Sunday Outing at OSU

My husband and I had another Sunday outing making that three Sundays in a row we’ve had plans (which is a rare thing for us indeed!). The first event that was penciled in was The Ohio State Marching Band Hometown Concert, which was scheduled for mid-afternoon.

The Wexner Center

Since that left the whole morning free, and we still hadn’t been to the Wexner Center to see the Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer and Maya Lin exhibit, we went there first. It’s difficult to know what to say about the exhibit. It’s colorful (Inflammatory Essays);

it’s thought-provoking (Truisms),

and it’s very detailed (Folding the Chesapeake).

The “details” can’t really be appreciated unless you see them in person. Picture like a million glass marbles or beads spread across the floor crawling up to the ceiling. My artist friend, Amy, is one of the installers who helped glue them all down, and for that, I give her a huge amount of credit. If someone had shown me the schematic, handed me a bottle of glue and told me I had like two weeks or so to make the space look like the drawing, I would have told them they were crazy, or I probably would have gone crazy.

I think being an art installer is very much an underappreciated and underpaid job. When you see exhibits like Maya Lin’s you have to think the installers deserve to be paid more than they do for the care they take in handling the art (which Amy said is definitely one of the perks since the general public certainly can’t touch priceless works), and then the attention they pay to detail when it comes to reconstructing the puzzle.

Of the three installations, my favorite was Jenny Holzer’s Truisms.  According to the exhibit description, “…Holzer produced Truisms: concise one-liners written anonymously and designed to condense difficult and contentious concepts into seemingly straightforward statements of fact.

Originally written in BIC pen on lined paper, Truisms existed as Holzer’s personal distillations of large philosophical ideas. Later, however, she printed them on rectangular white broad-sheets and posted them around New York City, pasting them up in telephone booths, in subway stations, and on walls and buildings, often working in the early morning hours to remain anonymous.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the nearly 300 maxims that make up Truisms began to appear not just on posters, but also on T-shirts, stickers, condoms, benches, LED tickers, and various other language-based media.”

I’m not sure if all 300 were there in this exhibit as the list repeats, but I read as many as I could and hopefully I can find the complete list somewhere (I love lists, and I love rules to live by). 

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~field/holzer/truisms.txt

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Since most of the Wexner exhibit is just a repeat of lots of text, it didn’t take even close to two hours to see the entire installation. We browsed the bookstore for a little while, but then to fill the remaining time until the concert started, we wandered over to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum (next door to the Wexner Center). The current exhibit is: Ladies First: A Century of Women's Innovations in Comics and Cartoon Art November 2, 2019 - May 3, 2020.

Though I’m not really into politics and quite a lot of the exhibit (at least in one room) is a pretty comprehensive display of political cartoons (from about the last 50 years or so), I very much enjoyed looking around. There were quite a few I had never seen (like all the ones from MAD magazine), and most were worthy of a laugh or two – even those mocking the presidents I liked (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, etc.). Ladies First main exhibit.

I read somewhere that Nixon’s face was a cartoonist’s dream come true because so little distortion needed to be done. I ended up spending so long looking at all the political art that I had to quickly skim the Ladies First main exhibit.

The Ohio State Marching Band Hometown Concert

We eventually made our way over to the Mershon Auditorium (where we have previously seen famous alumnus like comedian, Richard Lewis, photographer, Annie Leibovitz, and filmmaker, Richard Linklater). This time we were there to see the OSU marching band perform a varied program of movie musicals, pop music, and even cartoon classics (if you can call “Sponge Bob Square Pants” a classic).

Since this is a concert and half the fun of seeing the band perform is to watch them create the various formations on the field, those were shown on a screen during the performances. Probably my favorite of those was the rocket formations honoring the anniversary of the moon landing earlier this summer.

I especially enjoyed the impressive demonstrations by OSU’s two drum majors, Konner Barr and little old 5’2” Morgan Davis (proof that you don’t have to be tall to be a drum major).

Nary a baton was dropped and there were some pretty awesome gymnastics performed to catch it at times.

Memories of my sister and I pretending with our own batons floated through my head as I watched the pair up on stage. I was also fondly remembering a friend (who was only a few inches taller than me) who himself was a drum major when we were in high school.

As these are student performers, they’re not above a few unscripted antics – like the repeated chorus from “Hey Jude” at least a couple times between songs, which at one point, the announcer had to do his best and try to introduce the next song over that. At least everyone seemed to have a good sense of humor.

If you’ve never been lucky enough to attend a game or a skull session, or even see the band march through the annual state fair every summer, this is certainly the next best thing (and way more affordable $$ than attending a game $$$). TBDBITL!