shermaniablog

cock and bull story: a bumpy ride

2012-01-29T16:05:00.004-05:00

"Cock and bull story" is James Quandt's review of Steve McQueen's new film Shame in the January 2012 issue of Artforum.

The review starts:
"The martyrology of Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008) and his new film, Shame, is founded on the male body, stripped and in extremis."

The review ends:
"McQueen has made a passion play to gladden Michele Bachmann's heart."

(from the wikipedia page for the film)

"Hieronymus Bosch and being human"

2012-01-19T21:26:00.003-05:00

When Bill and I were in Providence, we stopped at Symposium Books. The spine of Circles of Thorns grabbed my attention and the cover had an image of "Christ Mocked" by Hieronymus Bosch, now in the National Gallery in London. The author -- Justin Lewis-Anthony -- uses the painting to discuss what being human means now by describing Bosch's symbolism. Bosch has certainly been "abused" over the years by cultural historians who find magic, alchemy, witchcraft, sin and degradation. All sorts of stuff. Lewis-Anthony divides the book into the circles of politics, elements, temperaments, devotions, and quiddity, and shows how Bosch reflects his time and speaks to our time.

I was a little worried after I got the book home and saw that it might be found on the religion shelves that I would find it not of particular interest. BUT it's been great so far, lots to think about. I'm now in the temperaments chapter but had to share.

The quoted words in the title of this post are the subtitle of the book and the picture is from the author's 3 Minute Theologian blog.

Bo Bartlett and Saint Luke

2012-01-15T19:57:00.007-05:00

I hadn't thought about Bo Bartlett and his realist paintings for some time. And then, last Saturday morning, Moira and I were going to the cafe in Amenia for a coffee and a visit to her studio which is at the top of the same building. A young artist that Moira knows from the Wassaic Project was sitting at a cafe table with a couple friends. We had a nice chat, it was crowded, we went up to the studio. As is so often the case when you meet someone, I didn't catch the name. Moira said he was Man Bartlett and his dad was Bo Bartlett, the painter. I remembered the haunting realist paintings I'd seen several years ago at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This video is Bartlett's words describing his medical librarian mother who brought home issues of JMLA with old-master covers and about telling your stories in your art and also about letting them go.

One of Moira's in-progress paintings is an Evangelist portrait drawn from imagination but based on looking at many early medieval illuminations. There's an ox in the upper right so it must be Saint Luke. I misspoke and said "Saint Mark" and then found a postcard in my postcard stash of a manuscript at the Morgan which has Saint Mark with the ox of Saint Luke. Hmm. No wonder iconography can be so compelling, so appealing.

The image of the Evangelist is drawn from americanlady's photostream on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanlady/3831120935/in/photostream I'm not sure why the white spot appears in the center, perhaps the residue of the scanned postcard's journey through the mail.

countdown to peace in Afghanistan

2012-01-04T15:09:00.001-05:00

You may have noticed the "countdown to withdrawal" widget in the right margin of this blog. It started with Obama's promise to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2011. Well, I just noticed that it's counting up now. Sigh.

NYC or bust ... or not

2012-01-01T17:45:00.004-05:00

The original plan was that Bill and I would go on from Boston to New York City for a couple days. For a variety of reasons, we stayed in Boston but did day trips to New Haven and Providence. I had stopped at MASS MoCA on the way from my older sister's near Albany to Boston to see Bill for the week between Christmas and New Year's. The "Memery" show about those using web-based memes was pretty interesting as were the "Workers" and other shows. It was amusing to be in a gallery with portraits taken against Flickr views of sunsets and sunrises: a couple people were taking pictures of the picture wall though I didn't get a picture of either of them as a meme-on-top-of-meme. The other work in that gallery was "No Sunshine" by Constant Dullart. Loved the contrast.

When Bill and I got to New Haven, we found ArtSpace closed so I guess I won't get an up-close visit to the "Library Science" show. We did however have a really good time at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art to say nothing of Atticus Bookstore/Cafe. The Atticus t-shirts were wonderful: one with a caption saying that unattended children would be given immense amounts of coffee and unlimited access to the internet and the other letting us know that censorship led to blindness. The Yale U Art Gallery has a Bosch panel which is from the same altarpiece as the Ship of Fools at the Louvre.
I'm very fond of the Ship of Fools and once had to keep standing in front of it because the tour group was hogging the Rolin Madonna of Jan van Eyck. Life is tough. We were running out of time and daylight by the time they chased us out of the British Art Center galleries. I got to see my Sickert painting of the hospital in Venice where they cast my arm when I broke it under the full moon looking out over the Grand Canal. There was also a woman dressed in a fine dress that could have been Fortuny (more Venice) in a painting by Alfred Elmore.

On the 30th, we went down to Providence by train and had a good trip to the "Made in the UK" show at the RISD Museum of Art. The UK show was 20th-century British art from the collection of Richard Brown Baker. I really enjoyed the Grayson Perry vase entitled "May My Ashes Blow Away on the Winds of Change." The label talked about the amphora shape and the blue-and-white drape that echoed the English ware traditions but didn't mention the glazed message inside the lip of the vase that said "Mr Grayson Perry is a real pervert." Thanks to Roberto for really bringing Perry's work to my attention. I also liked the "Study for Figure with Towel" by Keith Vaughan; the last line of its gallery label talked about the joy of being naked in the outdoors. And there was a nice Howard Hodgkin here as well as at Yale where Baker also bequeathed some of his collection.

Between our out-of-town visits, we got to the Institute of Contemporary Art ("Dance/Draw" was more wonderful than we expected), Museum of Fine Arts (new Caillebotte, photos of Cuba, Jan Dibbets: Gropius Bau Berlin), and the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Hans Haacke 1967 and Otto Piene: Lichtballett). The Haacke was really sublime and Bill related that his aunt, Virginia Gunter, had been the curator of the 1971 "Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Elements of Art" show at the MFA which had included some similar Haacke works.

So I'm rather sorry that I didn't get to NYC this week to see the "Hide/Seek" show at the Brooklyn Museum or to see NYC friends but .... no problem, we had a great time full of art and bookstores (yikes, don't want to see the credit card bills) and visits with friends. A couple movies: "The Artist" and "Young Adult." I'll finish this off with an amusing overheard conversation: the three students were talking about Gropius and I thought "architecture students" but it turns out there must be a bar of that name. Oh, well; it can't all be art.

writing about olive oil and nonfiction

2011-12-19T12:53:00.003-05:00

While ostensibly just a review of Extra virginity: the sublime and scandalous world of olive oil by Tom Mueller (W.W. Norton), this article by Dwight Garner in The New York times for December 8th expands on the very nature of nonfiction writing. I especially liked the sentences "It's an unintentional master class in how to say waxy and embalming things about fresh food" and "In this regard 'Extra virginity' is another reminder of why subpar nonfiction is so much better than subpar fiction. With nonfiction at least you can learn something." The review ends "That hollered obscenity reminds you that where there's a flask of olive oil, you also pray to find some vinegar."

me and Herman Melville

2011-12-18T18:57:00.003-05:00

I've started cataloging the books in the ancestral home in which I'm living. Yes, I'm doing it in LibraryThing as I have done with my personal library. It was interesting to watch the libraries closest to mine as I cataloged my own books. LibraryThing tells you the closest as weighted, raw, and recent. The weighted comparison is number of common books to total number of books. I've done about 60 books so far from the sectional bookcase in the front parlor downstairs and my closest weighted library is now Herman Melville's. Pretty neat.

I have read a couple of Melville's books in the past few years: Moby Dick and Redfern. Enjoyed 'em both. I think it was the first time I'd read Moby Dick but probably read excerpts at various points in school.

We'll see how this progresses and which books I might keep out of boxes in order to read. The point, you see, is to put some of the ancestral books in boxes so that my own books can come out of boxes.

shrinking cities but CITIES still and the same

2011-12-07T10:45:00.003-05:00

My meanderings so far in New Orleans have mostly been in the French Quarter or along the Esplanade to the New Orleans Museum of Art or, from NOMA, along the avenues of Mid-City and the Garden District. All of that is higher ground than the Lower Ninth or Bywater so not hit as hard by Katrina flooding. Still, as you walk the streets, there are empty houses and lots. We can all read about shrinking cities but it is still sad to see the quotidian effect. New Orleans is different from Detroit; more of the emptiness is still fresh. I admit to having more experience with New Orleans than Detroit but when I visited Detroit a few years ago, it seemed like the vacant lots had mostly been planted or were overgrown. There were lots of broken-down houses but somehow they mostly didn't stretch into the street. Oh, that's right, I was driving and the stretch is way more apparent on foot than from a vehicle.

All of this is swirling in my mind as I wander the streets but I wanted to reflect here because of Roberto's last couple posts about being in New Haven: a relatively high crime rate, town-gown, real cities, streets versus art talks. When I commented, he responded that New Haven didn't seem like a "city" (he should come to Alfred for a bit of small-town town-gown reality) and New Orleans does. Yep.

watching your templates redux

2011-12-04T21:16:00.002-05:00

A year and a bit more ago, I blogged about an unfortunate incident in which the assistant of our state senator read the senator's letter of greeting and it was for the wrong sort of event. Watch "save as" or the "to:" line of email; it CAN be tricky. Anyway, I said then that I didn't know if I'd vote for her or not. Our senator, Cathy Young, does generally serve us well but her latest update letter to us bashed New York City. I hate that! Not only because I love NYC but because I think it is divisive, perhaps as divisive as some of the partisan politics we see too much of.

systems and rules

2011-12-04T17:30:00.004-05:00

"The Los Angeles-based artist has long employed systems and rule-based procedures to widen the distance between concepts and their interpretation." -- from "Differential equations: Michael Ned Holte on the art of Charles Gaines," Artforum, Oct. 2011, p. 280-283. Part of an issue with tons of stuff about L.A. which, as you surely know, is very hot at the moment because of the Pacific Standard Time initiative.

