Lately I have been thinking a lot of my travels in Europe at 21. How different it was in 1973, before cell phones and internet. How truly on our own we were, especially during the final month of our travels. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible to execute. My only communication home for 3 months was a sporatic postcard crumb trail. I tried to send a card at the train station every time we changed cities. But, with our night train crisscross journey through Europe, had something gone amiss, it would have be weeks before anyone would have known to start looking and hopefully the right city to look in. My son's girlfriend is spending inter-term in London. I have no doubt they are exchanging email and pictures regularly, if not phone calls.
My travels were during the summer of the Watergate hearings and all across Europe people would shake their heads at us with wry smiles, commenting on how naive Americans were to be surprised and outraged that a politician would lie and our simplistic optimism about life in general. I am sure I traveled with a permanent wide-eyed look, amazed at how history and art were infused in the daily lives of average people, not just the wealthy.
In Lausanne, Switzerland we stumbled upon an International Fiber Arts Biennial. Colorado State University had a strong fibers department, so I already new the discipline was expanding in exciting ways, but I was not prepared for the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, and others. It is her name that I remembered and her career that I followed from afar. My slides from the show are long gone, but I suspect that what I saw exhibited were pieces from her Abakans series. Their allusion to a human presence seem to foretell her later explorations of the figure and search for the individual within the masses. The Abakans would have appealed to my desire to define humanness, and my search for the common denominators of the masses expressed within the individual. As I watch my son's generation, with its new technology and connections, I wonder how our new connectivity will influence our sense of individuality vs. being an anonymous piece of humanity.
This fall Abakanowicz installed Agora in Grant Park in Chicago. More pictures and information can be found at http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl. It is a beautiful, comprehensive new site featuring her work and well worth the time spent exploring it.
