Harvard's Worst Art
It’s a snowstorm Saturday in Cambridge, and I’ve been hit by an unusual wave of both ennui and energy. Either the weather or some suppressed self-loathing has made me hungry to rip something to shreds. The critic rears its ugly head. My target today: Harvard’s art.
My first stop is Kirkland B basement, where I’m told graduating seniors have attempted mini-murals of their blocking groups. I expect cute Miyazaki figures or maybe saccharine messages done in block lettering.
Instead, I spy a panel titled “How to Tie a Bow Tie with Kirkland Gentlemen.” But instead of a suave, instructional diagram, I’m presented with eight identical, mostly earless heads with what look like different blood spurts shooting out of each neck. Lovely. Directly above, there’s a group called “Harem,” with names arranged into a multi-color keyhole. How Orientalist.
Around the corner, I find pre-school style paint handprints and suns, alongside a heart-headed yellow monster accompanied by mysterious floating strawberries. Is this a commentary on the infantile nature of our generation? The Nintendo 64 graphic and a child-like family drawn with their pet goat would seem to suggest so.
My personal favorite, though, is a blocking group qua rap album entitled “Domestic Ratchet.” This synesthetic, appropriating terror features such tracks as “She Look Good; She Don’t Go Here” and “Glow Me (Gently).” I think I’d take the blood spurting, phantom Kirkland gentlemen.
Suffocating in the abyss of mediocrity, I rush out to the snow-crisp air and shuffle to Winthrop courtyard, where I meet a naked, headless, and left-armless metal sculpture in a contorted ballerina stretch. He’s a tortured and mutilated Degas mid-voodoo performance, a strip-tease that keeps the genitals barely covered with a rag transforming into tree trunk. Think Venus de Milo mixed with Apollo and Daphne, but full of agony and fewer body parts.
Passing Winthrop’s majestic eagle and levitating fully-nude-full-limbed man, I head to Quincy, a House my art contacts have called a paradigm of aesthetic horror. Feeling hungry for the future, my first stop is the dining hall, where I’m told I’ll spot the rare “Ascent of Man” mural. First the piece seems like a grotesque emoticon, then I spot the extraterrestrial spaceship with a frighteningly normal sun.
The artist has selected color dyads similar enough to impede both blending and separation: teal, blue, ruddy orange, and gold. I’m reminded of a time when my friend wore lime pants and an olive sweater. You’d be hoping for an alien intervention.
The colorblind creator couldn’t quite fit his mischosen hues into an outlined design. Color swatches form similar shapes like silhouettes that have been just slightly shifted over; Wall-E the outline, a potential saving grace for the piece, appears three feet to the right and a foot above chromatic Wall-E. Is this neo-cubist? A massively failed color-between-the-lines? You decide.
No, I decide. The three-eyed spaceship (look closely, the left eye is actually two!) has outline-scars running through its optic orifices. Which means they can’t see the scene. Lucky aliens.
Having lost my appetite, I head out of the dining hall, stopping only to wonder why “Ascent of Man” has been fossilized and reproduced as a rock climbing wall along the stairs. Suddenly, I’m paralyzed by the abomination before me: a horrifying green alien feasting on small pale limbs. My Quincy correspondent calls this a “Gollum-like character eating another Gollum-like character.” I call it the single worst Goya knock-off the world has ever seen. (See: “Saturn Devouring His Son.”)
Screaming, I run past Quincy Grille and seek refuge in an inlet with snack dispensers. There’s a bizarre metal fixture crafted of gold and silver half-tubes that I can only hope is a commentary on the shiny brand advertising of the soda machine it overlooks. Put off, but slightly calmer, I take two steps when I see what seem like studies of classic paintings. There are two O’ Keeffe’s, two Picasso’s, five Munch’s, and a Thiebaud painting of cake. I guess the shrieker wasn’t actually evoking the horror of modern isolation; he was just hungry.
By the elevators I spot a painting of a kraken who lives in a small cove and has traded tentacles for legs. He’s eating a submarine that somehow got within feet of a beachy shore. This piece may not be cannibalistic like Gollum-Goya, but I’ve had enough of Quincy’s banquets.
Before I make it to Mass. Ave., though, my stomach grumbles again, and I head to Adams. I take one step into the dining hall when, on my left, I’m stopped by a portrait of John Silas Reed. He’s over shaded to the point where I wonder if someone threw ash all over his face. Straight ahead, an angular and disproportional Abigail Adams greets me. Further ahead on the left, two Chinese demon-dragons—one with a baby demon-dragon on its rump—guard the deformed portraits. I appreciate Adams’s attempt at cultural inclusion, but I’ve permanently lost my appetite.
Next it’s the Barker Center, where “Book Glasses Ironing Board Table”—another neo-Cubist mess of muddled crepe tape silhouettes—has recently appeared to the left of the Cafe. I discern a table, a ladder with two rungs, another table, and half a bicycle. I have to wonder how the humanists and aesthetic scholars here can be so tolerant? How does textual exegesis occur amid this excrement?
Sadly, the scientific folks fare no better. The blue sculpture at the entrance to the Science Center seems like “Ascent of Man” come to life, and the mural spanning Lecture Hall B plays the role of its lesser-known cousin. It’s plainer and less threatening, but is no superior.
Back in the blizzard, I push north toward the Law School. Through the storm, I spot a giant black-metal abomination: onyx-colored sheets, grafted and intertwined, that rise several feet above my head. I’m surrounded by stately brick buildings and fields of white, and then there’s this torture device masquerading as a sculpture. I can only hope it’s a reminder to law students of what happens when Hobbes goes awry.