Moldy Cheese and Modern Art

I was in New York City the summer before my freshman year of high school. After having visited all the famous landmarks, I cultured myself with trips to the Guggenheim, the ballet, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, and finally, the Museum of Modern Art, where I encountered a piece that brought tears to my eyes. No, not tears of internal transformation or emotional depth, but tears of laughter. The piece by Dieter Roth was called Insel, with a subtitle of “Sausage and Cheese on Canvas.” Not surprisingly, this title is used very literally. The painting involved squishing moldy cheese, milk, and even sausage on a canvas and then watching the organic objects drip, forming abstract shapes and pictures. However, as a fourteen-year-old girl, and even still as a nineteen-year-old, I do not quite grasp the emotional seriousness of allowing moldy dairy products to infect a perfectly good canvas. While staring at the art, I found myself on the floor in a ball of laughter, attempting to contain the disturbing snorts and gasps that refused to subside, echoing through the silent halls of the somber Museum of Modern Art. Admittedly, there is something horribly entertaining about laughing when you are not supposed to. Any situation is ten times as funny when there is a social stigma requiring you specifically not to laugh. It was this natural phenomenon, in addition to the mural of rotting trash on the wall of a prestigious museum, that caused me to loose my cool. All of it. My mother, horrified at the unprofessional and immature noise I was uttering, hurried over to muffle my hysterics, but as the art and its title caught her attention as well, she found herself in the same helpless position that I was. Attempting to conceal her child-like fits of laughter with the knowledge that the close by security guard’s eyes were drilling into our teary contorted faces. I readily admit that I am no connoisseur of what is and what is not art; yet, I find it troubling that something often left decaying in the back of my refrigerator could be hanging in an internationally famous museum, representing all the beauty and thought and idiosyncrasy that accompanies modern art. My mother and I simply could not get over how confusing and slightly repulsive the decaying sausage was. Yes. My mother and I did end up getting asked to leave the exhibit until we could control ourselves and appreciate the masterpieces that were on display. But after that episode, we were hardly in the mood to finish a tour through a somber museum anyway. Thus, we proceeded to the gift shop, and out the door to take on more of the Big Apple in our own hilarious, idiosyncratic way.