Nanni

I bought more postcard stamps today!

I like the shell designs they've been using for the last few years very much. I think they're *super* pretty! These ones beyond this link. I enjoy the graphic stylization!

Yesterday I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, and spent about four hours taking notes in the Early Indian and Early Chinese galleries.

There's a really powerful and intriguing installation by Jitish Kallat on the grand staircase right now - he's used rubber, plastic, wire, and led lamps to put the the text of Swami Vivekananda's 1893 speech to the First Parliment of World Religions on the staircase. He's titled it Public Notice 3 I've never seen so many people using that space - a woman led a little girl up it step by step, reading the speech out to her line by line as they went up, and a teenage girl was standing on one of the landings excitedly exclaiming to her parents, and an elderly man was helping his companion, an elderly woman using a cane, up the stairs so she could read the rest of the speech on the upper sections.

I love temporary installations such as this one, because they make meaning in so many different ways. There's the meaning of the art piece itself, which in the case of Public Notice 3 - well, I'm not sure it entirely works the way Kallat intended. He used the color codes devised by the U.S. H.S.A.S, intending an commentary on the passage of a century, but what he meant is ambigous to start with, and Swami Vivekananda's speech is so powerful, and so few people actually read artist statements anyway, that I think Vivekananda's words and intent are actually determining most people's experience of the installation. Which means it might be a slightly different piece than the one Kallat was going for, but that's the danger of using the words of someone so eloquent and gently forceful. But then, in addition to all of that, there's the way that installations of this nature encourage people to interact with public spaces in new ways, the way that reading in public changes people's responses to each other, the making of communal experience - !

I just love installation art. Sometimes I want to do installation art. Public art is my favorite kind, I sometimes think, and installation art is maybe my favorite public art. (Except that I am fickle, so my favorites change all the time. But never mind!)

There's also a really awesome exhibition of ancient Chinese Bronzes running through January. Quite a lot of the pieces are on loan from China. ("Graciously" on loan, according to the interpretive material, which is one of those things I always find charming.) It's so cool! There's weapons and engraved ritual serving peices, and an incredibly beautiful set of five nested beakers from the middle/late Warring States period. They're thinly cast, so delicate, and they fit precisely one inside the other, incredibly close. Oh, they're so beautiful! I wanted to touch them, but of course they're eighteen hundred years old and made of bronze so I couldn't because the oils on my hands would be bad for them, and anyway, they were inside a glass cube.

There's also a measure from the Qin dynasty, from the year Qin Shi Huangdi ordered that the measures be standardized, that is heavily inscribed - and the good thing, the really good thing, about this exhibit is that all the inscriptions are translated, and nearly all of them have a fascimile of the untranslated inscription somewhere nearby (because you can't generally see the entire inscription at once without moving the object, which is obviously not possibly). Anyway, I wrote down the translation provided, because it's a fairly delightful inscription, and here it is!

It was the twenty sixth year [221 BCE], the August Thearch having completely unified in great peace all the nobility and commoners under heaven and established his title as August Thearch, then decrees that if his ministers unify measures and weights, then there will be none who cheat or harbor doubts but all will understand and regard them as equal.

It is the first year [221 BCE], the August Thearch's decree that his ministers unify measures and weights having been completely begun, the August Thearch had inscriptions engraved for it. Now if we were to engrave the inscriptions in accordance with his title but not refer to him as First August Thearch, would it be long lasting? If there are later those who continue to do this and engrave this decree without reffering to its complete success and full virtue, let it be decreed and engraved that the Deputy of the Left had no doubts.

I'm not sure who translated it. The translations weren't explicitly credited, although right at the beginning there's a display discussing Chen Mengjia's vitally significant work with ancient Chinese bronzes, and explaining that he did the first translations of the bronzes held in the Institute's collection, in addition to everything else he did. I wonder if he ever slept? But that's beside the point, the point is, I don't know if this translation is one of Chen Mengjia's. I wonder how it is and how I could find out. The guards probably won't know when I go back (I need to go back, I only got to look at about half the things in the exhibit and then I had to run for the train), so I'll need to find a curator, or maybe it's in the exhibition catalog. Hm. How to find out?