In art galleries, I always get scolded by the gallery security man. You know the man. It’s always the same kind of man. An elderly pale gent who looks like he might have recently been British or declared dead. He scuttles out from some invisible place and says: “You’re standing too close. I don’t like the way you’re standing. Don’t touch the art.” It always happens. If I can go to an art gallery and not be visited by the art security man, I’m surprised, and I feel as if I must have done something wrong. The first time this sort of thing happened I was in the MOMA in New York and I love Brancusi and there’s a sculpture called “Sculpture for the Blind” and it looks like an egg and it’s giant and it screams to be touched. It’s called “Sculpture for the Blind” for chrissakes. So I touched it. I couldn’t help myself. How could I? It was meant to be tactile. Well the guard came out and he was furious and humorless and told me that if I didn’t watch myself I would be ejected from the museum. Nice.

With much less of an excuse, when I saw the Narmer Palette in Toronto, I touched it. Again I couldn’t help myself. It was the oldest thing I had ever seen. It’s something like 5500 years old. I wanted to touch something that old. It’s not smart. But I think it was an ordinary human instinct. And it was thrilling. I didn’t get caught that time. But it isn’t usually like that. I respect art. I don’t want to destroy it. I know that you shouldn’t touch paintings. And I don’t. But still, I stand too close, still I look too closely at the brush strokes. I want to see things I can’t see in textbooks. I want to see where hairs of the brush stick in the paint. I want to look for fingerprints. I want to see pencil marks show through.

I usually get in trouble at plays too. I love and respect theatre. But that doesn’t save me from my trouble. In University I went and saw a University production by Chekov. I think it was called the Seagull. I went with my girlfriend at the time. We got on so well and had the same sense of humor and were equally inappropriate. We spent Saturday mornings together watching the Tick. The play started so heavy, so black, and so dense. And the first line, delivered by a woman all in black – or the first line I remember –, was “I am in mourning for my life.” Perhaps it was that it was so heavy-handed, perhaps it was that the young actress was so deadpan, perhaps it was the alcohol we had consumed before going, but I thought this was deliciously funny and I laughed hard but quiet which, disastrously, caused me to snort. This set my girlfriend to laughing. And we laughed quietly but vigorously through the entire play. I’m sure Chekov would not have been pleased. I’m sure the people beside us were not pleased. It wasn’t hard to tell. There were the evil looks. And then there was the man that said he wasn’t pleased. All of this made everything funnier. Sure it was juvenile. Like telling dirty jokes in church. That was the funniest play I’ve ever seen.

I haven’t had a chance to act out, to act up, to get in trouble. I need to get myself in trouble, I think. I am in mourning for my life. C’mon. Try not to laugh. Well, Chekov might not have intended to make me laugh; but I’m still quite sure that Brancusi wanted me to touch.

SS