Bait and Switch

This outing was billed as a dullish errand -- a trip to the Trading Musician to see if we could find a cheap used amp for the school's music program, so Josie wouldn't have to haul hers back and forth every day for band practice. It was also a thinly-veiled excuse to get the kids out of the house on a Sunday afternoon when it was spitting down rain -- again. With Andrew and I both moving kinda slow (our Saturday night started with our friend Julie Glass's, reading at Elliot Bay Books, moved on to  dinner at Marco's Supper Club with the author, and wound up at the Showbox for a mind-blowing Cloud Cult show) it would be all too easy to let Simon to spend the entire day surfing YouTube with his eyes glazed over. Which is, of course, his favorite way to spend a day: when I told him it was time to get out of his pajamas and into the car, you'd have thought I'd proposed a trip to the dentist for a nice long root canal.

Fast-forward fifteen painful minutes and I am headed north on I-5 with two children slumped in the backseat -- one resigned, one mutinous. The windshield wipers are in overdrive. On the radio Garrison Keillor is inventing a French movie that features s'mores as a soulful metaphor for life's beauty and futility. This elicits a few giggles from the backseat: things are looking up.

At the Trading Musician we find an amp without too much trouble. (Sure, it's seen better days, but it's only $40, and the layer of duct tape across the top doesn't appear to have affected the sound any -- plus, it comes conveniently pre-inscribed with the anarchy symbol on the side!). We throw it in the back of the car and get ready to head home again.

But all this time I've had a secret plan in the back of my mind, which I suddenly decide to put into action as we approach the University District on the way home.

"Guys," I announce. "We're making a quick stop -- there's something I want to check out." Groans from the back seat. "I know, I know. You hate everything. But just give it ten minutes -- then we can leave."

"Where are we going?"

"It's a secret."

"A secret? Come on, Mom. You're taking us there."

"Well, okay. It's a museum." I'm parking the car. We're getting out.

"A museum?!" Groans again -- you might even call this wailing. "What are we going to see?"

"I can't tell you." We're looking both ways. We're crossing the street.

"Mom! Why not? Just tell us!"

"No. If I told you, you wouldn't believe me." We're passing the Phillip Levine sculpture, Dancer with the Flat Hat. She's standing on one leg, pointedly pointing back the way we came.

"What!? Why not? What is it?"

"You'll see." We're crossing the footbridge over 15th Avenue.

"Mom!"

Ah, now we're pushing open the door of the Henry Art Gallery at last. I flash my American Association of Museums card at the guy behind the desk. "It's all free today," he says, waving me through. I grab Simon's hand and drag him into the gallery on the right.

"There. That's what I wanted to see."

I'd be showing you pictures -- or even video -- if I hadn't happened to notice the camera-with-red-circle-and-slash posted on the wall. No photography, per the artist's wishes. So I guess I'll just have to tell you what it was. And if you don't believe me, you'll have to go see for yourself.

There, in the middle of the gallery floor, is a kiddie pool full of water, with a bunch of bowls floating in it.

Amazing, no?

No? Maybe a few details will help. The pool is the inflatable kind -- a stack of three puffy rings, about six feet across, in deep sky blue with a vinyl bottom to match. The water is calm, but a pair of immersion heaters and a small pump are generating a gentle, silent current.

The bowls: there are maybe twenty of them, ordinary white crockery with blue detailing -- a wide stripe around the rim of one, flowers on another. There are deep mixing bowls, wide serving platters, standard soup-or-cereal bowls, and small saucers suitable for dipping sauce. One has fish painted on it, just like the bowls Annie and David had in their apartment on Harrison, and there are several Chinese bowls from the set my mom has, with the rice pattern on the sides and blue dragons on the bottom. A handful of wine glasses bob along among the bowls, their clear stems barely visible below the surface of the water. I have eaten out of many dishes exactly like these; so have you. I'm guessing it wouldn't have occurred to either of us to plop them into a blue plastic kiddie pool in the middle of an art gallery.

