Gallery 201

Three Windows to Other Worlds

A Californian man visited Disneyland every day for 8 years. After his hospital shift ended at 3pm he’d go straight to the park. His run of 2,995 consecutive visits only ended when the pandemic shut the gates.

I’d be tempted to mock this fellow except that most winter days I visit my Disneyland equivalent: the Museum of Modern Art.

MoMA is on West 53rd Street, and I live over on East 34th. I could take the subway but prefer the 2-mile walk through midtown; the city’s caffeine-chaos is energizing.

I keep my visits unique by choosing different galleries on each occasion. Since they rotate the exhibits on a seasonal basis, there’s always something new to see.

Most of the galleries in the museum are quite expansive, but Gallery 201 is a small room with just three paintings on display.

The large galleries have dark-suited museum guards on watch; I feel sorry for the staff, as these sentinels are not permitted to sit during their shifts.

But this tiny space is unguarded. It feels less like a gallery and more like a chapel: a room with three windows into other worlds.

Some anonymous curator selected these particular paintings with no obvious theme. But years of fooling around with tarot cards have trained me to see any random images as a meaningful tarot spread.

The first painting is by Carlos Almaraz: “Solo Crash.” Almaraz made a series of these “crash” paintings set on LA’s elevated highways. Each is violent and yet spectacularly beautiful.

There’s a cartoonish aspect to this image: the car must have been traveling at incredible velocity to ricochet and then hurl so dramatically. It leaves a blurry motion-trail of red and yellow.

The next painting is “Chronic Hollow” by Ida Applebroog. It’s a multi-panel piece, a jigsaw puzzle. The artist notes in a separate caption that the inspiration for the painting was the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but nothing in the image directly indicates this.

Rather, the assembled work seems deliberately mysterious. What’s the significance of the girl in the grotesque mask? Or of the acrobats?

Unlike with the other two images, which were new to me, I don’t have an innocent eye for the final painting, since I’ve seen a couple of solo exhibitions of Matthew Wong’s work. He loved the work of Vincent van Gogh, which is clear in his vibrant expressionist style.

Wong died by suicide a few weeks after painting this in 2019. He titled it “Unknown Pleasures,” a reference to the gloom-rock album by Joy Division. The band’s singer Ian Curtis was a suicide, so Wong may already have been signaling his own distress.

Reading the three paintings as a single tarot spread, I see them as a call to take nothing in life for granted: to be prepared for the worst, and to stay strong.

“Pay attention. The world is both violent and spectacular; don’t turn away from either.“

Wong’s far-off mountain still symbolizes hope to me, even if he was unable to find any. That pure white summit beckons.

Fuck Disneyland. Tomorrow I will be back at the museum, to explore a different gallery. I will wake up expectant, with the hope of seeing some rare and strange new thing.

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