Today I am in the city. I'm sitting with my back against the statue of Grant looking down the mall toward the Washington monument. In the distance I can see the corner of the Lincoln Memorial too. Both of my projects this semester require research at thhe library of Congress, so I'm trying to get into the habit of going there every Tuesday and Wednesday. Today's trip has been a learning experience. The records I need are off location and have to be ordered. So, I'm blogging while I wait for the containers to get here.

I really like going to the library of Congress because I always see something new. Today it was a statue of Gallatin standing in front of the treasurey dept. The inscription calls him a financial genious and he looks pretty proud of himself. I like the statue of Madison just to the left of the entrance inside the library better. He looks a little more down to earth (besides that he is a giant marble statue).

I skipped going to see Renquist. Does anyone else think it's creepy these guys have viewings like this? But, I did go to the Visual Music exhibit at the Hirshhorn. The exhibit was interesting, but not really convincing. I don't buy the idea that visual art can be elevated to the abstract and sublime in the same way as music. Sounds lend themselves to abstraction. We deal with white noise and sounds that inspire feelings, even when we don't know what they mean. Jackson Pollock defended his visual abstractions by compairing them to fields of flowers (what meaning is there in a field of flowers?). But we all know a flower is a flower, and vision is a sense that is centered on definition. When vision is blurry, there is a problem. So why should a person try to make abstract visual arts the same way we would make music?