23 August 2017

Fashion photographs RT Documentary photographs

We have been working on the art genre/form project, part of LCGFT, for several years. Too long but it's getting close to the point of submitting the terms. I was looking over (again) the cumulative list of terms after a couple rounds of reviewing by subject experts from the Library of Congress. We hope that we'll be ready to turn the words into records soon. Fingers crossed. After some proofreading, I fixed some supper and perused last Sunday's T: the New York Times style magazine as I ate my soup. The last opening of the magazine was an advertisement for Givenchy.
The credit line is "Documented by Steven Meisel" and this copy of the photo is taken from "Next season's hottest accessory is a cat, according to Givenchy" by Katherine Cusumano, from W magazine (posted July 10, 2017).
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/givenchy-campaign-cats

We're proposing Documentary photographs but not Fashion photographs. I think the latter is a hybrid term, mixing genre/form with topic .... but if we ever decide to submit Fashion photographs, we might just have to add a RT reference to Documentary photographs. Obviously, I've been spending too much time looking at the terms.

05 August 2017

completing the circle

On Friday, I went up to Buffalo to hear one of the FLW 150 lectures at the Darwin Martin House, being held to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright. This one was by Michael Desmond of LSU on "Shifting Perspectives of Form: Frank Lloyd Wright's Circular Houses." Circular houses would get me every time. It seems so central, so utopian, so right, so Palladio. Desmond talked more, however, about how Wright broke the circle to pull our eye toward a view or through the house. Desmond lyrically traced Wright's career, starting with the Blossom House, the plan of which uses the 9-square grid which comes from Palladio and the Villa Rotunda. But the 9-square is easy to encircle. It tames nature. It gives order. I really enjoyed the lecture and it was evocative. Many of the circular houses that Desmond talked about are relatively late works and not many were built. Desmond noted that Wright left more than 700 unbuilt projects.

In the question-and-answer period after the talk, Desmond paraphrased Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying that if we see an arc, we fill in the circle. And that is what Wright was doing, except when he was purposefully playing with the circles or arcs to disrupt the circle. It was then I realized that I'd experienced a similar relationship to incomplete circles earlier in the day.

One of the exhibitions on view at the Albright-Knox was "Drawing: The Beginning of Everything" and one of the works in the exhibition was Untitled (2011) by Jacob Kassay. On the left is a shaped canvas with an slightly curved right edge. On the right are two small panels with a line drawn in graphite on the wall, also slightly arced. Together, the arc shapes could form a circle but you have to complete the circle with your eyes.

Jacob Kassay
Untitled, 2011
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2011, 2011:49a-d

As I drove home in the rainy darkness, I kept myself company by singing "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" as Joan Baez sings it on David's Album.