Natural and Artificial History

κατέβην to the Mall (from 'most any part of the city, it's always "I went down" to that notable agora of America) and visited the Natural History Museum.  The museum itself is rather too much to take in at a time, as befits an institution of its scope, so I had to pick which exhibits I wanted to focus on. Some come to Natural History for the dinosaur bones, others for the Hope Diamond. I came for the crochet.


Part I: Crochet.   
Back behind the ocean hall is a fiber phantasmagoria, a science fair as rendered by a hallucinatory knitting circle with a fixation on marine life. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is a project to, well, crochet coral reefs. Why? Apparently crochet builds upon itself in much the way that corals do. It's part public art project (yes, I would like to see one outside a metro station) part advocacy, and part math experiment. 


As exhibited at the museum, the first two aspects dominated. One ghostly white reef (a "bleached reef") illustrated the effects of the death of microorganisms on corals.  Another was constructed entirely from plastic trash. The knitted wire sea creatures, delicate and translucent, were a testament to the unique expressive power of the needle arts. A section of reef had been done by DC-area crocheters.* The exhibit doesn't really delve into the math of hyperbolic space, which is really a pity. "There's some kind of science of ruffles!" is cool, but only in a BBC science headline kind of way, the way where you learn that drinking tea will extend your life by an average of ten years, or that women have evolved a superior sense of smell which explains their shopping habits.


Part II: Cyprus

Sphinx
Cypro-Archaic II period (ca. 550-500 BC)
Biodetritic limestone
Cyprus Museum, Nicosia

All right, I'd surveyed the crochet pretty throughly.  Where next? There's not really a natural flow through the museum (though the most logical sequel would probably have been the ocean hall) so I picked my next special exhibit priority. Upstairs to Cyprus! A pair of sphinxes guarded the door to the exhibit, traces of polychrome still visible on their wings.  Time replaced the alarmingly brilliant paint with the bare form in stone**;  perhaps our far future will imbue even us with dignity!


Within, the exhibit is strictly chronological; a straight shot down the long hall. Artifacts from each time period, generally including religious objects, tools, and occasionally bones, illustrate each chunk of the timeline from the Neolithic to the Byzantine. 

Where does stylization come from?  Is it a case of compensation for our own imperfections - that is to say, if we had the ability we would have a woman's form in exact miniature instead of slab with a nose and arms? Classical Greek statuary would argue yes. But the more naturalistic you become, the harder it is to easily signify one person or one idea in an easily replicable way. Does religion depend on stylization? Is religion itself a stylization: picking an image and sticking to it?


No point in pretending, if I'm in an archaeology-focused exhibit, I'm going to make a beeline for the pottery. (A literal beeline - I will ambulate from piece to piece, circle them several times, then do an dance to show all the other nerds the awesome things I have found. File that under "Things that will get me into trouble someday.") Anyway, my takeway from Cypriot pottery was the raised rather than incised figures, the spiral motifs and the large, enthusiastic slip decorations featuring birds. They looked more Egyptian than Greek, but that was part of what the exhibit was trying to emphasize; the crossroads-of-cultures thing. I could have done with more notes here - something about the introduction of the potter's wheel and more commentary on what kinds of ware Cyprus imported and why - but honestly, just stick me in front of a double-spouted jug and I'll be too distracted to protest


In the later ages, each section featured a selection of coins from that era. There's a tight connection between coins and history - pity it doesn't interest me in the slightest. Perhaps because the coins are too small to look at properly?  That doesn't seem right - I'll survey tiny inscriptions in alphabets I can't read, and scrutinize thumbprints on jars. Even without the coins, there were plenty of physical objects that plainly showed forth the march of time and empires across the face of the island. Statuettes of the Great Goddess became statuettes of Aphrodite and were replaced by large lively icons. The spiral designs of the earliest pottery reappeared on sophisticated glazed wares. And right at the end of the exhibit is a Last Judgment from the monastery of Agii Anargyri.


If there's one thing I love even more than pottery, it's the end of the world. No, this isn't the entry where you get the explanation of this peculiar fixation.


