Connections/Unstrung

My name is Mark Polizzotti. I'm the publisher and editor in chief of the editorial department at the Metropolitan Museum, and my topic is "Unstrung."

In the world, there are guidelines. We're aware of them. We follow them. We use them. As somebody who does live in a fairly structured world, I think that

even within certain guidelines, there are little moments of personal freedom. There are little moments of personal expression. These works suggest that there's something going on

beneath the surface, and that life has other possibilities that you might not necessarily notice. Marsyas

is a perfect emblem of the kind of art that could be considered unstrung.

The emotion that gets wrenched out of this is so extreme

and seems so in contrast to the very serene portraits that one generally had, in the seventeenth, eighteenth century.

This is a beast that symbolizes the imagination, and this beast

is being tethered. It's the impulse to tame that sense of freedom.

It's not unlike, van Gogh's picture of Madame Roulin rocking the cradle. The tether

functions as a kind of umbilical cord in a way. She's controlling the cradle but the cradle is also controlling her.

What I find interesting about Yves Klein's Leap into the Void is the playfulness. That on the one hand you have this man leaping into—it could be freedom, it could be death—and at the same time, you know that this photograph is fake.

This corset in particular symbolizes constraint and liberation at the same time. With the number of laces and ties, one cannot help but think of what would happen if these were slightly loosened.

I think Barbara Hepworth's Oval Form plays with the entire idea of being strung. In a way it's the essence of a guitar itself, but the strings are holding together an absence.

This is a photograph of the Third Shrine in the sarcophagus of King Tut, when it was discovered, wrapped to withstand thousands of years. The strings around it present a challenge. If you open those doors, whatever it's preserving inside will never be the same again.

The Two Lovers could be perfectly respectable, they could be chaperoned, and yet there's this one little opening

where the lover has managed to slip his hand in. A little bit of room for something a bit naughty to go on.

I love the Seated Nude in the Studio, the photographer has captured the model in a candid moment. She looks bored. There's anything but a sense of attraction going on here.

Calligraphy is a very, very stylized form, but what's interesting about this one, is that at the very end of it, the calligrapher has made this kind

of stroke of personal expression that brings it alive for me.

The Watteau, frankly, that's a painting that has always irritated me. This to me is an example of a strung work of art. He is maintaining the conventions of the aesthetic of his time, the conventions of playing, the conventions of the commedia dell'arte and the conventions of what it was considered to be a performer.

Guitars are the ultimate string instrument. I'm a guitarist myself, I enjoy playing, but what I really love are those moments

when I'll just start playing completely off the grid, and cubist representations of a guitar

that to me is the free jazz depiction of what it's like when you're really being able to improvise in a very free way.

I think unstrung creeps up on you. If I respond to them in a particular way, it's because they

suggest to me something that is different from what they might appear at first glance. Because they make me look at something in a different way. Because

they suggest that there's a slightly different way of approaching the world. Because they offer, again, an avenue for a personal expression

even if that avenue is sometimes very narrow.