I'm so glad Céleste Boursier-Mougenot thought of it, though. Because it turns out that if you put a bunch of bowls and wine glasses in a blue plastic kiddie pool with a couple of immersion heaters and a pump, something magical happens. The current carries the empty vessels slowly around the pool in two slightly intersecting arcs... And as they bob along in this slow, gentle spiral, they bump into each other... And when they collide, they chime.

The sounds vary: resounding clangs; bell-like peals; tentative pings, barely audible; low clinks that reverberate in quick staccato like little drum rolls; a desperate clamor as the bowls pile up in a kind of log-jam in the middle of the pool. If you watch carefully (and don't get dizzy), you can identify exactly which collision produces each particular note; if you don't, the chimes and clangs merge into an ebbing, flowing wave of sound.

I listen as the log-jammed bowls untangle themselves and wonder briefly if any of them ever crash into each other so hard they crack. Now the jostling pack is stirring smoothly counterclockwise once again. But on the other side of the pool, two big bowls are drifting in the opposite direction, moving casually along the perimeter like a couple of seniors sneaking out of PE class to smoke behind the gym.

One of the wine glasses rounds the curve, approaching the spot where the pump sits submerged. The glass hesitates for a split second... Then the invisible current catches its round glass foot, and it dips, shimmies, and shoots out across the open water, catching up to another wine glass. The two of them stick together for a while as they maneuver through the crowd, then huddle under the rim of a broad serving bowl. Eventually a small bowl joins them, nudges them apart, sends them on their separate ways.

It's awfully hard not to anthropomorphize these movements -- these empty vessels are really people at a party, or slow motion rollerskaters at Skate King's Disco Night, or porcelain dancers in an aquatic mosh pit. Like characters in one of Julie's novels, they each entered the pool with a story of thier own, and they've been launched toward each other in this cool blue observation tank because somebody thought something beautiful and meaningful might emerge from their interactions.

I felt this way about last night's Cloud Cult show too, in a way. The uncanny combination of haunting, drifting melodies and clamoring, pounding rhythms -- the power of individual voices and characters poured over an unpredictable mix of random strangers bouncing off each other on the dance floor... And all of it stirred up together, not in a cool round pool, but in a hot dark room pulsing with imagery and energy... At times I wondered if I might crack wide open and spin out into the galaxy to land God knows where. (Honestly, I'm not entirely sure I didn't.)

I guess it's all the same story, really: galaxies, novels, parties, bowls in a kiddie pool. Our lives play out in a stochastic universe where entropy increases and momentum pushes us forward. Where a random system produces consistent patterns most of the time, but where nobody can ever really be sure exactly what's going to happen next.

And once in a while a tiny hiccup in the pattern reverberates and amplifies and spirals into something nobody imagined, let alone predicted. Something spectacular or disastrous, magnificent or revolutionary -- or all of the above. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and six months later New Orleans is underwater. A random step off the curb puts you in the path of a bus instead of on your way to a job interview. That certain song, the right measure of pink cosmo in your bloodstream, the perfect angle of the rising moon, and suddenly you've crashed into the mosh pit with a bunch of surprised but tolerant 13-year-old boys at the block party. You set out in the rain to buy a used amp, and a dozen split-second decisions later, you are standing in an art gallery contemplating the nature of narrative, the pull of movement and momentum, the beauty of rhythm and reverberation, of cellular structure and solar systems, the miracle of liquid meeting solid, of air and soundwaves, of human beings and the many, many ways we make each other sing.

Maybe you'll stamp your foot on the concrete floor and a mad vortex will form in the kiddie pool. Maybe a tidal wave will engulf the Henry, and the flat-hatted Dancer will be left spinning in the deluge, pointing in every direction at once. Or maybe you'll turn and walk down to the Ave with your children, and get some pho (with extra meatballs) in a white bowl with a rice pattern you'll never look at in quite the same way again.

Simon, who has been quietly transfixed for almost as long as I have, looks up from the pool and takes my hand.

"What else do they have here, Mom?"



P. S. I did find some artist-approved video footage of a larger version of the piece, installed at the Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2009. It's beautiful -- definitely check it out -- takes the Henry's version to a whole nother level. But I think the one we saw -- with its mismatched bowls, puffy plastic pool, and extension cords trailing everywhere -- had its own homespun, DIY charm.