Part III: Other Stuff

There was still a good hour before the museum closed. Downstairs to the dinosaurs!  But though no one can fail to find triceratops skulls compelling, and gallivanting through time periods with names straight out of pulp sci-fi is always fun, yet I think that I was not quite the right person for the exhibit. Fossils of sea life appeared as sketches on clay, their ridged edges curiously similar to the ancient works upstairs. But unless they're beautiful I don't start thinking about them. 


Art moves me more than science. Art gets me asking questions, while facts get me saying "Huh. That's cool."  Perhaps it's because the scientific method requires me to sustain a viewpoint more optimistic than my own. But if there's one thing I've learned from feminism***, it's to refrain from assuming my experience is universal. Thus, not everyone shares my own shortcomings, and I can't fault the museum for not making more of a missionary effort to bring me into the science-question camp. With such an overplus of artifacts from every age and discipline, perhaps it is better served by targeting each exhibit to those who are inclined to love the subject.


"Wooooooooow!" hooted a small boy, racing past me. "Jellyfish! Jellyfish!"


And, after all, are they really so separate - history, science, and art? We can see a healed abscess in a dinosaur leg. Do we draw conclusions about the ineradicability of pain, the probable age of the creature, the nature of human knowledge? Keats wasn't writing exhibition tags for an archaeology show, and probably shouldn't have been. The sheer abundance of the Museum of National History encourages extradisciplinary forays, and we're usually the better for it. 


*This is the link you should click on if you want to see cool pictures. The Institute of Figuring has pretty strong language about use of their images, so I'm not including any.


**And even Sappho, glory that was Greece's/Lives best, I blasphemously think, in pieces.


***Add this to the list of things that I will expand on the future. 


SYNOPSIS
Place: The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Pros: Lots and lots of things
Cons: Exhibit notes could be be more rigorous and pedagogical.
Definitely Check Out: Whatever you're into. They have that..
Rating: 5-9/10 artifacts

Art Class: The Phillips Collection

The Phillips Collection is like a friend you admire and are slightly intimidated by.  How is it that she manages to be both erudite and gracious? So put-together even in adverse circumstances? Has she noticed yet that you're not nearly cool enough for her? Even if she has, she's far too classy to ever let you know it.*

The Sun and the Moon, Elizabeth Murray

A fire forced the closing of the Phillips House, one third of the three-building complex that takes up most of the 2100 block of Q. Still, there's plenty left to see while they complete repairs. In large open rooms suited for displaying large open work, some of the modern installations really stand out.Jae Ko's great decaying quillwork Force of Nature is a series of slumped, stacked rolls of kraft paper covering the walls of one room. I want to see Elizabeth Murray's jazzy, energetic The Sun and the Moon (shown) outside a Metro station.** They also have - or almost have - one of my favorite pieces of art, for which I made a beeline as soon as I entered.

In 1941 Jacob Lawrence completed his 60-painting epic "The Migration of the Negro", telling the story of the great 1930s migration from rural South to urban North. In form it resembles nothing so much as storyboards; the addition of terse, understated captions anticipates the comic book as a serious art form. In a gold medal at the Missing the Point Olympics, the Phillips got the odd-numbered paintings and the Museum of Modern Art got the even-numbered ones. What Solomon proposed this division?! Maybe the same one who displayed the paintings in a loose grid on the wall rather than in a linear progression down a hallway.

After Lawrence, however, I have no quarrel with the displays in the Phillips - indeed, the display philosophy is a major strength. Art in the museum is ordered not chronologically, but as a series of "conversations". The Phillips doesn't just display its art, it hosts it. Quite literally in this case - a visiting collection from Oberlin was on display, integrated into the Phillips' own arrangement. Organization sometimes seemed to be by visual resemblance, with an emphasis on continuity. "Oh, Still Life with Newspaper, you have to meet The Glass of Absinthe, he's also an example of analytic cubism and he's really interested in household objects."

