WorldCat Identities

When searching my email for a message by "Deborah" Ultan Boudewyns, I came across a message from Deborah Johnson at University of Minnesota Duluth Library. She was noting that she'd visited WorldCat Identities and found it rather nicely evolved. I had also been somewhat underwhelmed when I first visited Identities. Maybe I've evolved too. It looks really good now.

WorldCat Identities = http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities/

Today, I searched on Elizabeth I, as Deborah did, and then Palladio. It's true that typos in OCLC lead to multiple entries on these folks. But the bulk of the hits are on the authorized heading and faceting from the clustered data is quite interesting. I meandered off from Palladio to Teatro Olimpico to find that its classification number was in PN. Now it is a theater and all but we architecture fans think of it as NA material.

That reminds me. I saw Palladio's children by N.J. Habraken at a bookstore recently. It is not really a book about Palladio and his influence but it looks interesting anyway.

... and I quote: Hermione rules!

Art history can be fun (I'm at College Art in Dallas). This morning at the Rauschenberg session, we talked about copying and it soon turned to appropriation. Yesterday or sometime, rephotography was used for Sherrie Levine-ish appropriation. I've never heard rephotography used in this way. I think of it much more for the folks who do reconstructions of the western surveys. Today in a manuscript session, we heard about quotations in subject matter or composition. And one of the papers was entitled "What's in a name?" Other papers in the manuscript session talked about workshops and inheritance or family operations, and the women usually weren't mentioned unless they happened to take over the family operations. In grad school, Nancy Stowell and I "invented" Hermione van der Goes as the unknown early Netherlandish painter. Perhaps there really was a Hermione, the widow or sister of Hugo van der Goes, who goes largely unsung because she happened to be a woman.

I found it interesting that quotation, copying, imitation, inspiration, and appropriation have all been used with varying amounts of art historical weight. In some settings, it's been considered ironic. In other, normal or ironic.

The word of the conference that I wasn't familiar with is indexical. I'm probably way behind since several people used it with ease.

49 state capitols

You should go to Storefront to see the Ramak Fazel show. They have a small triangular space at the corner of Kenmare and Lafayette/Centre, near the Police Building (now condos). Usually the office is in the back (East end). For this show, they added a little room just inside the door that looks like the reception office for the tour and education office of a, duh, state capitol building. The attendant is sitting behind an Early American office desk. The larger gallery space has the photos of the state capitols that vary from something approaching a postcard view to a picture of someone polishing a air duct. All lovely and many evocative of the stereotype of the state. The smaller gallery has the covers of mail from Fazel to Fazel, using a wide variety of stamps. Chronological and thematic variety, arranged sometimes to match the theme. There is text to match, just a little text, mostly a thought show, not a reading show. http://www.storefrontnews.org/

I went on from Storefront to Thrust Projects on the Bowery. "Freeze Frame" includes paintings by several artists including Carrie Moyer who I know from Queer Caucus. Her painting is really wonderful, just enough of the glitter to give it sparkle without going camp. Jane and I talked for a while about the paintings in the office area which play off each other very nicely. http://www.thrustprojects.com/

From Thrust to Canada where they have a David Askevold show. Again, the connections between aspects of life played out. David Askevold died on January 23rd and I updated his NACO record based on a message from Art Metropole to ARLIS-L. I didn't know that the Askevold show was at Canada. The pieces in the outer room were nice but the inner room video was mesmerizing. A contraption with small candles was endlessly spinning as the candles burned down, and then went out, ending in darkness, with mellow saxophone music. Almost Quaker.

On to Ludlow Street for the Ludlow 38, the contemporary outpost of the Goethe Institute of New York. http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/ney/en2970416.htm Nice little show of art and culture magazines. A ways up Ludlow and across the street is the "Pawn Shop" project of Flux. http://e-flux.com/projects/list In the window was a wonderful Simryn Gill necklace composed of some Lenin work from the Foreigh Languages Publishing House. We get tons of their stuff to catalog for Tamiment. Inside an AA Bronson/General Idea multiple of Jockey shorts waistbands in a plastic bag. Not so expensive ($350) but that money isn't available at the moment. Sigh. It invited thoughts, however, of the underwear of famous people or pornstars that you can buy. Is it art? Is it pornography? I know it when I see it. There were quite a few things that I'd be happy to have, at a fairly wide variety of prices.

I had seen a notice for a photo show at LITM in Jersey City. Photos of Radical Faeries. So I hadn't been to Jersey City for a while and figured I'd go take a look. It ends at the end of February and I'm off to Dallas for College Art next week. I walked up to the Christopher Street PATH station but when I got to LITM, it was closed. It's more of a restaurant/bar with art on the walls than a gallery. Oh well. Over to the Jersey City Museum where they had a good show of women artists responding to the Feminine mystique by Betty Friedan which was published 25 years ago. I liked the "Uzi Coozis" by Heather Hart, guns with knit covers and Lorna Simpson's "Cure/heal" especially. They also had a Victorian parlor which was rather nice.

After reading a bit of the paper, I eyed the ad for "I'm not there" and figured I'd go there. It's a wonderful movie in a number of ways, not least of course getting to hear Dylan songs. I wasn't that taken with Cate Blanchett's character but the young black boy was wonderful. It was weird to see Heath Ledger (and Michelle Williams) so soon after his death.

I had been pretty weary last week. The weariness of working in an office that tries the soul, at a range of projects that go on endlessly. Today's art and cinema was a lot but not at all soul weary.

Last night, I went to see "The Cenci" at the Ohio Theatre, staged by John Jahnke's Hotel Savant company. The play by Antonin Artaud hasn't been much produced since its original staging in Paris in 1935, closing after 17 performances. The New York Times has written about it a couple times: pre-review article with lots of facts and interest, review which said it was worth seeing but problematic. Yup. The gallery owner of Postmasters was there too. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/theater/10blank.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=cenci&st=nyt&oref=slogin and the review: http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/theater/reviews/13cenc.html?scp=1&sq=cenci&st=nyt (if those don't link, go the nytimes.com and search "cenci")

social/asocial

One of the reviews in the New York Times Book Review yesterday was entitled "Log on. Tune out" (by John Lanchester) and concerned Against the machine: being human in the age of the electronic mob by Lee Siegel. The illustration showed a computer warning box: "Disconnected. The Internet's connectivity has unexpectedly isolated you. Sitting alone in front of your computer encourages exhibitionism and asocial behavior." I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before that there was some weird contrast between the rise of social computing and the asocialability of the internet. Perhaps because I am mostly socializing with people I know in the real world. Connections. Disconnections. It's not really that different from other correspondence exchanges. Like everything else, the internet speeds it up without necessarily adding oodles of value.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Lanchester-t.html?ref=books Somehow I'd missed the whole shebang about Lee Siegel and his incestuous and pseudonymous commenting on his own blog entries. And when I googled to find the citation for the book review, I see that others have written on the book.

Still, I've been enjoying playing Scrabulous on Facebook and actually saw a couple students playing realtime physical Scrabble the other day in the library.

And the NGC4LIB (next generation catalog for libraries) list is having a vigorous discussion on privacy of library patrons in a Facebook world.