One of the other essays is about Asco which was part of a question from Janice just a few days ago. They were new to me, I think, but, then, Janice is in California (S.F., not L.A.) and the Asco show at LACMA closes today!

Image from Steven Wolf Fine Arts website: "Greenhouse" by Charles Gaines http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com/dynamic/artwork_display.asp?ArtworkID=236

big words

2011-12-04T11:22:00.005-05:00

Last night at supper, we were talking about the new names for the art studio courses, e.g., lab, project, team. Fuse Lab, Move Lab. We went into a free-floating play on words that started with co, starting with co-lab, the obvious extension to collaboration.

From somewhere, "consanguinity" popped into my brain. Michelle said "what??" and I was kind of glad the conversation kept racing past so I wouldn't have to test my understanding of the meaning of consanguinity. I was right and you can look it up if you want by clicking on the link (Wikipedia) under the word.

There's probably too much inbreeding in art practice anyway.

I want to grill Michelle one of these days about the hot words floating around the art world these days. Does she try to separate participatory art from social practice from relational art? Does she use the word interactive in conjunction with participatory? I like the latter much more than the former but in most of the articles I've read recently, the authors use the words almost synonymously or descriptively.

The image is from the Wikipedia article:
Arbor consanguinitatis in MS BNF lat. 4975, f.121, illustrating Bernard Gui's Arbor genealogiae regum Francorum. Source: http://classes.bnf.fr/arbre/grandes/lat4975_121.htm

rhymes and homonyms

2011-11-23T22:00:00.004-05:00

One of the last credits for Woody Allen's film "Zelig" is to Adele Lerner, now retired from the archives at the Cornell Medical School. Adele and I saw each other twice a year during the 1980s when we'd each represent our respective subject library associations at the Council of National Library and Information Association meetings. Since the excitement of seeing Adele's name in the "Zelig" credits, all the endless credits, I've watched them for all movies. It's a little upsetting when the film locations are not given or even hinted at.

I've just finished watching "Being Julia," the 2004 film directed by István Szabó, written by Ronald Harwood and Somerset Maugham, and starring Annette Bening. (More credits can be seen on imdb.com by clicking on the link under the film name above.)

My favorite credit for "Being Julia" is:
Loop Group - Sync or Swim
Who knows (who cares) what a Loop Group is? And of course it never hurts to have Jeremy Irons and Miriam Margolyes in the cast.

discovery of the day: Kevin Wixted

2011-11-07T13:16:00.005-05:00

Working on some more MoMA catalogs and the next one is for the "Keystones" show of works by Kevin Wixted at the David Beitzel Gallery in 2000. There's a nice essay by Justin Spring whose biography of Sam Steward I've just about finished. The paintings are very nice so I look him up on Google and, small world, he teaches at Alfred now.

Image from the web: http://beitzelfinearts.com/images/Wixted/kw01.htm

relax already

2011-11-04T17:35:00.002-04:00

"The New York Times is absolutely extraordinary -- the density of language, the breadth of material. Reading it is a great pleasure, but it's not relaxing." -- RoseLee Goldberg, queen of performance art, in Art in America, November 2011, p. 61. Relaxing is overrated.

obsessed with relational art

2011-10-31T09:34:00.005-04:00

A year or so ago when I was at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College for a week of cataloging, Bronwen Bitetti (assistant librarian) asked somewhat innocently if there shouldn't be an LC subject heading for relational art, aka relational aesthetics. She was not having much trouble wrapping her parameters around it but was with conceptual art. For me, it was the other way around but then I got involved with reading art criticism in the heyday of conceptual art, the 1960s. Many conversations, live and online, have happened since then and I think I'm beginning to get a sense of relational art. Now I see it everywhere.

This morning over my breakfast cereal, I was reading the Weekend Arts section from Friday's New York Times. Karen Rosenberg was visiting the Carsten Höller show at the New Museum and said in her review that "Curators tend to place Mr. Höller under the umbrella of 'relational aesthetics,' which, as defined by the critic Nicolas Bourriaud, is all about transforming the museum into a 'festive, collective and participatory' space." She goes on to say that Höller's show isn't really that similar to Rikrit Tiravanija's cooking at MoMA or Maurizio Cattelan's conversation piece sculptures. Each does involve considerable relating between the artist and the audience. And all the sliding down tubes in the Höller exhibition reminds me of the ARLIS/NA-VRA conference reception at the Children's Museum in St Louis. But was that art?

Also in the Friday paper, Carol Vogel wrote about Tiravanija's installation at MoMA which involves serving Thai curry at lunch time. Fire regulations prohibit cooking in the gallery so, alas, the food must be prepared elsewhere in the museum. Still, Vogel quotes curator Ann Temkin: "It's part of what has been called 'relational aesthetics.' Joseph Beuys created social sculpture; it's the act of doing things together, where you, the viewer, can be part of the experience." That brings us back to Bronwen's and my first discussion of relational art and conceptual art.

Dropping "participatory" and "social" into the words above reflect what Bronwen and I are now grappling with. Much of art criticism uses these and LCSH doesn't have anything that tidily reflects "social practice" as it is regularly used by artists and art critics. LCSH does have a reference from "Participatory art" to "Interactive art." To me, "interactive art" sounds rather like interactive multimedia or video gaming; on the other hand, most every essay I've read recently that talks about participatory art uses "interactive" within 25 words of the mention of participatory art.

Art terminology changes over time and it makes it hard for us catalogers who want some sustained literary warrant before we establish a heading. A heading used a few times over a short period of time is probably handled better otherwise and our users probably aren't going to try to retrieve on little-used terms.

In my LibraryThing tagging, I'm a little loose with "conceptual art" and maybe with "artists books" but that's the good thing about personal cataloging. You can be selective and a bit idiosyncratic, though consistency still helps.

I know you're dying to know if Bronwen and I did anything about proposing a subject heading for relational art. As we were working on it, we discovered that LCSH already had "Relationism in art" and the title listed to justify it was actually CAP : art relationnel. We've proposed that that heading be changed to "Relational art" and we've added a scope note (thanks to Roberta Smith) and a couple more references and titles to justify it.

Life is relational and participatory, and both words are getting used pretty widely these days, e.g., participatory librarianship, relational acupuncture. I wanted to find a good picture to somehow represent this posting but ended up being reminded of Dennis Bellone's video of "Joseph Beuys is underrated" in which Bellone faces a fierce cat in imitation of Beuys's and the wolf. I couldn't find a still image on the web but you can watch the video at the link.

bronzino/branzino

2011-10-23T19:42:00.006-04:00

This morning at breakfast at the Collegiate, I heard "Bronzino" and thought of the great painting at the Frick Collection ... which I'd seen just days earlier in a quickie trip to the city. Then I heard words that made it clear they were talking fish, not painting.

Mixmaster

2011-10-23T19:06:00.005-04:00

My dearest Sammy,
The Mix master came Easter Sunday, and we have not had time to more than read the literature put it together and gloat, oh so beautiful is the Mix master, so beautiful ... we are very happy to have it here, bless you Sammy, Madame Roux said oui il est si gentil, et en effet he is dear little Sammy, Easter morning, what a spring, lovely as I have never seen anything lovely ... Alice all smiles and murmurs in her dreams, Mix master
Gertrude

[Letter from Gertrude Stein to Samuel Steward, 1940, quoted in Secret historian: the life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade by Justin Spring, p. 76-77 in FSG paperback edition, 2011]

Leads one to wonder or reflect:

* Did Alice make her famous brownies with the Mixmaster?

* Are lovely days more dreamy? In the early days of World War II for Gertrude Stein. Or terrifying? The clear skies of 9/11 in New York City and the next few days.

* Steward mailed the Mixmaster by parcel post in November 1939 after having been with Gertrude and Alice at Bilignin, and leaving quickly in August when war seemed imminent.

* Gertrude Stein's words are musical. I'd love to see a revival of "In circles" by Al Carmines from Gertrude Stein's opera "A circular play" which I saw in 1968 at the Cherry Lane Theatre. We got the album and I copied it onto cassette and sometimes sing more or less every word as I'm driving somewhere.

Meissen ≠ Messiaen

2011-10-18T17:29:00.008-04:00

Bitter in the mouth by Monique Truong has been a wonderful read. I was not familiar with synesthesia and there was a wonderful section about artists, writers and musicians who sense things in extra ways. It starts on page 216 of the Random House paperback edition (just in case you want to go read it). The protagonist in Bitter is reminded by words of particular foods. Truong talks about Wassily Kandinsky who saw colors when he heard music. Messiaen saw "musician colors, not painter's colors" when he composed. Scriabin also saw color in music, inventing a clavier à lumières for his Prometheus which Lindamint dreams of seeing at its New York performance in 1915. I read this passage during the course of a day of gallery-hopping in New York City. After the Frick galleries, I was in the bookshop and there was a book on Meissen porcelain ... which I read as Messiaen. I didn't see colors, taste particular foods but it was sensational.

The picture? It's Kandinsky's "Composition 7" from a synesthesia blog.

planning ahead

2011-10-17T19:17:00.005-04:00

Lunch today was a lovely surprise for Heidi as she faces one of those zero birthdays. We celebrated and chatted and had a lovely time. Even Heidi realized hitting such a milestone didn't need to be the end of the world.