The Syrian Bull, Mark Rothko

The exhibition notes are perfectly calibrated as well, neither too wordy nor too brief, and including the occasional input from the artists themselves "No possible set of notes can explain our paintings," protest Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in a perhaps unconscious irony.  "It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way - not his way."  I was right there with you, guys, until you started in with the bit where your work "must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration, pictures for over the mantle; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art; prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy; the Whitney Academy; the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe; etc." Like it or not, fellows, your work depends on those who are spiritually attuned to interior decorating. Quit insulting your host when you're at a party, it's bad form.


The conversations go on.  A hallway is devoted to moonlit scenes. A room of self-portraits (in my notes it's The Room of Dour Faces) features artists staring out at each other from their canvases. Other arrangements are less intuitive.  The large room dominated by St Sebastian Tended by Irene (which is, incidentally, the most evocative depiction of semi-consciousness I've ever seen) includes other nudes, bodies supporting other bodies - and also Manet's Spanish Ballet.  The juxtaposition is a bit unsettling. The juxtaposition of Ossorio's Excelsior and the anonymous "The Fountain of Life", however, is made of awesome: two hallucinatory altarpieces, one from the 60s, one from the 16th century. 


The impressionist rooms are an education. What I wouldn't give to see Van Gogh at work, to watch the process as his paintings got that way! But again, when the artists are allowed to speak for themselves, they show a regrettable lack of awareness of the system that makes their works possible. Monet criticizes the Louvre for being "a dull schoolroom whose doors are open to any dauber." Respectfully, sir -- on behalf of all daubers who might seek improvement -- shove it up your je-ne-sais-quoi.***


One other special exhibition is on display at the moment: TruthBeauty, an examination of the birth of art photography. (I mean photography as art, not photography of art - which I am sure is another discipline that Rothko would unjustly scorn.) I find photos hard to focus on as art unless - and this is odd - they are blown up to at least a yard long. Otherwise I start to read the entire room, with its grey squares on the wall, as a newspaper. This is quite unjust to the photographers, and once I realized I was doing it I made an effort to stop.  Nonetheless, the photos that drew my attention were almost universally the largest ones, not the best ones. I'm sorry, The Phillips! This is one of the things that makes me not classy enough for you.


Still, classy or not, I will be back as often as I can, and maybe, just to spite Monet, I'll bring a sketchbook.

*Yes, this museum seemed distinctly feminine to me. Odd, since it represents the collection of a guy.
**This is a compliment.  The fact that I give compliments like this may explain why I am not an art critic...
***This brilliantly articulate rebuttal (my original was terser and not printable on a family blog) is thanks to friend and literary critic at kagenjoujo.

SYNOPSIS
Place: The Phillips Collection
Pros: Gracious atmosphere and brilliant arrangement of art
Cons: EXCEPT FOR THE GREAT MIGRATION!
Definitely Check Out: Oh what the heck, check out the Boating Party, it really is all that and a bag of chips.
Rating: 8/10 smiling gallery attendants

American Fantasy: Rockwell and the Folk Artists at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

Boy, this one I just keep coming back to! Part of it's the late hours (the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, alone among its peers, keeps its door open until 7:00) part of it's the vastness of the collections, and part of it is that fascinating paradoxicality that is American art. I've covered the SAAM's contemporary art here, and the American history collections here. This time I blew in through the doors and barrelled straight to the Norman Rockwell exhibit. The pictures (it's a Flash presentation and I can't link to the individual images, but do scroll through the whole thing) were from the personal collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The spotlight illuminating the exhibit's title proclaimed both its theme and its nature.  This exhibit is about telling stories like they do in movies.  This exhibit is not subtle.

Neither is Rockwell. I came pre-loaded with the bloatware of other people's judgements and my own reactionary desires when looking at his work - he's practically a byword for saccharine idealization of Middle America, and I wanted to see what was actually awesome about him. I was surprised, and a little discomfited, to find truth in the stereotype.  He's an able, workmanlike illustrator (and according to the photos at the beginning of the exhibition, really did seem to be constantly chawing on a pipe) but his images, while they may quirk a smile, are hardly challenging. They do a very solid job of telling stories, but they leave no room for the viewer to participate in the creation of that story. Back to Civvies, for instance, is a young soldier come home to discover he has outgrown his work suit. Carefully chosen details - pinups by the mirror, fishing rod by the wall, decoration on the folded uniform - give the illusion of depth and discovery. But really, it's the same simple story all the way down. What you see, folks, is what you get - no matter how long you keep looking.

