ManicDDaily

I’d like to blame it all on Steve Jobs, but the fact is that I was a bit of a rule bender even before I constantly carried a little portable camera on my phone.

In my defense, I don’t bend rules that make sense to me–I’d never walk on struggling grass, for example, or let my dog hinder the health of a city tree. But, lately, when it’s come to non-flash photography and museums (especially museums without competing post cards), I’ve found it a little hard to follow the straight and narrow.

It started in Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay where one buys a single pass to about six small town museums. I really enjoyed these museums, several of which were housed in Colonial buildings and showed wonderful artifacts and reproductions of artifacts of Colonial life or depicting Colonial life, especially when I could take little photos of them (as shown below.)

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Though there was also a sense sometimes that town curators were pushing just a bit too hard to give visitors their money’s worth. Take, for example, the Armadillos in the natural history portion of the Museo Municipal (otherwise devoted to Colonial furniture and armaments), the stuffed Caiman under a table and the framed 1950’s poster of the evolution of canine breeds.

This feeling of an overly-pushed curatorial envelope was intensified at the teeny Museo del Indios in Colonia, which primarily displayed shelves and shelves of stones, some of which seemed pretty certain to have been used in native slings. (Fine. I liked the rocks. But none of them looked like they would be hurt by non-flash photography.)

Maybe this past arbitrariness was what put my teeth on edge today at the much more sophisticated Malba, Museo de Artelatinoamericano de Buenos Aires. Or maybe it was the head lice. (One of my family members picked some up in a youth hostel and we have spent some portion of this trip making sure that they were all ALL gone)

Both factors came up in the context of a beautiful drawing by Rodin. The Delousing of the Siren, I mean, Toilette de la Sirene.

The drawing, part of a terrific Works on Paper exhibit, begged to meet my iPhone. But I had already been advised by one very handsome and incredibly fashionable museum guard on a lower floor, a guard whose coiffed hair and bored expression seemed ironically calculated for a shoot, that photography was forbidden.

The guard at the works on paper exhibit was also handsome and fashionable. I was not even certain that he was a guard, until he looked up from his cell phone and began to focus on me, at which point, a quintessential guardness seemed to come to the fore. (I smiled. Probably a mistake.)

Although, to tell the truth, he may not have been focusing on me at all. The fact is that the Rodin drawing also hung in the only room of that exhibition that had an upholstered bench.

What to do? As I walked into the other rooms of the exhibition (he stayed on the upholstered bench), I tried to figure out how to turn off the clicking noise on the iPhone camera. ((I ended up with several photos of the floor.)

Every time I walked back to the Rodin, there he was. Should I pretend I didn’t know the rule? It wasn’t like I was carrying a yellow card from the first guard, but, at a certain point, I seemed to have smiled just too darn much, and I couldn’t somehow snap.

Finally, we went to a completely different floor and exhibit–Christine Pippa, a woman who makes rather political art with laminated meat and dessicated cow’s blood. I was going to settle for a surreptitious photo of the meat, despite the effect on my stomach, just to get some of my own back. But the first guard, the one who had actually seen me with the camera, had been moved down to this lower gallery, and I’d still not figured out how to turn off the iPhone’s clicking noise.

In short, I gave up, until back in our room, online, on the Malba site, I found it—-La Toilette de la Sirene! A much nicer photo than I could ever have taken.

What makes it even better: everyone’s heads (and consciences) are clear.

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