Partly Cloudy, 64°
A Facilities Management employee unwittingly disposed of every single piece of art on display at a recent student gallery show in the List Art Building.
The show, for which the 25 exhibited pieces were selected out of 80 submitted works, was entitled "Beyond Representation: Poststructuralist Beauty for Posthumanist Times." It opened this past Friday and was accidentally thrown out on Tuesday.
The custodian reputedly responsible for the destruction, Tony Batista, seemed a little confused about what had happened.
"Ruined an art show? No, no, you have the wrong guy," Batista said. "Tuesday I was cleaning out List, sure. Mostly routine stuff. Oh, and then- wow, you wouldn't believe it. I've cleaned up parties, but this one was a rager. A big paper-m�ché fight, pants tacked onto the wall, and one kid must have got so mad he bend a bunch of clothing hangers and just threw 'em on the floor. But you know me, I don't get steamed. Kids is kids."
The director of the David Winton Bell Gallery, Gail Kopachene-Eizentein, voiced a different perspective.
"Modern times bring with them a bevy of problems of identity and representation, the heuristic of which might only be expressed in terms comprehensible to the most inwardly attuned among us. As I contemplate Mr. Batista's ignorance and blindness to the joys of exposing to the outer world that very world's cure, I must be saddened only by his own loss."
Yet Batista has difficulty acknowledging that he threw out art to begin with.
"I see art in that building, sure," he said. "There's paintings on the wall- sometimes of naked ladies! But they don't run the place too good. Some girl invited her friends over and they were all eating pancakes with maple syrup and smoking cigarettes. Then they got a call and rushed right out of there, but they left all their half-smoked cigarettes to stick to a piece of paper that was lying around. How that paper got hung to the wall, I'll never know- but I'll be damned if I let a wall stay dirty on my watch!"
Thalia Rialdo '10, the creator of the described work, was deeply upset. "My piece conveyed the endless futility of trying to break out of the fatality of nature's plan. That's why its cigarettes, having suffered varying levels of combustion, are arranged in a circle. We start life as pure as an untouched cigarette, are burned away by the years and our wrongdoing, and finish where we started, at nonexistence, only at this point as mere filter and ash," Rialdo said, tears welling in her eyes.
When asked if she was ready to do artwork again, Rialdo explained that it depended on a variety of factors. "Am I feeling hatred? Am I feeling love? Is there something in this room that I can smoke and then glue to a canvas?"
When asked for final thoughts, Batista turned wistful. "There are certain things a man begins to wonder as he cleans a building like this," he said, his eyes tracing the rays of the sun. "Most of all, how the hell does so much trash accumulate in such random places?"
"I guess there are some things," added Batista, "that life prefers to leave as mysteries."
