J'aime Ikea

So I struck out into the town on my own. Since I was last there several months ago a new Ikea store opened up in Bloomington. My anti-big-box retail-ism comes with the caveat that Scandinavian modernism doesn't count. Riding the escalator up to the showroom, the smell of leather, pine and linoleum opened my sinus passages. Once at the top I was momentarily paralyzed, while different parts of my body wanted to make for different directions. Which first: livingrooms, bedrooms, studies, or kitchens? Wandering the floor, I began to act out little domestic scenes to myself. "Oh, what a hard day at the ACLU--stretch--I think I'll beach myself on my $349 Allerum sofa--beige, naturally--and see what Charlie Rose is up to..." And " Uff-da neimen! My buffed aluminum fridge is empty! Time for a Gjetost run!" That's the way I would speak In an Ikea outfitted environment: all exclamation points, like a Rex Morgan, M.D. strip.

As if that wasn't indulgent enough, from there I went to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, near the Powderhorn neighborhood, where I first lived. I went to the museum twice actually, such was my jones.

My parents went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design which is afflilated with the Institute. They hid this fact from me until I had recieved early admission notification from the University, lest I decide they had lost all moral authority to dissuade me from going to art school. It probably wouldn't have changed my decision.

At the MIA I have a routine: start in the lowest floor to get past boring folk objet d'arts (antique metal piggy banks? Man-purse notwithstanding, I don't think I'm that bad) and work my way up, climaxing at the German expressionist art on the third floor. Standing in front of one of the Chuck Close paintings, my cell vibrated.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Grant? Where are you?"

"Um, M.I.A."

"You're Missing In Action?"

"Well...yes, and no, I'm at the Mpls Insitute of Arts."

"Oh, okay. Howabout you meet us for dinner when you are done, then?"

I hadn't thought of it that way, Missing In Action. I am a casualty of museum culture.

When I approached the second floor, terror struck. Most of the South Asian galleries were closed. I hurried past the jade collection and found, much to my moksha, that my favorite sculpture was still on view: The Gandharan Buddha. Gandhara was a region in what is now Afghanistan. It marked the furthest extent of the conquests of Alexander the great. After his death, his empire quickly disintegrated into fiefs held by his Greek generals. Gandhara remained an outpost of Hellenistic influence through the Roman empire, when it served as a trading corridor between eastern and western cultures. This Buddha shows the mutual penetration of Helenistic and Asian traditions in this region. The sculpture is beautiful, not only aesthetically, but sexually, even. His nose is aquiline, and his eyes stare laconically from under long, hooded lids. His lips are cupid-bowed like you would see on any Greek or Roman sculpture and his ushnisha or "special Buddha brain" that shows up so often as a lump atop his head like a birth defect, is treated here as a top knot for a Greek do.

Beauty is the thing. But, I also like the metaphor of the statue. It shows the instability and human constitution of all things in the social world. Here the Buddha takes on the form of the people who created it, as all gods and political theories invariably reflect the identity of those who created them. This isn't some masturbatory Po Mo argument, facts about the natural world may indeed be objective, but no human institution ever is. Human institutions, whether politics, religion or the definition of marriage, can be and constantly are being redefined. Those who gesture at essentialism and say "America is inherently this" or "Marriage is inherently that" are simply defending the status quo. Nothing is inherently anything. "We are condemned to be free" dammit. Human institutions can be reconstituted by us to mean whatever the hell we want them to mean, so lets make them work for us and not be uxorious towards the prejudices of dead men.

How could I let my description of a granite sculpture descend into such bathos?

When the Taliban fell in 2002 suddenly I noticed many Gandharan Buddha heads turning up on the auction market. Even at $200k, they seemed to be asking for too little. It would be terrible to see them fall into the mort main of private ownership.

Staring at certain paintings does things to me. I get a welling feeling under my chest, and it pushes up against my solar plexus. I try to be detached and distant from so much, but I cannot maintain this pose around, say, a John Singer Sargent.

So I walked on a cushion of air, two inches above the ground, back to my Honda and made for 394 to Minnetonka for dinner with the Grand'rents. I love them and am normally an attentive conversationalist, but when the Grandparents from both sides of the family (two on Dad's one on Mom's) get together, the convo becomes completely incoherent, full of non-sequiturs and sweeping generalizations. When this happens I frequently disengage, listening less to the actual content of the conversation, than its rhythm and tone, so I know when to offer my "mm-hmms" "reallys?," and "interestings."

"That Helen Keller is overrated, don't you think?"

"mm-hmm."

I was practicing this rhythm method when I noticed the waitresses sort of laughing at me. I realized what I had been doing. I had been staring at the sole male server the entire time. One flip of his wrist on this, an otherwise strapping lad, and I was an anthropologist, deconstructing his every move right up until I noticed the wait staff noticing me. My conclusion: Yeah. Minority? Who's a minority?