Not If, But When

My parents are visiting. We went to the Henry Art Gallery yesterday, the oldest art museum in Washington State and also currently my favorite. It seemed similar to (though a smidgen smaller than) the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is sort of funny (but not really) in that the founder was an art collector from Minneapolis (more funny huh than funny ha ha, I suppose). Currently on until Jan. 31, 2010 are two photography exhibits: Mappelthorpe’s early polaroids, and Eirik Johnson‘s large-scale photographs of northwest logging, fisheries, and the like. One piece from the permanent collection that has stuck in my mind is a 1990 sculpture entitled “Not If But When”: four gray cuckoo clocks with no numbers or hands each ticking away as below them hefty hammers and sickles swing frantically.