I hadn't seen GraceAnne DeCandido for a number of years though we occasionally exchange Facebook interactions. We were talking about aging, freelance employment, retirement, and other things appropriate for a zero-birthday lunch gathering. She said that some doctor or whoever had told her that she should always have two trips in the planning stages. What a good idea. My recent trip planning has been too amorphous and should involve more action. For example, I'd really like to go see Prospect 2.0 in New Orleans. Heidi said go. I whispered to myself: for Prospect, for everything I love about New Orleans.

All this reminds me that a couple times recently I've realized that my retirement planning wasn't full of dreams. Linda Cuccurullo said that she dreamed of being in Italy a lot when she retired, and her Facebook status recently indicated she was there. And there was a similar experience involving someone else though I can't place it at the moment.

And now I'm reading Bitter in the mouth by Monique Truong and we're learning about how the protagonist's great-uncle, Baby Harper, a retired librarian, started his traveling to those places he read about: Colombia for One hundred years of solitude, Chile for The obscene bird of night by José Donoso, Uruguay for The book of embraces by Eduardo Galeano, Rio de Janeiro for The hour of the star by Clarice Lispector.

Now I should stay home and fix the house so it doesn't look like the wonderful market building in New Orleans pictured above ... but I'd rather go to somewhere that I've read about, or not read about.

Hamilton, Muniz, Wiley, Adams

2011-09-21T14:28:00.007-04:00

Roberto wrote a few days ago about the fall 2011 exhibitions that he was looking forward to. Normally, I'm OK with being in Alfred and not seeing every exhibition in New York City. But Friday's Times had three articles on exciting things coming up in NYC. One isn't just coming up: the Grange, Alexander Hamilton's house in West Harlem, is open again in its new old location. I visited it a few times in its old squeezed location on Convent Avenue and once after it had been moved and was being worked on.
But now it's open in all its glory and the Times writer, Edward Rothstein, indicates it's a site to behold. So I'll do that next time in the city.

The show of works by Vik Muniz at Sikkema Jenkins & Company was one of the highlighted shows in the
"Art in Review" column of Friday's Times. This body of work is collages of famous works made from scraps of glossy magazines and the one they chose to illustrate was based on the "Floor Scrapers" of Gustave Caillebotte. A yummy painting that I most recently saw in Vienna in a show of works from the Orsay in Paris. Recent Facebook feed indicated that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has just bought a Caillebotte of a guy toweling off after his bath. Looks yummy too.

The third ARTicle that especially caught my fancy was the "Inside Art" item by Carol Vogel on purchase of a Kehinde Wiley painting by the Jewish Museum. His work has caught my eye for many years. The Met had a large Wiley on the wall at the bottom of the mezzanine stairs for a while. The Jewish Museum's new painting is "Alios Itzhak" (2011) and it "depicts a handsome Ethiopian-Israeli man in a T-shirt and blue jeans, one hand on his hip, staring with attitude straight at the viewer."

We do have art and art talk in Alfred. This morning's Studio Visit with Lauren Frances Adams was interesting. She's now based in St Louis but grew up on a pig farm in North Carolina. Russian constructivist collage and textile arts play out in her work. She did a series of "Domestic Disturbances" that mix toile decorative pattern with war images, rather like Alighiero e Boetti war rugs, not stylistically. She has also done some work based on portraits of Queen Elizabeth I such as the miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard. Adams talked about how copying the work for hers based on the original brought details such as a horseshoe crab to her special attention. It reminded me how transcription gives you the same concentration on a written text.

When I was moving stuff around a couple weeks ago, I came across my great-grandfather's diary of his trip to Europe in the summer of 1902. It was probably that trip that my grandmother remembered during my last visit to her in the nursing home. She was one hundred years old, she couldn't remember me, but when I held up a postcard from a recent trip to Italy, she mentioned her father describing his time in Italy. The Rialto Bridge will do that to you: unforgettable.

The pictures above: my photo of the Hamilton house, taken June 2010; Vik Muniz "Floor Scrapers" from Sikkema Jenkins gallery website; Kehinde Wiley "Alios Itzhak" from the Times article.

Sicily

2011-09-13T13:46:00.005-04:00

Sicily has pretty much been at the top of my "wanna go there" list for several years. At the moment, anywhere in Europe might do. I am reading The inheritance of Rome: a history of Europe from 400 to 1000 by Chris Wickham (Viking, 2009) and it was interesting to come to the passage below about Ibn Hawqal. It doesn't discourage me from visiting Sicily; rather, it adds to the story.

"The Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal (d. c. 990) hated Palermo and the Sicilians. Palermo itself, conquered by the Arabs from the Byzantines in 831, was rich and impressive, and Ibn Hawqal spends many pages on its amenities: the large mosque (ex-cathedral) which could contain 7,000 people; more than 300 other mosques, in an unparalleled density, sometimes actually adjoining each other; the very numerous and varied markets; the specialized papyrus production, the only one existing outside Egypt; the richly irrigated gardens surrounding. But the Palermitans wasted this latter fertility on cultivating onions, which they ate raw; the consequence was that 'one does not find in this town any intelligent person, or skilful, or really competent in any scientific discipline, or animated by noble or religious feeling.' No one was qualified to be qadi (judge) there; they were all too unreliable. Schoolmasters were very numerous, but all idiots; they did the job in order to avoid military service; nevertheless, the Sicilians as a whole considered them to be brilliant. They pronounced Arabic wrong; they could not hold down a logical argument (Ibn Hawqal provides examples); they had no idea what Iraqi legal and theological schools believed, 'even though their doctrinal position is very well known.' Nor did the Sicilians know Islamic law properly, particularly in the countryside. Ibn Hawqal was so incensed about all this that he actually wrote a whole book about Sicilian idiocy, unfortunately lost; but he tells us quite enough in his huge geographical survey, The Book of the Depiction of the Earth. He ends amazed that the Sicilians could be so poor, at least these days (in the 970s), when their land was so rich. The only thing they made really well was linen." (p. 318)

Definitely not very complimentary. It was especially compelling to read this so soon after the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and all of the articles on cultural and political diversity. By the way, I have no problem with people teaching as a way to avoid military service, though clearly it would be good if they did it well.

(In the book, the word "qadi" about halfway through the quotation has diacritics: macron on the vowels and a dot below the "d.") (The image is from the Wikipedia article on Ibn Hawqal with caption: 10th century map of the World by Ibn Hawqal.)

WEMI schmeemy

2011-09-10T16:31:00.004-04:00

Why is it that I cannot get more excited about the FRBR Group 1 entities? The most recent moment of ennui (or more) came after reading an email exchange in a working group I'm supposedly working on. The discussion of whether subjects could apply to Expressions, Manifestations, and Items, or only Works, just saddened me. Isn't the ultimate model that you have an entity and relationships? Probably doesn't map well, or play well with others.

The WEMI model does have some strengths for collocating editions. It's hard for me to think outside the MARC box (aka catalog cards). The manifestation model that we've been using since way back (to the earliest library catalogs, I think; just go look at the old British Museum printed catalog) does a satisfactory job. If you had fields that would do more than simply index things the same way, you could get from a Manifestation or Expression up to a Work. I used to dream at Cornell of a way we could just add copies of Hamlet and other classic works rather than have individual records. The online environment should allow you to appropriate all of the common elements of the Work and add whatever is individual about the resource in hand; the user would get a cluster of editions.

And then there's real life. Today was the memorial service for Lois Smith who probably was my first model in life, that is, the first non-family, non-parent-selected, non-neighbor person who taught me how to get on in life. She was a librarian (naturally) and pacifist (also not surprising). I've done library and pacifist too but, even more, it was her way of living with enthusiasm, acceptance, and modesty that I credit as a good model for living. This would have been Mrs Smith's 101st birthday (she died during the summer and Alfred lives on an academic calendar).

Tonight they're doing a reading of "9/10" by Richard Willett, addressing the terror of 9/11, ten years later. As much as I feel for us Americans, perhaps especially those with first-hand connections, I cannot get over the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan people who have been slaughtered in revenge. Your terrorist is my freedom fighter.

This was rather a ramble over a variety of territory. I recently was cruising the blogs of a couple friends and was struck by the thoughtfulness of their postings. And I was touched that a cousin of mine mentioned that she enjoyed my Facebook postings, particularly a rather dry and wry appreciation of Robert Ryman's "The Elliott Room" at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Donald Charles Seibert, 1929-2010

2011-08-06T16:51:00.003-04:00

Today was the memorial service for Don Seibert, music librarian at Syracuse for upwards of thirty years until his retirement in the 1990s. One of the wonderful remembrances, by Dick Bough, was of Don as older brother and younger brother, mentor and joy-filled friend. Dick told a story of an Adirondack hike up some mountain. As they got to the top of the mountain, it started to rain. Don stripped and danced in the rain. I tried to find a picture of a man dancing naked in the rain but had no success. You have to do a brain picture of the joy.

Someone else mentioned that Don's name authority record had been updated for his death and included "Tchaikovsky scholar" as part of his accomplishments. Don would have loved that.

So here's to music, name authorities, and dancing in the rain, and to Don and his life well lived.

Alan Sonfist, land artist

2011-07-15T11:13:00.004-04:00

The summer 2011 issue of Art news has an article by Ann Landi on Alan Sonfist. I loved walking by his garden of native plants not far from my apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City. Sonfist grew up in the Bronx and contemplated a life as a farmer but discovered that modern farming was more real estate and finance than working with the earth. He discovered, during his student days at the University of Illinois, a book by Hoyt L. Sherman, a professor of fine arts at Ohio State. Sonfist "went on to study under Sherman at Ohio State before returning to New York with a changed perspective on his calling."

nature and art, before and after

2011-07-14T16:18:00.004-04:00

We went on some expeditions to seaside places when I visited CDS in Maine. After exploring some neighborhoods in Portland, we went down to see the Portland Head Light and then on to Two Lights Head. It was pretty exciting as the tide was coming in and the waves crashed ever higher. We went out to Georgetown Island the next day. It's one of the finger points along the coast between Portland and Rockland, South of Bath. The landscape is lovely. The water wasn't too rough either day but the waves are relentless.

