i just finished a rough, but good-enough-for-now, comment function for this here page. feel encouraged to make a comment below. i need to add at least one more line to this entry so it'll be big enough for the dropcap to work.

we spent a good portion of the waking hours of our spanish vacation sitting in cafes and bars. cafe in the day and vino at night was pretty much the mantra. nevertheless, we did manage to make it out to no less than three art museums: the guggenheim in bilbao and the prado and reina sofia in madrid.

in all of three we saw works by big guns: picasso (guernica!), dali, miró, goya, velazquez, and modern folks like rothko and de kooning. still, the piece that's been sticking with me, periodically popping up in thought, is by some contemporary sculptor whose name i can't recall.

when you turn the corner and stroll into the room you see a wall-sized, group of wooden shelving units filled with books. upon a moments examination you realize that the shelves are not actually lined with books, they're filled with variably-sized slabs of wood, crowded together on every shelf. the "books" are glued into place in a collage-like manner that is rough and angular, but reflects a polished touch. both the shelving unit and the "books" are of essentially the same dark brown hue. on a purely aesthetic level, it was beautiful and modern and stylistically unlike any other object i've seen in a museum.

i'm not completely clear what the significance of this piece is for me, though i have some vague notions, and i think that's why it interests me. also, and i'm maybe pausing here in describing the piece for this very reason, i think i want to write about it because sometimes through writing you can unwind and unpack a thicket of ideas to stumble upon what you really think but didn't know you thought.

[related sidenote: if i can get to the point where i'm always doing a job that i don't know how to do, i think i'll be more satisfied.]

so far here's as close as i can get to verbalizing the appeal of the "bookshelf" sculpture. books are made of trees just as the bookshelf is made of trees. so in a way the piece points out that an everyday shelf full of books could be construed as a wooden sculpture. to take it one step further, the information contained in the books, all of those precious and painstakingly-produced ideas, are just manipulated trees. we're like primitive people making tools out of the resources around us. all of the knowledge and culture captured in a bookshelf is just wood without the decoding system that lies so ephermally in our collective mind.

on the other hand, this thing isn't even a bookshelf at all — it's an abstract sculpture. the more i look at it, the less it looks like a bookshelf. i start to wonder if anyone else sees it that way at all.

no, no, it's definitely supposed to look like a bookshelf. then i start to think that the artist intended me to think, well if my mind can make this thing into a bookshelf, then how much am i making these walls and these other paintings and these other people into the experience of being at an art museum.

or maybe it's just a paean to the simple beauty of common household objects. or you could do an environmentalist interpretation: it's pointing out the way we're using trees to manufacture books and yet really even recall the source material. or an anti-technology statement by calling attention to the beauty of the bookshelf form, as opposed to the online library that may soon replace it.

or maybe it's just a simple blank slate, like an empty bookshelf, that works pretty well for holding a broad variety of ideas.

we just returned from 2 and half weeks in spain. and we have photos to prove it: