the world is your wind machine

The art museum in Cincinnati is one cool place. I visited it a few years ago when I was in Ohio for a friend's wedding. My partner Jean and I were not otherwise having the best experience of the city (Do people eat there on Sundays? Apparently not.) But the weekend lives in my memory not as the time Jean's coworker got stoned and fell off the hotel roof only to land on another roof 5 feet below, but as the time we went to the children's section of the art museum and saw the magic tree.

The children's section of the CAC is on the top floor. When we got up there, we thought it wasn't open, because we were met with a big closed door. But then we noticed a doorbell. The doorbell was attached to a comically complicated metal creature, all over bells and springs and cogs, who was hanging over the door. The creature went wild, welcoming us.

Inside, the first thing we saw was a large metal tree growing in a shallow reflecting pool. It looked a little like a weeping willow out of an episode of Star Trek directed by Tim Burton. When we got nearer to it, it swayed a bit back and forth and then peevishly shot water out of the tips of its branches. I jumped. It moved its branches toward me searchingly. We realized that it was reacting to our presence, but we couldn't figure out exactly how. Pretty soon we were clapping, jumping up and down and moving closer and farther from the tree, trying to get its attention.

After exploring the room with the curved floor, playing the light-up orchestral piano and throwing ourselves into a room carpeted with pillows in the shapes of different trees' leaves, we were in an unprecedented frame of mind to take in the more serious parts of the museum.

When we encountered an Inigo Manglano-Ovalle thundercloud suspended in the stairwell, I stopped and stared at it as I would have stared into the sky. One floor below that, we went into a room that was simply a wind tunnel. I believe the wall text for this startling space had something (long-winded) to do with post-colonialism. Jean glanced briefly at the text and shrugged. "What's wrong with art being fun?" she asked, allowing the wind to sweep her hair wildly around her face. "What that wall should say is 'this is f**king awesome.'"