I went to the Portland Museum of Art on my last day to see the Marin and Maine modernists shows, along with the permanent collection. Marin really paints the spirit of the ocean and I could feel the ocean as well as see it when I looked at the works. It was wonderful to have the natural and painted worlds so close in time and space.

The Maine modernists show was, however, the reverse. The show included considerable documentary material about the various artists who had worked in Seguinland. That term was then used for several communities South of Bath, including Georgetown and named after Seguin Island which is at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Artists in the show included several that I am fond of, such as F. Holland Day and Marsden Hartley, as well as others with whom I am familiar. I wished that I'd been to that show beforehand. I took a picture near where Day had his house and studio, and where he took some of his romantic pictures of naked young men. Another picture was of a cove, more or less across the road from the Lachaise house.

Hartley used to visit Gaston Lachaise and his wife at their house in Georgetown Center and moved permanently back to Maine soon after visiting Mrs Lachaise after Gaston died in 1935. If we'd seen the show and had the catalog in hand, perhaps we could have wasted a lot of time to find the actual locations and poked our noses into someone's private space. We just got the aura.

There's a wonderful small Hartley in the show that has splotches of rock and water. That was great to see after having stood on the rocks, watching waves.

I'm not sure why Seguinland is so named but I couldn't help but wonder if it was related to Seguin, Texas. Wikipedia tells me that the city in Texas was named after Juan Seguín, veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto and later a senator. I didn't check the Moderns catalog but the web hasn't yet told me the source of Seguinland in Maine.

Make It Right in New Orleans

2011-06-30T20:51:00.004-04:00

A couple of the Make It Right houses in New Orleans. When I was there last week for ALA, I walked from the French Quarter through the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater to the Lower Ninth Ward which was the neighborhood hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The up-top porch of the house on the left looked like a splendid place to spend a warm breezy evening, perhaps with a mint julep. More pictures from the walk and New Orleans at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/sets/72157627071715064/

metaphorically speaking

2011-06-30T18:03:00.007-04:00

Some of you may remember my musings in early 2010 on the right bumper sticker to stick on my then new used car. Fanny and I have been together now for about 18 months and I only just stuck the bumper stickers on the car .... but I couldn't quite apply the "Art makes me horny" one created by Aaron Krach. It's in a series of "Indestructible artifacts," after all.

The thought behind the bumper sticker came around again in the book I read as I flew home from New Orleans: The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The hero of the book is Arnold "Junior" Spirit who decides he has to leave the reservation in order to avoid alcohol and/or an early death. He transfers to a new school just off the rez. He and his new friend Gordy are discussing the size of the library and how long it would take to read all of the books, even though it's a pretty small library. Arnold says "Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you just keep on learning there is so much more you need to learn." Gordy replies "Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now doesn't that give you a boner?" Being 14-year old boys, you can imagine the discussion that ensues as Gordy tries to explain to Arnold what he means: metaphorical boner, joy, boner is funnier, reading freak, joyous freak.

Thinking about metaphorical boners from reading is like art that makes you horny. The true aesthetic, spiritual, orgiastic feeling of delight that comes from an enjoyed work of literary or visual art.

True diary has illustrations by Ellen Forney, done as if being done by Arnold who draws cartoons. I thought there was one is which "metaphorical" was replaced by "metaphysical," resulting in a metaphysical boner. I can't find the illustration at the moment but the metaphorical/metaphysical dyad can continue to bounce around in my brain as much as it wants to.

There is much to like in True diary. A ways into the book, I noticed that it is branded by Little, Brown as young adult fiction. Alexie doesn't talk down to us and he deals with adult concerns, or at least growing-to-adulthood concerns.

But, you ask, what bumper stickers DID I stick on Fanny? "War is not the answer" from the Friends Council on National Legislation and the blue and yellow equals sign of the Human Rights Fund. "Art makes me horny" remains on the bulletin board in front of my desk.

Francis Alÿs in NYC

2011-05-22T14:59:00.002-04:00

What is it about Francis Alÿs that makes his work so intriguing? The retrospective organized by the Tate Modern and now at MoMA and P.S. 1 was top of the to-do list on my trip last week to New York City. The videos are compelling, simple but compelling. The paintings are quirky, quaint and just grab you. The Peter Schjeldahl essay in The New Yorker for May 23rd grabs the essence way better than I could. He talks about the simple pleasure in Alÿs's works: chasing tornadoes, dropping his camera when the angry dogs bark and bark, driving repeatedly up a dusty hill (set to a band rehearsal: forward when playing, backward between bits of rehearsing), primitive paintings, walking with a gun in the street, the Coldstream Guards moving from random to ordered and dispersing.

I've been intrigued by the work of Francis Alÿs for some years. Is it the quixotic diaeresis? Whatever, when I read recently that his birth name was Francis de Smedt, I had to check his NACO record and the birth name was indeed missing. So I added it to the record. In all of the MoMA documentation, I never did see it mentioned.

The image is from Tate page for the exhibition.

miller & shellabarger

2011-04-13T20:04:00.005-04:00

Another good artist talk at AU: Miller & Shellabarger, from Chicago. When a student asked about seeing Cai Guo-qiang, Ai Weiwei, and Kara Walker in their gunpowder, black sunflower seed, and cutout works, they wisely responded that materials can be similar but the intent and context are different. An artist that uses oil paint is not accused of ripping off Caravaggio. The point of Ai's seeds is the crafting of the seeds; Miller & Shellabarger use it as a transitory material. Kara Walker uses her cutout to talk about racial stereotypes; M & S use it to talk about their relationship. Any material influence is more an homage than plagiarism. They were also asked about their daily life and Shellabarger responded that he tries to work on his art every day, discipline like going to the gym which he doesn't do ... but I understand. This freelance life needs some discipline too. You get out of practice.

The illustration is taken from the images on their artist page at the Western Exhibitions.

pepper, silva & goriunova

2011-04-08T17:51:00.006-04:00

It's been an especially rich bouquet of art talks the last few days. Today was a gallery talk by Jen Pepper in her show entitled "A glimpse, spark & flash" at the Llewellyn Gallery at Alfred State College. It's a reinstallation of work that was part of a show at the Everson in Syracuse, with changes because of the tsunami in Japan and the Pacific. In the Everson, the blanket of woven wire (1000 feet, in honor of Rauschenberg) was suspended likes waves or medical instrument readings. Here, it was splashed against the wall and spilling onto the floor. The rubber-coated and white-painted silk poppies were strewn on the wall rather than planted in a "pizza box." It reminded me of Petah Coyne but much more approachable (and Pepper, as she calls herself, let me touch one of the buds).

Pepper is a dictionary reader and words are important to her and her art, e.g., liminal space (because of its potency), "soy" which in Dogon means both woven material and the spoken word as it does in Hebrew.

Another exhibition at Cazenovia used engineering student notebooks from 1927-1932, discarded when Kanakadea Hall at Alfred University was renovated (other stuff went to the archives so it wasn't mass destruction). The notebooks included instructions like "Measure a line in which one end is inaccessible." Sounds like Sol LeWitt.

She and her partner did a piece entitled "I'm only number 2 ..." at the Spoleto festival in Charleston some years ago. They "hid" pencils around the city and folks were supposed to let them know if they found one. The results can be seen at http://cracksinthepavement.com/. Paula Stewart and I started exchanging museum pencils from our travels during the time I was at the Amon Carter Museum. I still buy the pencils but they don't get sent Paula-ward very often. I use them.

Olga Goriunova spoke on Wednesday about "Aesthetic emergence: brilliance, repetition & organizational tendencies on the Internet." She is one of the founders of runme.org which "says it with software art!" She spoke of runme.org as an art platform or locus, a catalyst, with creative energy to make brilliant aesthetic work. The talk was quite philosophical and I felt rather like I was drowning some of the time. One of her interesting observations was that new devices are closing down some of the creativity that was possible. The devices have more closed systems and applications. And they do things for you. She showed a wonderful piece of software that took what you're typing and turned it into banners and streams of letters, moving around the screen. Now, there's probably an app so you can just do it. Toward the end of the question-and-answer period, she said "software is fundamental" and I misheard it as "software is temperamental." Also true.

Bisi Silva spoke on Monday and the title of her talk was "Curating in Africa." She put emphasis on the "in." For a long time, western art curators have done shows of contemporary African art, or African art curators have done shows in Europe and America. She is the founder and director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. Silva is a graduate of the curatorial program at Bard College (home of one of my freelance gigs).

The library at CCA Lagos has 3500 volumes and it's quite an accomplishment to build up an art library in Nigeria. 3500 seems like a small number of volumes but I assume it's quite focused. It made me wonder if we couldn't start a gift program from the art libraries of the U.S.

And I just can't avoid thinking about cataloging as I listen to things. Silva used "lens-based art" to describe artists who use photography, video, and film. We could use a term (subject heading) that covers the waterfront. Pepper likes installation art because you are in the work. File that in the "relational aesthetics" pile for consideration of that LCSH proposal.

Woven through those art talks were presentations by the Alfred State architectural students on their projects for Main Street in Alfred and a talk on "How right was Einstein? or, Stringent tests of the theory of general relativity" by Dipankar Maitra. New jargon: GR.

I must stop now. The Alfred University theater department is presenting "A streetcar named Desire" ... preparation for my June visit to New Orleans for ALA?