In fact, the very completeness of the stories stops the images just short of being emotionally manipulative. Rockwell had the makings of a propagandist.  It's no wonder that so much of his work in this exhibition (The Stuff of Which Memories Are Made, Merry Christmas Grandma, And Daniel Boone Comes to Life) is advertisement. Some of Rockwell's propaganda is absolutely top-of-the-genre (The Four Freedoms), some is cringingly bad (Charles Lindbergh) and some just plain middle-of-the-road (A Time For Greatness - Shepard Fairey he ain't.)

But, since this is a personal collection, I don't have to rely on my own reactions to make sense of it. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg talk about why they chose the images in a 12-minute looping video. Nervous at first when Lucas started spouting things like "The audience wants to be informed in a way that's not only entertaining but informative," I was soon mollified by the actual insights the two directors provided not only into Rockwell's work, but into their own hearts as viewers.  Spielberg described seeing Boy on a High Dive and instantly relating to the it.  "I thought 'That's going in my office, so I can look at it every day.'" That's the kind of art collector I respect: one who sees an image and has to have it - not for power or prestige, but simply to be able to continue looking at it.

I learned a few things about Rockwell's techniques as a painter.  Apparently he cast his paintings, taking multiple photographs of his models and showing them exactly where to stand and what expressions to wear. Lucas also pointed out the prevalence of over-the-shoulder views in Rockwell's paintings. There he goes creating a point-of-view character.  There's definitely something Spielbergian in Rockwell's use of child protagonists.  Is it something about the purity of childhood emotional experience? I wonder if I would have the same criticisms of Rockwell if he were explicitly a children's book illustrator?

The Mermaid

Rockwell's proficiency and prolific output remind me of another purveyor of the popular: Stephen King. King has the same deftness of hand when it comes to evoking strongly drawn American types, the same relentless focus on narrative.  And one surprising image in Rockwell's collection illustrates a similarity that should have been.  Rockwell would have made a top-notch science fiction illustrator.  He infuses his people with plain and vivid character.  Juxtapose that with surreal or sinister situations, and you have some real imaginative potential. As it was, the fantasy world he constructed was America.

Exiting the exhibit I ran into a hall of bronzes (why does that always seem to happen?!) and then looped back around through the American Experience and Folk Art sections on the ground floor.

I'm basically going to ignore the American Experience section.  I usually walk right past landscapes, and when I was drawn closer by the electric blue of The Chief's Canoe it refused to reward my interest. There was also a giant stone donut, perhaps a sly tribute to the archetype of American masculinity? But I was in a hurry to get to the Folk Art room, where mute inglorious Miltons got their chance to mouth off.

Thornton Dial, Sr.Top of the Line (Steel)

I really dig this collection.  Sure, some of it looks like it was produced at Crafts Hour at summer camp, but for the most part it's refreshingly free of the convoluted introspection of capital-A art. I'm inclined to suspect that a lot of the things that art still has to say concern materials, and works like Root Monster and Top of the Line (Steel) are speaking loud and clear. That's not to say that folk art is somehow purer or more admirable than the art of the establishment and its loyal opposition. If anything, it's messier. And in its messiness, it gets at part of what it is to be American.

Religious motifs, particularly apocalyptic ones, are everywhere.*  Almon has Christ chaining Mr. and Mrs. Devil. Finster's crossing of the Jordan is an overwhelming tide of text. Roberg paints a technicolor Babylon. Not coincidentally, many of these artists are also street preachers, that glorious meld of huckster and prophet. If you have this in your head, let alone in your house, you're crazy. But we do. And we are. And we're running with it. Christine McHorse makes the scintillatingly paradoxical declaration "I can make my own taboos and traditions." America gonif!

