words words words

My galleryhopping today was pretty focused. I had a few galleries on the list and didn't wander far from itinerary. First off was White Columns at 4th and Horatio. One of the pieces was a collection of Stuart Sherman videos. Some of his words: nose, words, globe, chain, gun. On another wall "A false sense of security" spelled out in pushpins. Then I went to the Kitchen to see the Christian Jankowski installation. Yikes. The Frankenstein piece was folks walking out of the darkness toward the camera, some in costume, all talking of wreaking huge damage on someone who had messed severely with him/her. Not easy to watch, very little to even be ironically amused by. The other installation was pomo talk about cinema studies against a gory bloody horror vampire movie. It did have funny moments with the text actually taken from works by various film theoreticians. Imagine someone spouting pomo words from their mouth, along with blood. Maybe you had to be there.

The next show was very light by comparison: Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's works at Pavel Zoubok Gallery. I talked to Sur Rodney (Sur) who was manning the front desk and he said that Tommy has done lots of installations and this stuff was so small and contained. On the other hand, it was placemats and hotpads of plastic and various collage bits including renaissance paintings and pictures. One of the amusing ones was Saint Augustine's mom and her concern for her son. One of the others had this great quote: My eighth grade class was greatly influenced by Mother Cabrini and Auntie Warhol.

One of Andrew Robinson's pieces at Paul Sharpe Fine Art had this text from Rimbaud: I sat beauty on my knee and found her bitter.

Sidebar: Paul and I chatted about gromets and clips and I realized that binder clips are more ubiquitous now in our paperless environment than they were twenty five years ago. Hmm.

And I wonder sometimes why I am so attracted to the melancholy?

Then off to the train and up to Columbia to see the Ely Jacques Kahn show before it closed (both it and the Jankowski were on their last day). Some lovely drawings and interesting photos. I knew he was prolific but I guess I didn't realize how many of the midtown skyscrapers were his. The Avery collections are so incredible but there were also things from LC.

There was a notice on some list that a task force is being formed at LC to look at the future of bibliographic control. If I had to pick between series authority control and more processing of architectural archives, I think I'd take the latter. That's certainly the direction NYU discussions are taking: why spend oodles of time and money recataloging the mainstream stuff that everybody else is doing when there are uncataloged and unprocessed items in special collections.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the email from Visual AIDS and the picture was of Tom Seidner and another guy in a picture entitled "Radical Faerie Series" (1987) by Albert J. Winn. When I was at the Wolf Creek Sanctuary in August, I thought of Tom and wondered what had happened to him. He had been the owner/operator of Borealis Books in Ithaca in the early 1980s. We had talked about the Radical Faeries and I had heard he was spending at least part of his time in faeriedom but don't know which sanctuary if that was the setting. Still can't tell which from the Visual AIDS page but it isn't Wolf Creek and looks kind of Tennessee. http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/web_gallery/2006/renaldi/06.html