Museum, 2007 Mixed media, bronze swarf, printed text
Museum is Bart’s visual response to a poem of the same name by Minneapolis writer Eric Lorberer. Bart interpreted the poem’s chief anxiety to be the relationship between beauty and danger, which she wanted to translate into physical form.
The golden box and its jewel-toned contents allude to medieval reliquaries. Those enticed by the box’s beauty who reach in will find its contents piercing: it holds strips of gemstone-colored paper on which Lorberer’s poem is printed in gold ink, along with sharp-edged slices of swarf—pieces of metal left over from the process of shaping Bart’s bronze bowls on a lathe.
MUSEUM by Eric Lorberer
SHH! SHH!
The hush, the red light.
Black angels
slung up in the sky like bats
the crippled boy
viewing the transfiguration.
Now eyes cut open.
The gash: dark weaponry
animated to destroy color.
The phone booth: ghosted Rome
empty of blood and bile.
In the triumph of death
even the skeletons have penises.
Angles on the angels are both sexes
and hard to play on the zither.
Their bodies are flames
you could descend and play again.
Seneca Falls:
a face peeled off, a welcome mat.
Dead calla lilies
finally born in the museum. MMMM NOR HUMS
The warp of spirit
cuts a frightening figure— STOP HUM
and wings of sheet music
you adore in heaven
the slash mark that is nobody’s halo.
START TYPING
TYPE TIL DING, MOVE CARRIAGE, SAY:
memorandum of fate
One must suffer in a secular way
the curve of sex
repeating movement through the palace window.
One: abolish all forms of royalty.
Then the eruptress could
breathe quickly
a carnival tune lately escaped
like the baby-riding bitch-lion
human chain
of snakeskin swallowing
she came in my mouth and it tasted salty.
Velàzquez said the face in the mirror is nothing.
You could put language in any mouth and it would still
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