Art Rental Returns

Recently Oberlin students across campus—from North Field to the arb—received the dreaded email: “This is your first reminder that Art Rental return day is next Wednesday, Dec 10.” 

It’s been a long time since I’ve expressed my appreciation for art rental on this platform, but, in the absence, my love for this program has only grown. A few semesters ago, I wrote about a piece I received and hung directly across from my lofted Twin-XL, a reclining Bacchus who greeted me with a raised glass of wine each morning, noon, and night. Following that blog, I told myself that, to do each of these rentals justice, I would write a blog dedicated to each one. I wanted to be able to remember the pieces I’d had, to do a small bit of research on each of them, pushing them beyond mere decoration towards something more meaningful hung in the halls/walls of my part-time home. At this goal, I have failed rather miserably. 

In lieu of the more formal interventions I had planned, a brief recap: In the semesters since Bacchus I have had a small framed cigarette box (Nan Goldin) and a large sketch of a typewriter eraser (Claes Oldenburg). I didn't ever learn much about either piece, but I loved each of them. The Nan Goldin was tiny, and hung right above an armchair I had pushed and shoved into my French House dorm. Situated behind the chair, I didn't look at it all that often, but I liked knowing it was there.

The Oldenburg had a more outsized presence. It hung above my bed next to a bad watercolor painting of a rooster my friend from home had salvaged from the side of the road, some high school AP curriculum study gone wrong, and gifted to me the night before we both left for college. It has followed me ever since. On the walls of my Baldwin dorm room, the Oldenburg and the rooster were joined by a large charcoal drawing of Fran Lebowitz, gifted to me by the same friend during a Secret Santa exchange. Despite Fran's domineering stare, it was the Oldenburg that drew people when we brought them to our room for the first time. Due to the relative obscurity of typewriter erasers in our modern day and the intentional obscurity reinforced by Oldenburg through the magnification and presentation of the instrument floating in an empty field of white, most people couldn't identify it at first glance. We began asking people to guess when they entered. What do you think this is? we’d crow and they’d stand stumped before it, puzzling before finally throwing an answer out into the void: A bulls-eye? A drum? My personal favorite: A nipple tassel! 

This semester, instead of having just one art rental, my house has been graced with three. I am living in an on-campus house this semester, a lovely little blue thing with a porch and a roof that leads out from my room. I have three busy roommates, one feminine lamp, and too many walls to count, which we are slowly covering up with prints, paintings, and other decorations. Before the semester closes out—I write to you with only three weeks to go—I’d love to give you a tour of the art with which we’ve decorated our living room.

Walking in through the front door, you are greeted by a painting my roommate-from-last-year and housemate-from-this-year brought from home. A friend of her parents painted it and, during the traditional clean-up that occurs once college students flee the house, my friend had been offered the painting half as a parting gift, half as a we’re-giving-it-away-if-you-don’t-want-it. The painting is beautiful and we’re glad that she opted to take it. Split in two mirrored images, the left half of the painting shows a little man with a strange-squashed face holding up the silvery circle of the moon, the right half a similarly styled creature holds up the curve of a yellow sun. Every time I walk by the two men, I want to make up a story about them. I have yet to do so. 

Continuing to your left, you come across your first art rental. “Walking Man” depicts a lone figure, more of a silhouette, on an empty curve of parkway. Large trees bloom out over his head, benches line the path to his right. Recently, when looking more closely at the work with a friend, I noticed that one of the benches has been drawn from such a perspective that it looks like a wooden folding chair, the straight-on angle such that the traditionally three-dimensionally-represented bench becomes a series of flat lines drawn against a plane. "Walking Man" wasn’t a work that I particularly liked at first. It felt regular. Mundane. Beautiful with little substance. But as I’ve gotten to know it better, I’ve found I like it a great deal. I’ll miss it when it's gone.

Take a couple more steps to your left and you’ll see a series of buildings the same roommate/housemate brought back from her time abroad in Chile. Encased in small wooden frames, one red, one black, they go together, mirrored like the little men on the wall opposite. 

Three more steps and you’re in communion with the other two art rentals our house retrieved this past fall. First, my own, a sketch of a woman with a straight nose, a squiggle of hair across her forehead, wide eyes, small lips. Unremarkable in most ways except for her maker. This semester, I got the Picasso. Oberlin advertisement of the art rental always promotes that there is a chance you might get the Picasso in their collection. Until this semester, I believed it was a fiction. Unlike Bacchus, Picasso's woman and I don't make eye-contact, her gaze directed off to the right when I look at her head-on. Still, I like to think that we’ve become warmly acquainted if not fast friends.

Our final art rental sits on the wall opposite and is entirely inexplicable. A series of nine contained images, full of movement and color, connected in repeated shapes and images in a way that leans towards representation, but upon further reflection, is impossible to definitively link to any specific object. Though the Picasso holds a certain star-power, this rental, in its confusing intricacy, has been my favorite. 

Along the last wall is a series of pictures we’ve been cutting out of books: an upside-down elephant, a fox leaping through a starry sky, a chicken in the form of a storm cloud lording over a distressed flock, a blue angel cut from last semester's edition of Wilder Voice Magazine. 

And I would be remiss not to mention our most recent addition, a print we picked up from Ben Franklin the day before Thanksgiving break. The image shows four old woman in workout gear—leopard-print tiger-striped leotards pulled over sagging skin, athletic bands pushed up over wrinkled foreheads and holding back puffs of grey hair. There are four of them, in exact synchrony with the members of our house and, over the past week or so, we’ve been doing our best to look into the future. Which one will we be when we get up in years? Which one of us aligns most closely with which one of them?

This blog preserves a moment in time that won't exist in five days—soon our walls will be bare, awaiting that final art rental of that final semester. The program marks time, seasons in the short course of our lives here on campus. Different art has accompanied me as I've moved between different walls—Harkness, French House, Baldwin, and now. It’s nice to look back and think about everything that I’ve done, those that have been with me along the way. It's harder to look forward, to think about preparing for something new, to be faced with the flat blankness of bare walls and decide what next you will hang up.