Foster Lake

2011-03-03T14:11:00.004-05:00

Bryan Daly read his Phi Beta Kappa "Wit and Wisdom" prize-winning poem "The artist on his shores" at today's Bergren Forum. He introduced the poem by talking about Eddy Foster who created Foster Lake in the middle 20th century. Some of the words I scribbled down as he was reading: the tarp of the sky, it's only irony (about the Segway inventor trying to fly in his Segway), how can I float so long?, eulogy (for Mr Foster) or elegy (for the lake). For Daly who grew up near a reservoir that serves as water supply for Boston, a lake is a deep body of water in which towns have been buried. Alfred's little Foster Lake is not deeper than twenty feet and resides at the top of a hill with two outlets that run to different watersheds. It "miraculously" filled the summer it was built (1950) ... with a bit of help from heavy rains associated with a hurricane. Daly's elegy to the lake was beautiful and thoughtful, and evocative.

His thoughts about Eddy Foster were tangled up with thoughts of his grandfathers. My first trips to Foster Lake were as a child when my family would visit my maternal grandmother and great aunt. And today would have been my father's 92nd birthday. The lakeside trees were small then, and now it's a forest. My mother was a legendary floater too.

We're still buried in snow here and Daly had lovely wintry photographs to "illustrate" his poem. The picture above is one I took last summer during a bird walk around the lake. The walk around the lake was one of my mother's favorite times. So today is for parents and grandparents and hope for spring.

relics and desire

2011-02-28T21:11:00.004-05:00

February disappeared. I meant to write up some of my thoughts from the College Art Association annual conference in New York City. It hasn't happened. Daniel and Gary very kindly let me stay several extra days so I could do a bunch of gallery hopping and see friends and whatnot.

One of the shows I saw was "Objects of Devotion and Desire" at the Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College. It's on until April 30th and the catalog is available in PDF from the exhibition website. The show was put together by medievalist Cynthia Hahn and the students in a contemporary art class. It included a few reliquaries from the Metropolitan as well as recent works of art that played off the theme.

I read Hahn's catalog essay on the bus ride back upstate. She traces the history of relics and uses the neologism re-licing "in order to put the focus on a verb or action rather than a noun or object" (p. 9). My first thought was that this was a lost opportunity to turn a "c" word into a "ck" word when you use the "ing" ending of the present participle, e.g., picnicking, frolicking. Then, it occurred to me that "re-licing" would be "relicking." This had potential for seeming naughty ... but perhaps is wonderfully appropriate for relics.

The picture is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the work is: Arm reliquary. 13th cent. (with 15th cent. additions). French. Silver, silver-gilt, glass and rock crystal cabochons over wood core. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Accession number 17.190.353. For more information, click on the name of the work.

mud pies!??!!

2011-01-30T10:28:00.004-05:00

In an article on the return of "Baby Doc" Duvalier to Haiti, the New York Times says that women are selling mud pies out front of Fort Dimanche which once held political prisoners. Mud pies!?! When we were kids and made mud pies, we didn't HAVE to eat them because there was nothing else to eat. Just imagine.

Elsewhere in the paper, there's a review of The haves and have-nots: a brief and idiosyncratic history of global inequality by Branko Milanovic. The reviewer, Catherine Rampell, states that the richest 5% in India makes the same as or less than the poorest 5% in the U.S. That's even counting the Mumbai McMansions. No wonder folks risk their lives to get to the rich countries.

I did find it heartening that Mexico was making progress on universal health care but the overwhelming feeling of social global helplessness in the face of world problems made it a little hard, and very guilt-ridden, to finish my simple breakfast of pancakes and one egg ... especially in light of getting excited about the airfares from Aer Lingus for late spring.

once more: the comma

2011-01-12T11:26:00.005-05:00

Barbery and Byatt fans will remember earlier posts on the comma and good, long sentences. As I work my way through Babel Tower, I encountered this sentence. The last comma would probably have sent the Barbery concierge into a tizzy:

"He is not ready, and may never be, and she may not want him to be, now, or yet, or ever, how can she tell, but the law and Nigel will make it be solid, be cut and dried -- cut, and dried -- gone ..." [closing ellipsis in text]

And you might find the essay on the long sentence by Ed Park in the December 24th New York Times Book Review interesting.

brutalism

2011-01-02T21:37:00.002-05:00

Hmm. I wonder which is more brutal: the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier's brutalist masterpiece (top), or what they've done to the old building of the Fogg Art Museum (bottom).

Polish cabin fever

2011-01-01T14:37:00.006-05:00

New Year's Day 2011 in Boston, and the weather is pretty close to perfect. It's in the 50s (at least) and the snow from the Blizzard of 2010 is disappearing except the stacks. What you need after the Eve's drunken excess is a quiet walk around the neighborhood. I'm at Bill's in Cambridge, Massachusetts and he suggested that I might want to see how the Fogg looks as it is being deconstructed and reconstructed to Renzo Piano's grand plan. They've taken down the back wall, lots of the guts, and Werner Otto Hall from the 1990s. The Fogg is next to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts done by Le Corbusier in the early 1960s, his only building in North America (not including the U.N. building) and a grand brutalist building. You can see a lot more of Carpenter without Werner Otto and Fogg back in the way.

After I got home to Bill's, he was almost done with preparations for folks coming over at 4 and I insisted that he go get some fresh air rather than my going to get a bottle of wine. WGBH was playing a Rimsky-Korsakov work and it ended. The announcer started telling us what she would play next and I thought I'd like to hear the "Warsaw Concerto" ... so she announced she was about to play the "Warsaw Concerto." Magic. It must be a sign that the coming year will be fine.

For the curious, the picture is of the Lazienski Palace in Warsaw, taken by Andrew Ward, Getty Images, and picked at "random" from the Google Image results from "warsaw poland." The picture with snow was from a war game so not appropriate for me. And the fact that I picked a picture of a neoclassical (Palladian) building is totally coincidental.

over the river and through the woods

2010-12-27T19:20:00.006-05:00

I'm on a Christmas-New Year's trip to Queensbury, Portland, and Boston. My older sister Roberta lives in Queensbury, in the exurbs of Albany. We had a nice evening and breakfast. I had it in my mind that I could do a bunch of art hopping on the way to Portland: the Tang Museum at Skidmore College for the "Jewel Thief" group show which looks interesting, on to Troy for an exhibition at EMPAC (Experimental Media Performing Arts Center) at RPI (and maybe to pick up the new book The architecture of EMPAC which includes a picture of three of us art librarians in the blackbox theater), and then some Dürer at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Well, the Tang wasn't open yet, EMPAC was closed this week even though their website hadn't indicated it, but the Dürer print show at the Clark was wonderful. Since I hadn't had my contemporary fix, I stopped in at MASS MoCA and was delighted to find a Petah Coyne show entitled "Everything that rises must converge" (thoughts of Deb Kruse who also uses Flannery O'Connor for inspiration) and another visit to the Sol LeWitt installation, as well as Michael Oatman's work "All utopias fell" which includes a football field-sized photovoltaic cell installation on the roof.

At about this time, the weather reports on the radio were talking about a coastal winter storm. I didn't see snow right away but it was pretty thick and windy as I approached Boston and the drive up to Portland was pretty dramatic. I didn't have any trouble (keep knocking on wood) and enjoyed my evening with Christie and Janet. The morning included considerable worry about Janet's return to NYC via bus and train but she seems to be getting there.

Oh, the picture at the top. When I'm doing the drive from Queensbury to Boston, I like to take the blue highway, Route 2, across Massachusetts. Just after you climb the mountain out of North Adams, you get to the town of Florida, Massachusetts. It is especially fun to see the "Entering Florida" sign in the winter, and I've done that more than seeing the sign in the balmy weather.

commas and just one semi-colon

2010-12-19T11:17:00.004-05:00

Back in September, I blogged about Muriel Barbery's use of the comma in her novel The elegance of the hedgehog. I'm now reading Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt and there's a wonderful sentence that uses commas in quite an extraordinary way: series within series with just commas and only one semi-colon. The passage appears on page 202 in the Vintage International paperback edition and it reads:

"The children themselves, of whom there were perhaps fifty or sixty in the Tower, were not present at this oration, for various ladies had voluntarily taken upon themselves to teach the little creatures the skills of the old civilisation, to wit, reading, writing, figuring, languages, dead and alive, sewing, plain and ornamental, drawing and painting, singing, dancing, playing on flutes, fiddles, tambourines and glockenspiel, making paper carnations, cooking little cakes, observing such humble creatures as spiders, lizards, flies, cockroaches, earthworms and mice; also the growth of beans and mustard seeds."

That single semi-colon is wonderful as a sort of delicacy.

The novel includes two narratives: one set in the present day about a woman rediscovering herself after escaping an abusive marriage and another set in undetermined time, rather medieval or post-apocalyptic. The two stories have some parallels and not. The book was recommended by an artist friend, Moira Kelly, who gave me a little evangelical pamphlet which I decided became an artist's book even though Moira's intervention in the creation of the book was merely the act of giving it to me, with enthusiasm and spontaneity during the NY Art Book Fair which, again this year, blew my socks off at P.S. 1.

(The image is Pieter Brueghel's "Tower of Babel" which is in the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Vienna. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)

"hide/seek" on the t.p. verso

2010-12-13T17:22:00.004-05:00

There has been a lot of "ink" spilled over the past ten days since the National Portrait Gallery in Washington pulled a video by David Wojnarowicz from the "Hide/Seek" show and reignited the culture wars. Well, we all know, there are constant cultural differences but we had been cruising along, more or less, since the Mapplethorpe exhibition and NEA Four days of the later 1980s.

