Richard Flynn :: no comment

‘Austin is the city of the U.S. with the most restaurants per capita and the most museums per capita,’ I heard a man telling his tour group as they went around the city. These are of course almost meaningless statistics: as for the restaurants, I was left scratching my head since I could find very few restaurants worth going to in the downtown area save numerous sandwich shops which only open for lunch. As for the museums aspect, ‘most museums per capita’ doesn’t take into account the size and quality of those museums, and depends very much on the old ‘it depends what you mean by a museum’. A village of 100 people might conceivably have a one-room ‘history of our village’ museum: that would then be an example of a massive number of museums per capita! The fact that the tour-guide was mounted on a Segway ¹, as was every member of his tour-group, in my mind lent no credibility to his statistics.

In fact I was able to go to a number of impressive museums in Austin. Having since then been to San Diego I would suggest that that city is a close contender, if not a victor, in the number-of-museums-per-capita stakes.

Austin Museum of Art

When I was in Austin there was an exhibition covering the idea of ‘art as memory’. As with many exhibitions of modern art, it was as much about the way every individual work fitted in to the exhibition as a whole. There was a great deal presented to think about, but some well-worn anecdotes got trotted out, including the inevitable reference to Proust and A la récherche du temps perdu. No one mentioned Augustine, Confessions book X, though.

One British artist had typed what she could remember of the plots of Shakespeare plays from when she had read them at school, without any reference to books or other outside sources: each play typed on to a separate sheet. Some plays merely had a title at the top of an otherwise-blank page, while others were much fuller, albeit with omissions and errors due to the passage of time. Another artist’s work consisted of a series of black-bound books on a shelf. Each book had on its cover a type-written description of a Polaroid photo from her childhood, while inside the book were millions of 0s and 1s, the binary representation of the digitized photograph. Both these pieces are interesting enough in their own right, but I was left wondering what significant artistic value they offer to the world.

Mexic-Arte Museum

Down the street from the Austin Museum of Art, this museum—as you might expect—consists of artefacts from Mexico over the course of several hundred years. Nothing really sticks in my mind from the museum, apart from several revolutionary posters, and the fact that much of the display seemed to be about the museum’s founder, and the very great contribution the museum has made to the life of the Austin general population.

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Museum

This museum, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is in a building which has been leased by the university to the Federal government in perpetuity. The museum is extensive, covering nearly the whole of the twentieth century, starting from when Johnson was born in 1908 (in the rural settlement of Johnson City, Texas, which had been founded by his ancestors) to beyond his death, just after the museum and associated library were opened. His wife, Lady Bird Johnson, ² survives to this day.

The exhibits of the museum are interesting, even if facts which to me seem obvious were explained in the greatest of detail. Of course, the Second World War didn’t really start until 1942/3 when the Americans got involved! The exhibits really picked up with the discussions of Johnson’s own presidency. The former school teacher had wanted to be remembered as a president who had pushed through massive education reforms; instead, the story goes, he was saddled with the mess of the war in Vietnam which had been left by J.F. Kennedy when he was so inconveniently assassinated. The museum, being so pro-Johnson, can’t present any idea other than it was all Kennedy’s fault. No one would dream of saying that the Americans should have learnt from the Korean War, or that they simply didn’t know how to deal with jungle warfare, or that they had simply ignored intelligence about jungle warfare being offered to them by the British following their experience in Malaya. Of course not.

One interesting exhibit was the dictaphone recording of Lady Bird Johnson’s account of the day in Dallas when J.F.K. was shot (the Johnsons were in the car with him), and the photograph of Johnson being sworn-in on the presidential plane seven hours after Kennedy’s assassination, his hand on Kennedy’s Missal, which had been sitting on Air Force One.

The Bob Bullock Texas History Museum

This museum was very large, and very interesting. The first thing I saw was a temporary exhibition about immigrants who had arrived in the U.S.A. through the port of Galveston Island, on the Texan coast of the Gulf of Mexico. What was possibly the most amusing were the various boards throughout the exhibition which offered visitors the opportunity to write and pin up their answers to various questions posed, along the lines of ‘What hardships do immigrants today have to endure?’ The answers to these loaded questions ³ seemed to have been almost entirely written by tween girls with the attendant curly/bubbly handwriting and txt-speak spelling.

The permanent exhibits provided a very full account of Texas’ history, beginning really with the Spanish missionaries’ first interaction with the local indigenous peoples. Thanks to the museum I now properly understand who the American settlers were who were living in Texas while it was under Spanish control (as part of the Mexican colony) and later independent Mexican control. These are the people—brought in by special arrangement with the government in Mexico City to farm the land—who subsequently got sick of being mistreated by the newly independent Mexicans, leading them to revolt and gain independence for Texas. The museum also of course deals with the more recent history of Texas, including its involvement in the American forays into space exploration.

I then tried to go to the Harry Ransom Center, the museum attached to the University of Texas at Austin, but was unable to go since it is closed on Mondays. I would later be presented with the same difficulty with the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Anyway, as a result, I was able to visit the Texas Capitol, which was very enjoyable.

The Texas Capitol

I walked through a door and was suddenly inside the Texas Capitol building. I half-expected someone to come up to me to tell me to go to some formal visitors’ entrance, but no such thing happened. In fact, I was impressed that the public were free to roam around inside unaccompanied. I did then join a tour group, which was helpful since the guide explained things which I would not otherwise have known, such as the fact that the Texan Congress is only in session for about six months every two years, on odd-numbered years. In fact, the State Congress sat from January to June this year, and won’t be seen again until 2011! The House of Representatives (the lower house) can be recalled in case of some emergency, as can the State Senate, but a small group of senators led by the Lieutenant-Governor effectively runs the show while Congress is not in session.

I think that my photos give a good impression of the inside of the Capitol building, so won’t write more here.

Impressions of Austin

While I did many interesting things in Austin, it is not a city which particularly captivated me. The effects of the intense heat (~102ºF most days) were only compounded by the large expanses of concrete with little shade. This is a city which is not particularly geared-up either for tourists, or for pedestrians. My subsequent experiences of San Antonio, Los Angeles, and San Diego have reminded me how a city can promote itself to tourists, with helpful street signs, comfortable places to sit, and so on. In Austin, though, it’s almost unimaginable that you won’t have a car. Previously when I heard the term ‘café culture’ applied to various neighbourhoods of Sydney, I always thought that it denoted a rather vacuous or meaningless way of life. However, one thing which would immediately have improved Austin in my eyes would have been something of a ‘café culture’! I have mentioned that I could find very few worthwhile restaurants in downtown Austin, and there was also very little proper shopping: a few tourist shops ⁴ and a medium-sized convenience store (drugstore), but that’s about it. Evidently all the serious shopping takes place in retail parks away from the city centre.

I suspect that the character of the city changes entirely both when the students are in residence at the U.T. Austin campus, and when one of the many annual conventions is in town. But even then I don’t see how the deficiencies of the city (in my eyes) can be resolved without serious development. I wasn’t particularly sorry, therefore, to leave Austin for a train south to San Antonio.