in films about Victorian students when they have their clandestine meeting at the library study tables to plot their revenge against the malevolent upperclassmen. Tall tall tall shelves stretching up to plastered ceilings. Busts of noteworthy deans scowling down from the cornices. Acres of leather-bound volumes stretching into the distance.

Our first stop was the 18th century Oriel College library, which houses the personal collection of Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh. Oriel's original library was a single 900 square foot room housing approximately 98 books, but James Wyatt designed the current building to accommodate Leigh's books.



The collection is still organized as it was originally in Leigh's country house, by general subject but with no formal classification system. The shelflist helps the librarian find volumes, but the books are still not in the Oxford online catalog. An electrical fire started in the roof in 1949, which destroyed over 300 books, but the roof was repaired within a year, and the ironic announcement proclaimed that the library was once again open for smoking.

Not far away, the Codrington library at All Souls College contains books dating from the college's medieval foundation up through the present day. While the college retains fellows and lecturers visit from elsewhere, there are no students other than visitors who come to hear lectures, which makes the library unique in that it is a research resource for the entire university. Inside the library building, constructed in the early 18th century, is allegedly the longest room in Europe.



The library recently underwent a complete renovation, which meant that the librarians had to remove all 185 thousand books, carefully note where they belonged on the shelves, properly store them, and return them each to their places. The amazing part is that this was all done in the space of a year. There aren't many pictures to go with this post because Photography is prohibited inside Codrington, which is just as well since my battery is almost dead.

After such a posh morning, it was time to get medieval--well, early modern if you want to be technical.

We toured Christ Church college and Cathedral, taking in spectacular architecture, stained glass, a collection of oil paintings and sketches from significant European artists, and the school's dining hall. "What's so special about the dining hall?" you may ask. If you have seen any of the Harry Potter films, you've seen the Christ Church dining hall.



However, it's barely recognizable in the films because it has been digitally altered to appear larger, and of course it has an enchanted ceiling that looks very different from the hammerbeam construction in the real hall.

Some of the school's other famous connections are to its founder King Henry VIII, and Charles Dodgson--better known as Lewis Carroll--who taught mathematics at the college. Traces of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland can be found around the college.

"I'd fancy another story," said Pooh.

At the end of the evening, David Benedictus gave a reading from his new book Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, which is a new collection of Christopher Robin stories authorized by the estate. From what he read of the book, I believe Benedictus must have discovered a lost manuscript or found a way to channel Milne from beyond the grave, because he has basically written another Milne book.

It's easy to copy an author's style, or to parody a long-standing, well-known work of literature, particularly children's literature, but it's difficult to continue an author's work without the text becoming self-conscious. Benedictus has balanced originality with homage in Return, the characters are alive and breathing eighty years on--Christopher Robin still the boy the animals adore although yet slightly older with a few new experiences from a far away place called school.



Return to the Hundred Acre Wood debuts in October, and I hope Oprah gets an advance copy beforehand.