"Hide/Seek" has been called the first LGBTQ show at a major museum in the U.S. There have certainly been shows at various venues that dealt with homosexuality but "Hide/Seek" is a big show in a mainstream museum. It was attacked by the Catholic press and then various politicians picked it up. I won't recreate the history here but I have been using the del.icio.us tag of "hide/seek" to hold onto the articles that have especially interested me. You can get upwards of a dozen of the articles there, or you can just google it yourself. There's also a "Support Hide/Seek" group on Facebook which has a good bunch of postings from newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc.

What interested me once I was looking at the record for the catalog was the seeming "hide/seek" game that was being played in the cataloging. The subject headings in the CIP are: Portraits, American -- Exhibitions; Sex customs in art -- Exhibitions; Sex symbolism -- Exhibitions. You may note there is nothing about same-sex desire in the subject headings and I think the use of the word desire in the subtitle is very important and telling. The subtitle of the catalog, by the way, is "difference and desire in American portraiture." It is sometimes by looking at the art and perhaps knowing something about the biography of the subject or the artist that shifts a portrait from merely representative to a richer understanding. Of course, sometimes your gaydar (gay or straight, you can SEE desire sometimes) just goes berserk.

Holland Cotter talked in a second article in the New York times about how the censorship had actually led him to look at his reaction to the show again and see that the selection of objects had been significantly more nuanced and rich than his initial reaction that it was a bit of same old, same old.

The moral of this story is that there are times when you can do things and there are times when you can't. I've adjusted the OCLC record for the catalog to include two more subject headings: Homosexuality in art -- Exhibitions; Desire in art -- Exhibitions. And I will admit that the second added one is perhaps subjective. You didn't really believe that cataloging could be objective, did you?

remembering Christina Huemer

2010-11-19T16:47:00.003-05:00

Christina Huemer died a few days ago and this leaves a big hole in the world, my world. She was one of the first art librarians that I knew and helped shape my view of art libraries along with Judith Holliday and Pat Sullivan, the other art librarians then at Cornell. We met in 1970 when she was the assistant librarian at Sibley Library and I was a copy cataloger in the main library.

Many memories of being with Chris are circulating in my brain and soul. One of my favorite times with Chris is probably a visit to a codfish restaurant in Rome, named simply Bacala, I think. They served filets of cod, deep fried, with paper wrappers and you just ordered as many as you wanted. As Chris, Christie Stephenson and I entered the restaurant, the waiters were having an argument about whether Bill Shatner had been in spaghetti westerns. The waiters recognized that Chris was fluent in Italian but American by upbringing so they engaged her in their lively discussion. Chris's fluent but non-native Italian and their fluent and native Italian were a beautiful mix. I don't think we resolved the issue but the cod was wonderful. The restaurant is on the plaza in front of the church of Santa Barbara, near the Campo de' Fiori.

Chris moved to Rome in the mid 1980s, starting at ICCROM and then moving to Florence for a while. She found Rome much more to her liking and I think my love of Rome is significantly due to her enthusiasm. Our discussion of the differences was mostly over a meal with Pat Barnett in Florence, during the IFLA art conference. Rome is gritty and busy, rather like New York City; Florence is rather more precious and a shopper's place. Great art and architecture in both places, undeniably.

After her stint in Florence, Chris became the librarian at the American Academy in Rome. They had been SACO contributors for a while and Chris arranged for me to come over to give some NACO training in 1998. She arranged for me and Bill Connor to have a room in the Villa Aurelia for two weeks as payment for a couple days of NACO training. There was a Sol LeWitt drawing on the wall near the staircase to our room. We had a wonderful time and went on an Academy field trip to the port city of Ostia. Bill and I also went to Fiumicino to see Chris in her apartment one evening. Fiumicino is on the coast and a bit like Jersey shore towns.

Chris usually did a drawing for her Christmas card and I especially remember one she did of the canal in Fiumicino.

I miss Chris. She was a fine person as well as being a good librarian. We shared lots of conversations in person and in letters and cards. On the bleaker side, we talked about our cancer: hers internal, mine skin. It was our enthusiasm for art and architecture, places, people, reading, and life that enriched our friendship. That will stay with me, even though Chris is now gone.

Roz Chast does Bosch

2010-11-14T20:18:00.006-05:00

Imagine my delight to find that Roz Chast's cartoons in the November 1st issue of The New Yorker included a takeoff on "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch. She didn't necessarily pick the things that I find most delightful about life, e.g., 2% body fat, Same personal trainer as Madonna, Shoe sale, but the illustration has her usual humor and twist. The image above is from the New Yorker website and I hope you can see the Boschiness. The clipping is now on the file cabinet next to the phone.

watch your templates

2010-10-31T11:54:00.004-04:00

Our small but lively public library here in Alfred got one of the grants to establish a Public Computer Center. It's the smallest library in New York State to get one of the grants and it will be inserted into the space through rearrangement and using netbooks to maximize space needed as well as allowing for the lending of the computers for those that don't have them at home. At the "groundbreaking" ceremony, the representative of our state assembly member read a letter which praised us for our "woman-owned business." Now I knew that librarianship was a female-dominated profession but really. It was rather more humorous than sad but showed how easily one can use the wrong template for a formulaic letter. Nonetheless, the assemblywoman Cathy Young seems to be pretty good for our region. I haven't decided yet if I'll vote for her (she seems a knee-jerk fiscal cutter).

And speaking of integration of special text into a formula, Jesse Kahn posted a link on Facebook to MoveOn.org's video about President Palin. It uses photos and names from your Facebook archive to personalize the message. I think it works pretty well though it's a bit scary how quickly they can insert themselves into your life.

friendship is in the water

2010-10-30T19:37:00.003-04:00

Last Tuesday night, I went over to Wellsville to hear philosopher Timothy Madigan give his talk "Aristotle's Email: Friendship in the Cyber Age" at the David A. Howe Public Library. He started out with describing Aristotle's three types of friendship: utility, pleasure, good, and how they can help us achieve eudaimonia (literally "good spirit" and usually translated as happiness in the sense of fulfillment). This is described in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. After laying out the foundation, Madigan brought us up to date with how friendship plays out in an era of Facebook Friends, other social networks like Classmates.com, googling your long-lost friends (and finding them sometimes), and TV shows like "Seinfeld" and "Friends." He cited Robin Dunbar's writing in Wired which hypothesized that one's brain is capable of handling 150 friends. So what's that you say? You have 500 friends on Facebook. He and others have followed up and found that 150 is about the number of active friends one might have on Facebook (whatever active means). He said that nobody writes letters anymore but we know that isn't entirely true. On the other hand, one doesn't get much personal mail in the mailbox.

On Wednesday, Lenka Clayton gave a lecture as the visiting artist in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. Wouldn't you know that one of her recent and ongoing projects is called "Mysterious Letters"? She and Michael Crowe both discovered that they had wanted to do a project to write a letter to everyone in the world. They realized that this was a daunting task but that if both of them had come up with the idea, there must be some reason to pursue it. They started with a residency in Cushendall, Northern Ireland, working out of a tower in the center of the village of 467 households. Lenka and Michael walked around town, taking pictures and then writing individual letters inspired by the houses and whatever. They mailed all of the letters on the same day and their story ended up on BBC News. Next up was Polish Hill in Pittsburgh where Lenka is now living. A couple more are in the planning but don't ask where because they won't tell you. Kind of kills the mystery. In Cushendall and Polish Hill, the letters evoked and provoked considerable comment and some concern among the residents. Folks in Polish Hill met neighbors that they'd seen around (perhaps acquaintances or Aristotelian friends of utility). This project, and much of Lenka's art work, reflects her origins in documentary filmmaking as well as her interest in history and place. Her other projects led to taking apart Bush's weapons of mass destruction speech and putting the words back together in alphabetical order; following the instructions for a trip in NYC found in a notebook bought in a thrift shop; putting people in order by age, finances, length of relationship, and stage of pregnancy; and writing consecutive numbers on 7000 stones in honor of the Steinheim Museum at Alfred University (part of residency in 2008).

Then, wouldn't you know? I get to church this morning and Pastor Pat Bancroft is going to talk about friendship in the cyber age. She didn't call it that. Pat hasn't leapt into the Facebook swamp yet but had read about someone who was bragging about their 4700+ Friends and she was just stunned. Not surprisingly, her take on the topic was more about spiritual friendship but, still, there was much to think about in light of Madigan and Clayton. Pat's husband, Tim, indirectly gave me another assignment in talking about how Aristotle plays out in Boethius and on to Aquinas and then on to later philosophers and thinkers. Yikes, and I just wanted to continue with my reading of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Alÿs

2010-10-17T20:15:00.008-04:00

One of the lovely things about a slow evening on the reference desk is catching up on the current periodicals. This evening, I read a couple wonderful paragraphs, one about Hieronymus Bosch and the other about Francis Alÿs. Matthew Collings is making a movie about the Garden of Earthly Delights and got to spend eight hours filming in the Prado. I wasn't there for eight hours but I did spend a lot of time with the Garden last December. The Garden of Earthly Delights is in a gallery with several other Bosch paintings. And it was the object of research for Peter Glum whose microfilms were my recently completed cataloging gig for the Morgan Library. Francis Alÿs has long been a favorite artist, as Bosch has been. He's a Belgian who lives in Mexico City and does great pieces that are often related strongly to place. It makes sense, then, that someone might want to play on his work and do a show entitled "I'm not here -- an exhibition without Francis Alÿs." The show also played off Todd Haynes' 2007 film "I'm not there." The show was at De Appel Boys' School in Amsterdam. At any rate, here are a couple paragraphs that I found interesting:

"One of the films I've been working on is about Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. ... I say perhaps because no one knows what Bosch's intention was with this or any of his surviving pictures. Piety, lust, and ghastly eternal pain are typical symbols in a Renaissance altarpiece, which is always a moral history of humanity. But Bosch plays such weird games with everything defining religious art up to then (the painting was likely done about 1505) that the rhetorical emotion doesn't seem like anything at all, replaced by an entirely new emotion. Or maybe what is truly new and truly refreshing is the apparent absence of emotion: a kind of sudden loaded bewilderment. I think that may be my favorite feeling in art. I certainly felt happy and privileged to be filming this painting for more than eight hours in the Prado one day earlier this year. Then, as the weeks went by and all the filming was done and the editing began and the footage had to be made into a convincing, seamless narrative, the torture began." (Collings, Modern painters, Oct. 2010, p. 27)

"But sometimes serendipity just falls into place: in the performance Just popped out, back in two hours (2010), artist David Sherry was meant to sit zombie-like in a chair for the duration of the evening, with a Post-it note stuck to his forehead reading 'Just popped out, back in two hours.' But due to the lingering traces of Eyjafjallajökull's eruption, Sherry couldn't get to Amsterdam in time, and was thus replaced by a stand-in, making him even more 'not here' than he otherwise would have been." (Douglas Heingartner, review of the show, Frieze, June/July/August 2010, p. 186)

The image of the Garden is, by the way, from the Wikipedia article on the painting.

