Randall 1

“I” am going to do this. “I” am going to write this paper. “I”will do this.

I heard something snap when I slipped on sleet in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I feared it was a bone, and waited a moment expecting a wave of pain to wash over me. Having never broken a bone before I wasn’t sure if the pain happened instantly or a few seconds later. Seconds passed, however, and I felt hardly an ebb, just a cloying tickle in my pocket. Not the kind men of a certain age experience in heated situations, but my pencil—my now broken note taking pencil. In certain situations I would withhold all outward expressions of my frustration for the sake of appearances, but seeing as I was traveling alone and there were few others in the vicinity, I let out a quiet four letter word.

By nature I’m a rather gloomy person, and getting off to this poor start set me in one of my dark and unproductive moods. I stood there for a moment contemplating ways to get out of this assignment and the class if necessary. Finally, I recalled the last line of my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Of course Gatsby died and no one mourned him, but I found strength in this quote nevertheless.

So I beat on. I walked up to the building and stepped through the sliding glass doors. They made that familiar whoosh as they shut behind me and I found myself at the beginning of a long foyer. Various advertisements for upcoming exhibits lined the walls like windows in a conservatory, tiny glimpses into the museum’s future. Throngs of people hugged the walls talking. Their many voices coalesced into a singular dull murmur that pervaded the air. I enjoyed the constant hum as I made my way to the front desk.

The receptionist was an affable young woman with a high pitched, vaguely shrill voice. She rung up tickets with an enthusiasm that bordered on obsessiveness. I imagined she was an Art History Major in college, who lived her whole life to one day work at museum like this one. Her enthusiasm infected like a disease, and suddenly I was excited to be in this cathedral of culture.

But I soon struggled with the urge to feel overwhelmed as I stepped past the gate and entered the atrium. It was immense, and as the largest room in the museum it was difficult to navigate. Maybe the architect hoped for a minimalistic layout when he designed the atrium, but I found it unnecessarily confusing. I longed for musty, cramped hallways that perhaps were not appealing to the eye, but gave me only two directions in which to travel—forward and back.

So I wondered for a bit confused and lost, avoiding tripping over little kids who presumed to call the museum their playground. Eventually a sign that read 21st Century art silently beckoned. I like the sound of that I thought. If the pieces come from the present era they will likely be sexy and sophisticated. It will be art that I won’t have to guess at, but will understand on some guttural level.

I answered the sign’s beckoning and followed a short hallway to the exhibit. Again I found myself wandering, but wandering on a semi guided path. I followed a succession of paintings I arbitrarily planned in my head. First I’ll look at this one, then this one, and then this one, and so on. But then my wandering what interrupted by a beautiful woman. The woman in “La Grande Odalisque” from the series “Les Femmes du Maroc.”

There she was on the wall. MyMorrocan Mona Lisa. Staring at me blankly with melancholy eyes. I looked away for a moment abashed, but soon set my gaze on her once again, mesmerized by her stare. This painting had annexed me and made me its prisoner.

It’s a rather straightforward piece objectively, just another portrait of a half-naked woman. The kind that millions of masturbatory men have painted immemorially. But this one is different. Instead of the typical pale, blond, virginal maiden with perky breasts who positions herself in vaguely sexual poses or stands inexplicably outdoors, obvious to her own nudity, this woman shows a measure of modesty. Her head is covered with a canvas colored wrapping not unlike the hijabs that Muslim women wear. Around her body is a bed sheet that appears to be made of the same material. She reclines comfortably upon an ambiguous surface with her back turned, hiding her nakedness. Nevertheless she peers at me over her shoulder with those melancholy eyes. But despite her modestly this woman is not immaculate. Her skin is stained with so many words.

All over her face and body are words I cannot understand. But whatstruck me most was the exactness of their form. The characters are exceedingly small yet they seemed to have been scrawled across her skin with an obsessive attention to details.The artist, whoever he was, possessed the same enthusiasm as the affable woman at the front desk. That kind where you’re so happy to be doing whatever you’re doing because you’ve lived your whole life for it. Suddenly I needed to know the first thing about this artist.

LallaEssaydi is not a very masculine sounding name, perhaps because it is a woman’s name. After my visit to the museum I did a bit of research and learned that she is an accomplished Moroccan artist whose work has been featured in some of the finest galleries in the world. Her paintings are known for superimposing Islamic calligraphy on women’s bodies to draw attention to the lives and experiences of Muslim women.

Her process begins with a memory of her childhood in Morocco, and then after scrutinizing those memories under the microscope of her adulthood, they burgeon into ideas infinitely more complex. From there she has the germ of a new painting in hand, and then simply does what comes naturally.

But at the core of Essaydi’s work is the wish to “document actual spaces;” public spaces like the work place, and private ones like the home. Men have dominated both spaces traditionally and Essaydi’s work seeks to discover and document the place of women in them.

With this new information I developed an even greater appreciation for the “La Grande Odalisque,” but I also felt dejected that I had failed to grasp the larger political meaning of the piece initially. I was simply drawn to those melancholy eyes.