Smithsonian.com

One morning still in a sleep-induced fog, I venture over to the Hirshhorn Museum.

There, I spiral into yet another dream sequence. Sheep, passing by in a herd, beg to be counted and the sight of a man’s chest rising and falling as he sleeps lulls me into synchronizing my own breath with his. Suddenly, I’m barreling around mountains in a train that’s passing through tunnels.

Or are those blackouts just my heavy eyelids blinking? I wouldn’t doubt it. Someone’s rattling in a dull monotone from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the background, and not the part about the madeleine. That part I liked.

Next, I’m off the train and walking through a beam of light bursting through a smoky haze. Yikes! Two men are wrestling in the nude.

And, now, a weird creature with the head of David Bowie and the body of a doll appears. Really?

Bowie’s spouting off orders, but I don’t stick around to find out why because King Kong’s Fay Wray is in one of her screaming fits. She’s convulsing as if she’s being exorcised.

Not long after Wray’s screams fade, I’m hopping through some colorful video game world listening to soundtracks of birds chirping and water rushing. I follow a crowd to a light at the end of a tunnel, ride an escalator down a floor, pass through a revolving door and I’m spit out onto the sidewalk.

Was it all a dream? No. It was the museum’s exhibition “The Cinema Effect: Dreams”—a dark labyrinth of 20 film installations that plays out like a highbrow haunted house, and mentally jars my perception of fact and fiction, and dream and reality.

Now my life seems more fiction than fact, a film in the making. Could that street vendor and those guys unloading the truck be part of the plot? I was putty in the curators’ hands, one of whom said, “The cinematic is in the way we perceive the world, in the way we speak, in the way we dream.”

The exhibit is open through May 11.(Still from Tony Oursler’s Switch, 1996. Image courtesy the artist. Still from Steve McQueen’s Bear, 1993, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist. Still from Christoph Girardet’s, Release, 1996, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist. Still from Stan Douglas’s, Overture, 1986. Image courtesy David Zwirner, New York. Still from Michael Bell-Smith’s Up and Away, 2006, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York.)

So what’s with the gray cookies jarred and on display in the Hirshhorn Museum’s lower-level galleries?

Last Friday, on my lunch break, hungry for cookies, I skipped over to the museum to find out and attended a gallery talk by National Gallery of Art curator Matthew Witkovsky on the exhibit.

Turns out the so-called “Corpus Wafers” are part of artist John Baldessari’s Cremation Project, in which the artist cremated all of his works executed between May 1953 and March 1966. He announced what he’d done in a local newspaper, photographed the event and baked cookies laced with the ashes.

“When you make a radical shift and you feel it’s absolutely radical, you want to get rid of everything before,” said Witkovsky. He noted that Baldessari’s burning of his works wasn’t totally original. Jasper Johns destroyed everything in 1954 before his American flag series.

But baking them into cookies? Come on. That’s original.

(Photograph courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Cremation Project, Corpus Wafers (With Text, Recipe and Documentation) John Baldessari, 1970)

This just in. The increasingly popular Indie rock band, Fools & Horses, is playing this Friday night at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Afterhours party. The group is making an unadvertized appearance; perhaps to keep their fans from swarming the museum and taking advantage of the low cover price of just $12.

Fools & Horses is generating quite a bit of buzz after being recognized by Monthly Music Magazine’s reader poll as the “Best Modern Rock Band.” XM Radio says: “These four guys have formulated an outline for writing great songs…give Fools & Horses your undivided attention!”

Afterhours is from 8 p.m. to midnight, Friday, October 5, 2007, $10 in advance, $12 at the door, Hirshhorn members admitted free. Also performing is DJ YumYum’s CRAP party at 10 pm, call 202 633-4629. At 10 p.m., take an “Insomniac tour” of the new Morris Louis Now exhibition.

(Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.)

Artist Morris Louis (1912-1962) produced 600 paintings in just eight years before succumbing to lung cancer at age 49. His method–to use acrylic paints to stain a canvas that hadn’t been primed so that the color seeped into the material–was an innovation that inspired a generation of artists. Tomorrow, a retrospective that includes 28 of his major works goes on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

In a gallery this morning, members of the press gathered before his 8 foot by 11 foot Point of Tranquility (1959-60) and the equally large Where (1960). Adjacent was Para III (1959), which was recently purchased by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, where the show originated. On the opposite wall was the 8.5 foot by nearly 12 foot Number 99 (1959-1960). The four huge paintings popped with a wonderful, vibrant energy against the museum’s stark white walls.

“This room is an explosion of color,” says Smithsonian curator Valerie Fletcher, “when you put [these works] together they talk to each other.”

There’s certainly an expressive dialogue going on in that gallery, and the observer comes away a richer soul for having been witness to it.

(Courtesy of the Hirshhorn: Para III, 1959, Acrylic resin [Magna] on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Gift of Marcella Louis Brenner.)