AAT in the museum

2010-10-14T21:56:00.005-04:00

I forgot to mention in my blog entry yesterday about my visit to the Albright-Knox that I really enjoyed the wall labels in the small Sol LeWitt exhibition that included several items related to the wall drawing, books from the library, and other items. On the labels for the books and other items, the format was listed as: paper (fiber product). Just like in AAT but "oil on canvas" didn't become "oil (substance) ..." I do remember Toni Petersen or other early editors saying that you wouldn't need the qualifier in a modified descriptor if the context made the qualifier redundant or unnecessary.

Albright-Knox Art Gallery: inside and out

2010-10-14T10:26:00.006-04:00

I really enjoyed my trip to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery yesterday. The main reason for making the trip yesterday was a lecture in the evening by Jennifer Walkowski on John Bennett's plan for the city and John Wade's City Hall. John Hosford is taking a couple classes at the UB library school on Wednesdays so we were able to carpool, as it were. And boy am I glad I went.

The main show at the Albright-Knox is the "Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents." I especially enjoyed Joshua Reiman's four-projector installation on the sublime and Sarah Paul and Suzannah Paul's installation of film against a scrim of old windows. The grid of the windows resonated with the Sol LeWitt wall drawing which is being installed in the stairwell between the old and new buildings, one of his mighty fine "enigmatic vortexes of graphite scribbles." Throughout the galleries were arrows pointing your way or to an emergency callbox or similar things, courtesy of Micah Lexier.

The upper picture is not from the Albright-Knox; it is his "This is an arrow in a vitrine with other things" (2009; photo from an entry on the "View on Canadian art" blog). This arrow does nonetheless have about the shape of the AKAG arrows. When I was done inside the museum, I went out on the grounds and found this arrow pointing to the storm sewer drain near the bottom of the grand stairs from the museum down to the Delaware Park lake.

There was an Andy Goldsworthy video in the court gallery: "Rain Shadow." Goldsworthy is lying on the sidewalk near the grand stairs outside the museum as it starts to rain. He gets up and walks away after it has been raining for a while. The dry spot where his body was of course gets wet, and the rain shadow disappears. The video was done on one of Goldsworthy's trips to Buffalo to work on his "Herd of Stones" which is to be finished in the fall of 2011. At the moment, there's a stack of smaller stones and a few bigger ones, surrounded by protective tape, on the park side of the museum. Nearby, some nice sticks on the ground, also transitory.

There are a few more pictures of my day in Buffalo in my Flickr photostream which is available from the bottom of this blog page. Those of you who will be going to the ARLIS/NA conference in Toronto in 2012 should start getting ready; we'll probably be doing a day trip to Buffalo to see the Albright-Knox and maybe the Darwin Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright and perhaps some of the greenbelt or the city hall or who knows. Maybe even Niagara Falls.

international style?

2010-10-14T10:21:00.003-04:00

If a Greek Revival house gets French doors and displays an American flag, is it fair to call it International Style? This house is on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, a few houses South of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

encoded

2010-10-08T12:39:00.005-04:00

Lori Hepner is the visiting artist this week in the Freshman Foundation class at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. I went to her talk and interview on Wednesday morning. After a childhood of drawing, she started college as an Egyptology major but soon shifted to photography. It was the hieroglyphics that inspired her and encoding has become fundamental to her work. One of her early works ("Binary nature" pictured above, photo courtesy of the artist) combines glass shards as zeroes and bits of plant material as ones. She spoke of enjoying the natural and the product made from natural ingredients. I like the mix too.

One of her more recent projects -- "Code words" -- is taking pictures of silk ribbons breaking apart in little dishes of bleach. The ribbons were inscribed with a word in binary code. Her titles are wonderful too: using a colon between the words, suggesting a possible relationship, e.g., aplomb:cessation; itinerant:abeyance. While this seems rather mathematical, the results are totally aesthetic. You can see more of the recent work on her website at lorihepner.com.

It did get more technical the next day at the Bergren Forum when Scott Moerschbacher talked about "QCD and the strong interaction." What?!? You don't know what QCD is? It's quantum chromodynamics. While I have no pretense of understanding particle physics, it does have to do with fundamental stuff. The words were beautiful as they passed over us: asymptotic freedom; hadron polarizability; quarks are called up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. But my favorite discovery was Lattice QCD, the model of QCD which allows the computer to deal with the mush of subatomic particles and turns it into, for our visual delight, a Tinkertoy construction. Maybe you had to be there. I could imagine the talk being redone as a dadaist performance piece but when I mentioned that to Elizabeth Gulacsy after Moerschbacher was done, she thought I was a bit touched in the head. He said he was going to post the presentation but I don't see it yet. I also couldn't help but turn "QCD" into "queer compulsive disorder."

ode to the well-placed comma, in French

2010-09-07T21:27:00.004-04:00

A few days ago, I wrote a blog entry about The elegance of the hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and a passage about a misused comma which sent our heroine into a tizzy. I'm now in Ithaca where I found the original French version L'élégance du hérisson in the main Cornell library. The English translation clearly plays the same game but I'll have to leave it to those with better French than mine to find the rich nuances in the French original. Still, the English translation is magnificent. I highly recommend that you read the book, in whatever language you can. The ending is quite a surprise and very moving. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to get to sleep, after an hour each of Daniel Burnham and Henri Matisse on PBS and then finishing the book.

The passage on the comma (virgule) appears on p. 114-116 in the original Gallimard, 2006 edition:

La mort de Pierre Arthens flétrit mes camélias.

J'ouvre l'enveloppe et je lis ce petit mot inscrit au dos d'une carte de visite si glacée que l'encre, triomphant de buvards consternés, a bavé légèrement sous chaque lettre.

Madame Michel,
Pourriez-vous, réceptionner les paquets du pressing
cet après-midi?
Je passerai les prendre à votre loge ce soir.
Par avance merci,
Signature griffonnée

Je ne m'attendais pas à une telle sournoiserie dans l'attaque. De saisissement, je me laisse tomber sur la chaise la plus proche. Je me demande d'ailleurs si je ne suis pas un peu folle. Est-ce que ça vous fait le même effet, à vous, quand ça vous arrive?

Tenez:
Le chat dort.

La lecture de cette petite phrase anodine n'a éveillé en vous aucun sentiment de douleur, aucun flamboiement de souffrance? C'est légitime.

Maintenant:
Le chat, dort.

Je répète, pour qu'aucune ambiguïté ne demeure:
Le chat virgule dort.
Le chat, dort.
Pourriez-vous, réceptionner.

D'un côté, nous avons ce prodigieux usage de la virgule qui, prenant des libertés avec la langue parce que d'ordinaire on n'en place point avant une conjonction de coordination, en magnifie la forme:
M'a-t-on fait assez de reproches, et pour la guerre, et pour la paix ...

Et de l'autre, nous avons les bavouilleries sur vélin de Sabine Pallières transperçant la phrase d'une virgule devenue poignard.

Pourriez-vous, réceptionner les paquets de pressing?

Sabine Pallières eût-elle été une bonne portugaise née sous un figuier de Faro, une concierge fraîchement émigrée de Puteaux ou bien une déficiente mentale tolérée par sa charitable famille que j'aurais pu pardonner de bon cœur cette nonchalance coupable. Mais Sabine Pallières est une riche. Sabine Pallières est la femme d'un grande ponte de l'industrie d'armement, Sabine Pallières est la mère d'un crétin en duffle-coat vert sapin qui, après ses deux khâgnes et Sciences-Po, ira probablement diffuser la médiocrité de ses petites pensées dans un cabinet ministériel de droite, et Sabine Pallières est en sus la fille d'une garce en manteau de fourrure qui fait partie du comité de lecture d'une très grande maison d'édition et est si harnachée de bijoux que, certaines fois, je guette l'affaissement.

Pour toutes ces raisons, Sabine Pallières est inexcusable. Les faveurs du sort ont un prix. Pour qui bénéficie des indulgences de la vie, l'obligation de rigueur dans la considération de la beauté n'est pas négociable. La langue, cette richesse de l'homme, et ses usages, cette élaboration de la communauté sociale, sont des œuvres sacrées. Qu'elles évoluent avec le temps, se transforment, s'oublient et renaissent tandis que, parfois, leur transgression devient la source d'une plus grande fécundité, ne charge rien au fait que pour prendre avec elles ce droit de jeu et du changement, il faut au préalable leur avoir déclaré plein sujétion. Les élus de la société, ceux que la destinée excepte de ces servitudes qui sont le lot de l'homme pauvre, ont partant cette double mission d'adorer et de respecter la splendeur de la langue. Enfin, qu'une Sabine Pallières mésuse de la ponctuation est un blasphème d'autant plus grave que dans le même temps, des poètes merveilleux nés dans des caravanes puantes ou des cités poubelles ont pour elle cette sainte révérence qui est due à la Beauté.