I haven't even visited the National Portrait Gallery yet, so you can be sure I'll be back with yet another "American Noun" titled blog post.

For another perspective, check out iowasthinking's review of the Rockwell exhibit.

*I find the apocalypse, as a motif, endlessly fascinating.  I'll elucidate in another post one of these days.

Close-ing Time: The Corcoran

It was Labor Day Weekend (that's the one at the end of the summer, yes?) It meant the end of all kinds of things: super-cooled office environments,  tank tops, and free Saturdays at the Corcoran. If there was ever a time to gather rosebuds while I might, this was it.

On the steps of the neat square Beaux-Arts building, an artist was crouched.  Earbuds in his ears, he was laying out blocks of color for a portrait of George Washington, riffing on Gilbert Stuart's classic. 

The Corcoran is a college as well as a gallery, and the atrium has an elegant, intimate feel.  A group was sketching from a model in one half; the other was taken up by a cafe.  I had just biked in from Arlington, so went to get some water before art. It was blood-warm from the fountain and as I raised my head a burst of song rang out through the atrium.

Really, there's only one thing to do when you hear a distant strain of music.  I followed.  Upstairs I found two choirs in handsome black and magenta.  The Washington Revels were presenting their program of America music: Ren-fest-sounding songs of the American Revolution, spine-tingling spirituals, and apocalyptic shape-note hymns.

I hunkered down to watch the singing beside a striking sculpture, all feathers and claws in black metal.  As soon as I saw the comical sculpted eye, though, the figure of a bird flying through reeds leaped out, and the effect was ruined.

After the concert I wandered around the upstairs level, which was entirely dedicated to Chuck Close.  He's the one who does those portraits made of multicolored squares ("Hey, that's so derivative!" I though, before realizing it was the opposite). Close has been around for a while - long enough to have anticipated in mindboggling manuality the techniques that were to become standard in computer printing technology. I didn't think to check the dates, so I don't know if he was deterred or discouraged by the fact that Photoshop made it possible to do in microseconds what he accomplished with so much labor, but the labor did seem to be at least half the point of the exhibition.

The information labels left a lot to be desired.  Poorly placed, they jammed visitors trying to read them into corners, and took a weirdly reverential tone toward Close himself.  They referred to one work (according to my somewhat illegible notes) with the statistically improbably phrase "typically important." In all, I came away respectful, but strangely unmoved.

All of the other upstairs galleries were closed, but my tour of the permanent galleries downstairs began with a really delightful exhibition of early American art.  This kind of exhibit is one of the real strengths of smaller galleries, showcasing not beauty or even importance but sheer overflowing personality. Rembrandt Peale's portrait of Joseph Outen Bogart resembles an early Photoshop disaster, Charles King's deadpan Artist's Cupboard (including the book "On a Vegetable Diet" and a stack of unpaid bills) is as accurate as ever, and Joshua Johnson's portrait of Grace Allison McCurdy and her daughters is stop-you-from-across-the-room beautiful. A Light On the Sea appears at first glance as being a portrait of a sailor cross-dressing on shore leave.  And the final standout, to me, was Cecilia Beaux's Sita and Sarita, which is possibly the most subversive thing I've ever seen.

For the most part the paintings had the immediate presence of being in someone's home rather than the occasionally clinical feel of museum works.  But why were some hung so high on the walls?  One Sargent painting appeared curiously elongated, as it were meant to be hung above eye level - but that was right there in front of the viewers.

The European galleries weren't quite as engaging as the American ones, although I did enjoy hearing a mother telling her enrapt six-year-old daughter what was so cool about impressionist art. "The farther away you go, the more detail you see." The daughter backed away from the painting, squeezing her eyes shut.  "I see it!  I see it!" she yelled joyfully. The Dutch room was very dark, the English painters got carried away with sfumato, and although I usually don't give a damn about French art, Jean-Jacques Henner's "Standing Woman" was so notable that it doesn't appear to have any images online.

