Museum. Architecture for people – without people.
(2000 and November 2004)
White rooms,
doorways leading
to other white rooms.
Pictures, straight-edged,
in the straight-edged
architecture of the rooms.
Muffled voices
in the carpeted room.
Intermittent sounds
detaching from what should have been
the underlying silence.
A hum
persistent
low key
elusory
pervasive
inescapable.
Barely perceptible.
One note
rising and falling.
Words in the becoming.
Shaping
almost
into words.
The pictures on the walls
white walls
doors – endless rows of doors –
fantastic structures
architecture
for people, without people.
Denying personality
denying individuality
submitted
to a precise
mathematical order.
But observed by people
coming and going.
And always
the hum.
A fluorescent fixture hum,
a subtle sound
pervasive,
dying down, returning,
as one moves in search
from room to room
before circling in
to the source,
to a small black man
dressed in black
standing in a doorway.
Black Habakuk.
He stands there
apparently
motionless.
Only his eyes
follow
the comings and goings,
lips barely moving
to let the hum escape.
A dirge,
from somewhere deep within.
Words
but are they words?
surfacing like evanescent
ripples on a deep dark pool.
Words seem to form
but then trail off,
dissolve.
Words you know you know
but that refuse
to let themselves
be captured.
The hum goes on
without beginning
without end
imperceptibly
rising and falling
an all-pervasive sound.
The hum
that tantalizing hum.
What is it
what are the words
where are they going.
I think, for a moment,
he is part of the show,
an installation –
black against the white,
a counterpoint to the rigidity
of straight-line architecture –
and counterpoint he was
standing almost motionless,
his body sometimes arching
with his inner music.
An age-old lament of people in captivity,
captive here of museum walls,
of pictures meaningless perhaps to him
and in the end
perhaps to me.
For what I remembered afterwards
was not the pictures
but this human being
and his hum.
Erika Bizzarri 