Zoe Leonard, Danh Vo, and Adrian Piper

The Zoe Leonard and Danh Vo exhibitions were on my list for the two NYC days I spent after three weeks in Italy. I had seen a good number of the works in the Zoe Leonard show at the Whitney and it was great to see the Fae Richards Photo Archive again. I really like the pieces that combine everyday objects and demographics/popularity. For example, the Niagara Falls postcards were stacked by viewpoint. Some viewpoints were only evident on one postcard, others on many postcards. Niagara Falls cards were also spread out on a gallery wall.

Another work had editions of How to Make Good Pictures arranged in stacks of copies of a particular edition. This was displayed in a gallery with a window wall looking out over the Hudson River. There was construction going on across the West Side Highway, where the piers used to be. I was thinking about the wonderful arch, remnants of a warehouse, that is off-and-on threatened for demolition but it's actually got a website now: http://pier54.com/ -- so maybe the threats are in abeyance.

The Danh Vo show was very interesting too. The Guggenheim was jammed on Friday, April 6th, when I was there. I mean jammed. The fellow in the Aye Simon Reading Room said it had been jammed for about a week. Easter rush? Lots of people speaking other than English. European spring break? Vo's work is complex and occasionally rambunctious. Folks seemed to be there for the Frank Lloyd Wright and were making comments like "Oh, look, a chandelier." Vo's chandeliers are from spaces of historical importance like the hotel conference room where the Paris Peace Accords were signed. It was actually difficult at first to be there but I worked at getting over that and wrapped myself in a visual and auditory bubble. Having just been traveling internationally, I was quite amused by the slices of a fruitwood Saint Joseph in carry-on bags. Christie and I often stopped on the street in Italy when we saw a stationery or pen shop. Another of Vo's works was Esterbrook fountain pen points used for signing the nuclear test ban treaty.

As much as I enjoyed these two shows, it was a late addition -- the Adrian Piper show at MoMA -- that really knocked my socks off. I was fairly familiar with her work but had never seen a comprehensive show. She is just a bit younger than I am. She was doing traditional work in high school and found the conceptual and minimal artists when she came to New York City to study art. I'm not a practicing artist but I similarly evolved in what I wanted to look at at about the same time, the mid-late 1960s and into the 1970s, when Lucy Lippard was writing Six Years and the next generation of artists was succeeding the Abstract Expressionists (to massively overgeneralize). The political overtones are strong here as they are in both Zoe Leonard and Danh Vo.

I did do a bit of other gallery hopping and saw some friends for meals but it was a real rich couple days after three weeks of wonderment in Italy.