Ivey Rucket brings us out of our mundane tasks and into the galleries with a reminder of why art matters.
By Ivey Rucket, Senior Manager of Digital Communications, High Museum of Art
It was ten o’clock on an oppressively hot morning and I had just spent the past hour swapping unproductive emails with the accounts receivable department of a search engine company. I am withholding the name of the company, but antitrust laws aside, you probably know what it is. Faced with the existential dread of having to waste another moment sending emails into a deliberately labyrinthine void, I decided to clear my mind with a trip into the museum.
Patches of tree-filtered sunlight streamed through the windows as I climbed the concrete stairs to the Skyway Level and made my way into a cool, quiet gallery. I was searching for what Duncan Phillips described as “the two great gifts of emotion” that art can offer — “the emotion of recognition and the emotion of escape. Both take us out of the boundaries of self.” [1]
As an employee of the High, I am fortunate to have regular access to a bottomless well of recognition and escape. And because I grew up in Atlanta, my relationship with the museum began well before I was hired. When I was sixteen years old, on a school trip to the High, I stumbled upon a kinetic sculpture by Rebecca Horn titled Drunken Beetle.[2] The work was a delicate structure made of typewriter ribbons and steel. It held two small glasses filled with Fernet-Branca, and it thrashed against the wall in a slow, relentless, methodical loop.