words to look at, seeing songs

Before I went off the Museum of Fine Arts, I stopped at a favorite neighborhood bookstore here in Cambridge: the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue. When I got in the store, I was thinking about the book on words in conceptual art and thought I remembered "art words 1970s." The clerks didn't find anything in their database. It was the old trick that librarians get all the time, of course. I want the green book that used to be over there on that shelf by the window. When I got home and searched worldcat.org, I found it was Words to be looked at: language in 1960s art by Liz Kotz and that the paper edition is coming out in April 2010.

After getting a bit of food and talking to Darin Murphy (librarian at the School of the MFA) who also happened to be in the MFA cafeteria, I went into the "Contemporary outlook: seeing songs" show. Again, rather a twist on the senses: looking at words, seeing sounds. One of the prominent pieces in the show is a 30-monitor video installation by Candice Breitz, each monitor with someone singing along to a Queen song or some other number. The variety of movement, animation, devotion is really great and very cheery.

And lest you think I wasn't keeping buildings in mind (see previous post), I noticed Moving rooms: the trade in architectural salvage by John Harris (Yale, 2007) in the bookshop. Watch those geographic coordinates or declarations of unmovable objects. They did have a copy of Words to be looked at in hardback but I knew I could be a bit patient and get the paperback soon. Joseph Miller (Sears SH editor at Wilson) was also in the bookshop and we were both ogling Roberto Calasso's new book entitled Pink Tiepolo.