A ‘Zines exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was enough to make me give the NYPL CulturePass a try. I think you can only use it once a year but it gets you free general admission, which would be $20 in this case, to a number of institutions, including the BK Museum.
I’ve never much cared for that museum. The space just does not feel very museum-y to me. There are always dead ends of exhibits not being shown, and a seemingly conspicuous quantity of museum employees standing about, watching my every move.
Such was the vibe yesterday, when I found the sole museum-goer with 4 or 5 museum workers trying to act invisible. My mood was already leaning toward cantankerous after the security guard forced me to throw a perfectly good sandwich into a garbage can. I honestly thought the place had a bag check, but I guess they must protect their artworks from people throwing ham sandwiches at them. That was really my plan all along, inspired by the recent Mona Lisa vandalism. Yeah, right.
I may have had the last laugh about the samdwich, though the laugh was only shared amongst myself. I ha dplaced the samdwich in a bag, and in a garbage can outside the museum. GIven its location and given the very cold temperatures of the morning I surmised that the sandwich would survive in that garbage can unmolested. The garbage bag itself looked perfectly clean and new. the sandiwch was, as mentione,d itself securely wrapped in a bag and even within the bag it was still sealed in the store-bought plastic container with its packaging that you have to tear a strip off of to open. It was basically sealed shut.
So unless someone came and dumped a large amount of liquidy trash on top of this it seemed my precious sandwich would be better left in this location as opposed to being in my bag. With outdoor temperatures below freezing it was as if I left it in a refrigerator.
True to plan, I spent about an hour at the ‘Zines show and maybe a half hour at the American Art room. When I left the museum I retrieved my sandwich from the trash can, finding it no worse for wear since no other trash had been placed in this recepticle. I imagined that security guard witnessing this bit of wino-esque chicanery and taking umbrage that the sandwich was not wasted. That seems to be a point of satisfaction I’ve encountered at venues like this, or at stadiums and concert halls, when security honestly seem to feel strength in watching people dispose of perfectly good food and beverage and medicine and whatever else.
In this case I have no reason to believe the security guard witnessed my retrieval of the blessed sandwich, nor my consumption of it in museum’s outdoor seating area.
This little experience honestly made me feel like some kind of street urchin. I left the Brooklyn Museum not uplifted or enriched but feeling like a person who ate a sandwich he pulled out of a garbage can.
The ‘Zine exhibit was a mixed bag. HOnestly, it gave me a bit of a headache. The focus was on a specific ‘zine scene in Brooklyn. THis is a scene I never knew anything about. There was a lot more male masturbation and cocks flying around than I was in a mood for on a Sunday morning.
No trace of the ‘zines I knew about were to be found. No Exquisite Corpse, no Lost and Found Times, no Apology Magazine. Too far out of scope, I guess, though Apology seemed like it could have been an acceptable outlier.
Virtually all the publications were under glass encasement. So compared to the quantity of stuff under glass there was relatively little reading material available. I really wanted to see what the ‘zine called “JUST ANOTHER ASSHOLE” was about. That could be the name of almost any personal blog today, couldn’t it. There were also some poetry=looking ‘zines that looked intriguing but this was not a ‘zine fair, just a museum display documenting the scene, not experiencing or reliving it.