The other galleries included a claustrophobogenic little closet with what appears to be the sweepings from the desk of Olga Hirshhorn and a collection of bronzes which, though varied and intriguing, weren't really a medium that spins my wheels. Lachaise's massive female torso, though, made me realize something.  Women's rights were set back millennia when Venus popped up in Milo missing her hands.  Seriously, how is this trend of depicting women from the neck to the thighs anything but gruesome?

SYNOPSIS
Place: The Corcoran Gallery of Art
Pros: The really kick-ass American art collection
Cons: Ten bucks!
Definitely Check Out: Sita and Sarita
Rating: 7/10 chalk drawings of Washington

The Illegible Past: The National Archives

I had been all day in an office, and the cold had seeped into my bones. For the most part DC's museums are unkind to the city's population of nine-to-fivers.  Open during business hours, they debar anyone who's bound to the clock from sampling the city's cultural delights during the week.

The National Archives is an exception*, and in the time it took me to get from the office to the handsome square building just before the Mall, the summer heat had thawed me just enough to render the air conditioning a welcome respite.

There were no lines to get in. In high spring touring season I've seen lines stretch around the block as the schoolkids take their turns gawking at the US Constitution. Evening in late summer, however, meant I had the place as nearly to myself as anything ever gets on the museum circuit.  Getting in to the Archives is not tremendously straightforward - a side door lets you in past security to what appears to be a basement - but at least it's well signed.

Being a museum is, after all, not the primary purpose of the archives.  Perhaps aware of this, and perhaps seeking to defuse a reputation as boring or inaccessible, the Archives has poured its heart (and huge wads of cash) into the construction of its star exhibit: Discovering The Civil War. A full-length screen greets visitors with a pleasant young archivist stepping out of the stacks to offer tantalizing tastes of the stories on offer. It resembles nothing so much as an NPC one encounters in a video game, offering hints for the road ahead. "Two thirteenth amendments?" "A treason trial for resisting slavery?"

The exhibit itself is all walls - and no wonder, they need every inch of vertical space they can get. Titles, pull quotes, colored backgrounds (blue and grey make an appearance but do not dominate), blown-up photographs and a general high-budget design make the exhibit extremely visitor-friendly. Large imitation post-its ask questions about the documents on offer.  The Socratic method in a museum exhibit risks being twee, but the Archives pulls it off.  Its notes read like the questions of a good teacher.

Now if only the documents weren't so damn illegible! They are the stars of this exhibit, and there are some real doozies - John Brown's provisional constitution, Lee's resignation letter, both 13th amendments.  But the handwriting and occasionally the printing are so crabbed that I have to stare and sound out every word, a process that fills me with incoherent rage. In some place there are listening stations. Of all things to read, the declaration of secession?! It's printed! The readings from letters succeed rather better.  Like the photographs, the letters produce the familiar footsteps-on-the-grave frisson, that shudder of recognition that those who have been swallowed by time are as real and as whole as you.

The exhibit really shines in telling the lesser-known stories, like the petition from a group of Confederate women asking the Secretary of War to allow them to take up arms.  (He responds, rather snippily, "The men of the country it is to be hoped will suffice." My girl Sarah Emma Edmonds makes an appearance, as do the men of Christiana, indicted for treason for harboring fugitive slaves.

One of the most disarming sights of the whole exhibit was the stationary. I'm serious. The exhibit is very meta, celebrating archives and archival research equally with the period information it presents.  And without not only the content but the sight of these primary sources, how would I have known that the state of Alabama, after secession, couldn't be bothered to print new stationary? (An application for naturalization from a New Yorker appears on a form with word "UNITED" crossed out and "CONFEDERATE" written in).  Would I have quite grasped the deadly appropriateness of the fact that the Confederacy printed slaves on its money?

The exhibit is dotted with touch-screens, many of which make nods to modern means of organizing information.  Some succeed better than others (the quasi-facebook interface for tracking which officers had which relationships with others is unfortunately only confusing).  My favorite was the comic-book style recounting of the CSS Alabama's voyage, complete with spinnable globe that shows the ship's track to the other side of the world on its commerce-disrupting adventures.

