| At home we were tourists After graduating with honors from the University of Chicago, my little sister took a job parking planes for American Airlines, where she worked full or part time for the next seven years. She had her reasons. One obvious benefit was the deeply discounted travel, which she rarely used until the company decided— half way through her tour of duty— to extend flight benefits to siblings as well as more "immediate" family. We both hated Christmas ever since our dad died, so at the end of each year we planned a trip to somewhere in Europe to drink and smoke and look at art. We were always completely broke, so we stayed in hotels cheaper than the hostels, ate bread and cheese and drank Chianti out of the bottle at the tomb of Augustus before heading over to St. Peters for a rowdy drunken midnight mass. Or we had other profane adventures in other sacred monuments, other cities, other histories—other stories for another time. However, there's no proof of any of it. Years earlier, we'd learned to mistrust images from a camera. I helped my mom assemble a video collage to commemorate Shannon's college graduation (she was the youngest of four children, but the first to finish high school—never mind college—without dropping out). We argued bitterly over which images to use, which to exclude. The computerized miracle of a smudge pen erased blatant facial scars given Shannon by either my brother or the Maytag that spring morning; instead you saw a wide-eyed blond girl on the lawn with her puppy. A Latino friend saw the video and said, "you guys were the fucking Brady Bunch." Maybe we were. And maybe photos lie. So we went to Rome that first time without a camera. We wanted to see what we saw, and to remember what was—not to have our memories refashioned by what happened to be reflected and recorded in the chemical "evidence". I wanted to remember what the air felt like on the Capitoline, how it was different on the Palatine, what the ghosts smelled like, how things were spaced. I'd spent years studying ancient Rome in two dimensions—from maps, temple floor plans, elevations, engravings, artists renderings, reconstructions. I was tourist and tour guide in a place I'd never been, except in books, in papers, in dreams. The greatest artists have already painted and filmed and photographed Rome—what could I possibly record differently, what could I add to the visual record? Simply my presence, in that peculiar landscape, but even that was no longer necessary. I can always paste myself in later with PhotoShop. At the museums, my fellow travelers were unable to resist the temptation to photograph, to consume their view. Not even particularly Americans; people from everywhere, walking through churches, video running, walking through the galleries, recording "everything"—every picture, every painting, every thing they didn't see. Could these captured images possibly rival the professional quality of the reproductions available in the gift shop, or indeed, in any art history survey available in any used bookstore? Would these people pop the tape in the VCRs later, when they got home, and then see what they missed? Would they then enjoy the experience more? Or ever? The modern tourist doesn't want to learn or feel or be affected by art. He doesn't even want look at it. He wants only to consume art, along with everything else he sees, or doesn't see but suspects is there. Again, I have no proof of any of this.
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| | Last updated: January 2001 |