Art and Animals

Kate was attending a workshop run by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG, a wonderful acronym) in Washington, DC this Wednesday and Thursday, and when she told me that, I said “Hey, I’m not teaching this term, why don’t I tag along?” So, we extended the trip a little bit, and made it a family vacation (because, after all, it’s going to be a while before we take any more long trips…).

While Kate did generally attorney-like things all day Wednesday and Thursday morning, I visited labs at NIST and UMD, about which more later. After her workshop was done, we decided to take advantage of the many opportunities available in DC (which, shockingly, has more going on than Schenectady), and get us some Culture. Thursday afternoon, we went to the Freer and Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, and then wandered around the Mall before meeting a friend for dinner, and Friday morning, we went to the National Zoo. Here’s a bit of what we saw, and what I took away from it:

Sackler Gallery. The Sackler Gallery is the Smithsonian’s Asian art museum, housed underground next to the famous castle. They have a nice collection in their own right, and they bring in a lot of interesting shows. Their current big show is called Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters from the Price Collection which featured a nice assortment of screen and scroll paintings from Tokugawa-era Japan.

The coolest thing was probably “Birds, Animals and Flowering Plants in the Imaginary Scene” by Itoo Jakuchuu, seen here in an image fetched from the Google cache:

You can’t really make out the fine detail in that image, but it’s done in the style of a mosaic– the whole six-panel screen is divided into squares about a centimeter on a side, and each square is painted in individually. There are two of these, with a bizarre assortment of animals, real and imaginary. You can find some more detail in this translated page from a Japanese museum, which compares it to another similar screen by the same artist.

Freer Gallery: The Freer Gallery is a bit eclectic, built around the collection of Charles Lang Freer, who had a bunch of Asian stuff, but was also a big fan of some American artists of the nineteenth century, most notably James McNeill Whistler, who, frankly, comes off as a bit of a dick.

They have a really extensive collection of Whistler paintings, including a whole room full of miniatures, mostly landscapes. These are perfectly nice paintings, albeit kind of blurry and monochrome– here’s an extreme example— but they’re mounted in these enormous elaborate gilded frames. This was apparently part of Whistler’s conception, intended to make an abstract point of some sort (and there are a number of bitchy comments to that effect in the labels in the gallery), but given that the frame presented more than double the surface area of the paintings, I mostly just found it annoying.

The Mall: After the museum swing, we strolled down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial, which never fails to impress. From a distance, it’s yet another ponderous neo-classical building in DC’s giant collection of ponderous neo-classical architecture, but up close, it’s actually really well done. The statue is always better than I remember it, and the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural carved into the walls are just terrific pieces of oratory. They don’t beat the Jefferson Memorial’s “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hatred toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” but the Gettysburg Address is a respectable second place.

We also passed the Korean War and WWII memorials, which brought home two things: 1) The Vietnam memorial broke memorial-building forever, because everybody now feels compelled to acknowledge the horrors of war explicitly. The Korean War memorial’s troubled statues and ghostly faces on marble are a bit too direct a copy from the Vietnam memorial, but the more old-school WWII monument feels almost anachronistic. 2) Rhetoric is dead. OK, Lincoln and Roosevelt were exceptionally gifted speakers, but honestly, even the generals quoted on the WWII memorial had a better way with words than any big-time politician these days.

The Zoo: Thursday was a beautiful sunny day, and as we were headed back to the Metro, I saw an ad for the panda exhibit, and said “Hey, let’s go to the National Zoo tomorrow.” Friday was kind of grey and dismal, but we went anyway, and got to enjoy the zoo almost entirely by ourselves.

The highlight was that I finally got to see the frickin’ pandas. I’ve been to that zoo at least three or four times, and every other time I’ve been to the panda exhibit, they’ve been barely visible, just a small patch of black or white fur sleeping way in the back of the enclosure. This time, though, they were out and about, with one of the two bopping around munching on bamboo. As Kate noted, they’re deeply improbably creatures– they’re huge, they’re fertile for about two days a year, and they eat nothing but bamboo, which has almost no nutritional value. How they’ve managed to survive this long is a mystery to me. They’re pretty darn cute, though.

Other highlights included a bunch of keepers posing for pictures with the beavers (another of the keepers was leaving, and they wanted a good-bye present), a bunch of cute and hyperactive otters, the keepers hosing down one of the elephants, a pair of utterly imperturbable mandarin ducks in the bird house, and the sloth-in-a-box (napping in a crate hung from the ceiling of the small mammal house).

The zoo was just about empty– the volunteers just about outnumbered the visitors, and were practically mugging passers-by to point out animals and share science facts. Some of the animals weren’t out due to the cool weather– sadly, the red pandas were all elsewhere– but we got to see a wide range of critters. We went through everything except the Invertebrate House, because while the advertised octopus feeding sounded interesting, neither of us are all that into bugs.

I would definitely recommend it. It’s not that big a zoo, but the exhibits are well done, and they have some cool stuff. The volunteers were really helpful and enthusiastic, though I imagine they get a little swamped during peak hours in the summer. And, hey, you can’t beat free admission.

The change in the whole concept of zoos over the years is really striking. I’m just old enough to remember when going to the zoo meant walking past rows of wrought-iron cages with bored animals in small concrete pens. The modern paradigm of providing them with as natural-looking a habitat as possible is a huge improvement, even if it does mean that it takes three or four trips before you catch the pandas out in the open where you can see them.

And now, we feel all cultured and stuff.