This exhibit closed today, I'm afraid, so unless you want to head to Dearborn, MI in 2011 you won't be able to see it.  But part II opens in November, and not even the most illegible of letters will be enough to keep me away.

SYNOPSIS
Place: The National Archives, O'Brien Gallery
Pros: Fiesta of primary sources, highly accessible format.
Cons: Can't read the damn writing.
Definitely Check Out: the crossed-out naturalization document.
Rank: 9/10 rough drafts

On the Lawn: The White House, Part I

I found myself downtown with an hour to kill.  I decided to begin my museum project right then and there.  As the bells were tolling noon, I rounded the corner and found myself in front of the White House.  Where better to begin?

I'd first seen the White House from this spot - standing in Lafayette Park looking toward the front - when I was quite young. I remember being shocked at how accessible it all seemed.  Barred gates, sure.  Snipers on the roof, sure. But the fact remained that I, and an assortment of humanity, were milling about hardly a stone's throw from the President's seat of power. (I'm sure the snipers would have something to say about actual stone-throwing.)

The crowds before the gates were a curious combination of regulars and visitors. Tourists were snapping pictures of an obliging Connie, the Old Faithful of protestors. In front of the gates, two bike cops were talking to a blind woman cradling a pigeon against her chest.  A man went past talking into his cell phone like a mike.  Handsome South Asian familes posed for pictures under the statues. Federal workers hurried by - men in suits with their jackets off, walking with their bodies pitched towards each other to signal that they were in a meeting despite being technically walking through a park.

There clearly was some way to visit the White House - loose-walking tourists were clearly visible on its steps - but I had no idea what that way might be. The signs that dotted the front walk were mostly of the "YOU ARE HERE" variety.  "Yes, I know I'm here," I grumbled to myself.  "How do I get there?" Eventually I spotted a marker on the map for the White House visitor center, five blocks away, and set off for it.

That alone must reduce the load of casual visitors the White House bears.  There's no readily discernable flow from the park to the visitors' center.  The center itself is a single room, but one set up as a White House museum exhibit. The walls of the large room are lined with little cubicles focusing on different aspects of White House life.

There seemed to be no particular flow to the information. Some displays presented White House objects (like the desk made from recycled construction materials, reputedly by the White House's original architect himself) others presented a view of the sorts of events that take place there (like Charles and Diana looking supremely uncomfortable during a meeting with the Reagans). The objects and the photographs were often interesting in themselves, but the narrative accompanying them set new heights in banality. "Objects like this enhance the historical character of the White House."  Really?

I learned a few new things, largely to do with the home-economic bureaucracy of running the residence of Presidents.  For instance, each one gets his own china service. (I'd make the obligatory "China service" joke except that Google made it for me while I was searching for images under "china service white house") Anyway, what do they do with all the leftover china when the president leaves?  I also learned such domestic tidbits as that Mary Todd Lincoln overran her $20,000 decorating budget, Julia Gardiner Tyler introduced the waltz, and Harding wore some spectacular top hats.

I kept thinking that it would be interesting to see a display focusing on how a given space has changed through the years, and this was actually gratified.  A station presented the character, function, and changing appearance of the Green, Red, and Blue rooms. Like most of the White House (at least to judge by the visitor's center) they're each a farrago of styles, but even in their chaos they change over the years.

I never got beyond the visitor center, for as I discovered at last, the only way to get into the White House itself is to go through your Member of Congress, not more than 6 months and not less than 30 days in advance. So when I went home I wrote to Eleanor Holmes-Norton requesting a tour.  I requested one of the Capitol and the Pentagon while I was at it.  Apparently the wait is several months, so you'll probably be waiting a while to hear the results.

SYNOPSIS
Place: White House - Lafayette Park and Visitor Center
Pros: The majesty and absurdity of trying to combine history with livability.
Cons: It's not nearly as accessible as it looks.
Definitely Check Out: Visitors staring across the lawn and trying to spot the roof snipers.
Rank: 4/10 squirrels