It's starting to feel like fall, and I'm pursuing joy.
2 glorious hours wandering through Dia:Beacon.
I took myself on a date on Monday afternoon. I drove 34 minutes to Dia Beacon and saw the leaves start to change as I passed through Wappingers Falls. I spent 2 glorious hours wandering through the museum (one full hour was spent in the Steve McQueen exhibit) and then proceeded to get kicked out when it finally closed.
It’s starting to feel like fall, and I’m pursuing joy.
In a past life, I think I was an art historian who knew every fact about the art displayed in Dia, but in this life, I have no idea what’s going on for about 80% of the exhibits. It comforts me that there’s a sense of camaraderie when looking over at your neighbor and realizing they also have no idea what a piece of art is trying to symbolize.
And yet, we all carry on through the museum where we stop to stare at the art that hits a chord and only glance at the ones that don’t. I climbed Rita McBride’s Arena to the top and looked at the people below me. I shimmied through Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses and was told that my hair matched the shades of the sculptures.
I wore red cowboy boots that looked fabulous in the mirrors of Robert Smithson’s pieces, but then immediately had to sit down and grab a strawberry matcha from the museum cafe because while they’re cute boots, they’re not the most comfortable. I drank half, saved the rest for my drive home, and ran back into the museum because there was too little time and too much to see.
Dia Beacon has some insane pieces of art, but nothing compares to Steve McQueen’s basement exhibit. I fear my description of the gallery won’t do it justice, but hopefully, you’ll be curious enough to want to see it for yourself.
Steve McQueen’s Bass:
McQueen ingeniously installed 60 lightboxes on the basement ceiling of Dia:Beacom that change color slowly through the shades of the rainbow. There are 3 stacks of speakers transmitting afro-bass sounds from different points in the gallery. Because bass is the lowest type of sound in music, the sound is more felt than heard. It emanated through my body, so much so that my heartbeat seemed to mesh with the sounds of the bass.
Once I got over my initial shell-shocked reaction to the basement, I sat on the floor, leaned my head against a pillar, and reflected on the melancholic feeling I’d had the last couple of days. This feeling always seems to come around as summer starts to float away. The leaves are starting to change, there’s a chill in the air, the days are getting shorter, and while I love fall, I already miss the pleasure of laziness I allowed myself to feel over summer.
I watched a TikTok earlier today that introduced the idea that we are not entitled to joy. No one promised me joy. It is not mandated that we must be happy, or that others must make us happy. If I’m having a bad day, it’s not someone else’s problem.
The overarching idea of the TikTok was that we must constantly be pursuing joy and doing things to fix our bad days. And so I took myself on a date to do one of my favorite activities: wandering an art gallery.
You might be thinking - “Charlotte that’s so obvious. Of course we have to pursue joy,” and I might say “Maybe that’s true for you, but for me, it’s not always that simple.”
I’ve had a bad track record of relying on people to bring me happiness. I’ve gambled my emotional well-being on a select few people, expecting them to fully enrich my life.
Looking back, it’s obvious that not only was I setting myself up to get hurt, but I was putting too much pressure on the people I was expecting that joy from.
And so I’m learning. I’m learning how to pursue joy on my own so that I can bring joy to others.
I have to say, it’s going pretty well. And if anyone wants to pursue joy again with me at Dia:Beacon, I’ll happily drive.
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beautiful writing as always char