Aux riches, le devoir du Beau. Sinon, ils méritent de mourir.

C'est à ce point précis de mes réflexions indignées que quelqu'un sonne à la loge.

art for art's sake

2010-09-07T10:34:00.003-04:00

There were a couple dozen students out on the lawn outside the campus center, all looking West-Northwest and mostly in a line. I looked over that direction and couldn't see anything. I asked the closest person what was up; is it that pole rising from the ground? There was a pole over on the hill that way that I didn't remember. She said that they were doing a mile-long line and looking at the other folks, over there, across the valley. I asked "Guinness book of world records?" She replied "art." Probably Freshman Foundation. Sheila Pepe was the visiting artist for the first week of classes and they knitted up a storm, the unknitting of which may find its way into scarves.

(this is not the Pepe project at Alfred which was in a more cramped space in Harder Hall; this is a photo from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum site)

sunshine and cancer

2010-09-05T11:14:00.003-04:00

"Frank C. Garland, an epidemiologist whose work helped establish a link between vitamin D deficiency and some cancers, including colon and breast cancer, died on Aug. 17 in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 60 and lived in San Diego." Dr Garland's research seems to show that exposure to sunlight's vitamin D lessens the likelihood of colon and breast cancer. Ironically, he died of cancer of the esophageal junction and had lived in a place with considerable sunshine.

In late 1997 and early 1998 when I was having a nose reconstruction because of basal cell cancer, my mother was dying of colon cancer. We don't know how we'll go but go we will and this conjunction of sun and cancer is especially compelling for me.

ode to the well-placed comma

2010-09-04T18:53:00.006-04:00

The elegance of the hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is beautifully written, originally in French and translated by Alison Anderson. There are two main characters and the chapters are written in the voice of one or the other. The older of the main characters is the widowed concierge "at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood." She mostly plays the stereotype of slump and TV-watcher for the benefit of others; she really is entranced by art and cultural things. She is also quite a reader.

When one of the tenants dies and wilts her camellias, the concierge Renée Michel gets a note from another tenant that includes this sentence: Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner's this afternoon?

For the next couple pages, we are in Mme Michel's thoughts as she contemplates the misplaced comma after "as." Barbery fills these two pages with incredible sentences of dependent and independent clauses, modifying descriptions, and other complex construction that result in a beautiful tribute to the correct use of the comma.

I'm not much past this passage which appears on pages 108-110 of the paperback edition. Materfamilias Reads has also blogged this matter and has typed in a good portion of the section I'm talking about. cf http://materfamiliasreads.blogspot.com/2009/04/muriel-barberys-elegance-of-hedgehog.html Materfamilias has only selected and typed one paragraph but it's the whole two pages that just fills me with delight but then, like Materfamilias, I'm probably a punctuation pedant. I should probably look up the French original; though my French is not great, I'd probably be able to work my way through this section.

The Clark(e)s of Cooperstown

2010-07-19T18:09:00.005-04:00

Hyde Hall has long been one of my favorite Palladian houses in the United States. Perhaps nothing compares to Monticello for Palladianism but Hyde Hall, designed by Philip Hooker and built between 1817 and 1833, is wonderful. It is set on the northern end of Otsego Lake, not too far from Cooperstown. It probably is relevant that the builder was George Clarke but, alas, there is no reason to think that he is even a distant relative of mine. His family came to the United States through New York City and my Clarkes were Rhode Islanders before moving to western New York State. Still, it's nice to have the nominal connection.

At the other end of Otsego Lake, one finds a good deal of influence from a different family of Clarks. Sterling and Francine Clark are perhaps best known these days as the founding patrons of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I've visited the museum several times, most recently last October when the regional chapters of ARLIS/NA and VRA held a joint meeting there.

My family gathered (as you may know from the last entry here or from Facebook) at a KOA campground near Herkimer over the July 4th weekend. One of the field trips was to Hyde Hall with my sisters Cathy and Carol, and another field trip was to Cooperstown with a couple carloads. Everyone else went to the Baseball Hall of Fame and I went to see the Sargent show at the Fenimore Art Museum. One of my brother's pictures from Cooperstown was of a sign which read "Estates of Edward Clark and Alfred Corning Clark" (grandfather and father of Sterling Clark). The Clarks summered in Cooperstown and were great patrons of a variety of activities, including sports and art.

For years, I've been meaning to read The Clarks of Cooperstown by Nicholas Fox Weber and the visit to Cooperstown certainly raised it on the list even though the reviews on Amazon are not so positive. Sure, it probably could use some editorial tightening but I'm learning a lot and enjoying it.

Edward Clark was an associate of Isaac Merritt Singer of sewing machine fame. Clark and Singer together dreamed up the monthly payment scheme and everybody could then afford to have a sewing machine at home. Clark was the business side of things and owned or controlled significantly more than half of the company. He left an estate to Alfred Corning Clark that Weber says was relatively bigger than that left some years later by J.P. Morgan.

In addition to his life as a rich American businessman, Alfred was also a great patron of tenor Lorentz Severin Skougaard (known professionally as Skougaard-Severini), sculptor George Grey Barnard, and other artists. Alfred's relationship with Skougaard was intimate and he summered with Skougaard's family in Norway. One is generally reluctant to apply late 20th-century interpretations of homosexual relationships but Weber does include information about their activities that provide a rich history of Alfred's parallel lives with his family in the United States and his "artistic" life in Europe.

One of Alfred's paintings was "The Snake Charmer" by Jean-Léon Gérôme:

Weber talks about how we, the audience, see the naked backside of the charmer while the men in the painting are getting a front-on view. Alfred's widow sold the painting after his death but it was repurchased by Sterling and Francine and is now in the collection of the Clark Art Institute. The description on the institute's website does not mention this interesting bit of provenance.

Alfred's relationship with Barnard was perhaps more complicated since Barnard sublimated his sexual urges in exchange for creative energy. He did marry a woman later but, in Weber's telling, it was a sublimation of his attraction to men. While this may have been frustrating to Alfred, it did lead to some powerful homoerotic sculpture, e.g., Brotherly Love (a memorial to Skougaard), The Struggle of the Two Natures of Man (stood for years in the Great Court at the Metropolitan). When I was at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester last weekend for Rochester Pride, I noticed a wonderful bust of Lincoln which was dramatically illuminated. It was a work by George Gray Barnard!

Alfred Clark also served as champion of Frederick Bourne whom he had met at the all-male Mendelssohn Glee Club, for which Alfred commissioned a concert hall and clubhouse (since demolished). Bourne became president of Singer & Company and was responsible for commissioning the Singer Building from architect Ernest Flagg. It was briefly the tallest building in America and demolished, sadly, in the 1960s.

Singer Building, New York
(Completed 1908, demolished 1968)
(from wirednewyork.com)

Flagg was also commissioned by Mrs. Alfred Clark, after Alfred's death, to build a mansion on Riverside Drive. Weber describes it as "Neo-Palladian" but it is a far cry from the severe Palladianism of Hyde Hall. The illustration in the book shows it to be something like the Carnegie Mansion that has become the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Yes, it has classical detailing but it's more like Newport than Chiswick. I could not find a picture of the exterior on the web but this drawing from the American architect and building news (Dec. 1900) shows the progression of orders around the windows and other detailing which grew from the same roots as Palladio.

In an interesting twist, the caption for this illustration on the St. Croix Architecture site (where it's available as a poster) misspells "Clark" as "Clarke."

That's probably a sign that this Clarke should stop trying to summarize the book and go back to reading it. It has been quite an interesting ride so far, resonating beyond the history of the Clarks of Cooperstown.

carpenter italianate

2010-07-06T11:02:00.004-04:00

We drove through Mt. Vision, New York on the way home from the family gathering at the KOA campground in Herkimer. Mt. Vision is along Route 205 on the western side of Otsego Lake, near Cooperstown. I noticed three houses that looked like siblings as we passed through the village. Each was a tripartite Italianate house with six windows on the front. The center section sticks out a foot or so in front of the rest of the facade, making a simple but lovely and classic composition. Perhaps I'd had too rich a diet of Palladianism at Hyde Hall in Glimmerglass State Park, also on Otsego Lake.

The Italianate detailing was fairly light in these houses: flat roof, simple bracketing under roofline, balanced fenestration, no columned porch. I think of my house in Alfred as carpenter Italianate. It was built by my great-great-grandfather, Martin W. Babcock, and my great-grandfather, Alpheus Burdick Kenyon. They may have used a plan book but mostly it's a cube with sheds appended out back: big cube, little cube, littler cube. The front side is basically tripartite though the porch lightens the verticality and the door is on the side rather than central as in the Mt. Vision houses. Nonetheless, they seemed to be carpenter Italianate like my house, just the work of someone building houses in a small town in the years after the American Civil War.

An added treat was a fancier version on the southern edge of town. The scale was slightly bigger but it still didn't have the porch in the example at the top of this entry. All four of the houses had closed louvers on the upper middle window. And, then, as we drove out of town, there was another bigger one. Its roof had been augmented by a hip roof: practical in snow country but it rather ruins the Italianate feel. I saw quite a few Italianate buildings with such augmented roofs as we drove around central New York State.

Since I wasn't in the driver's seat and we were anxious to get home, I didn't request that we turn around and go back so I could take pictures. The house illustrated above, found by googling "italianate houses" for images, is the Coite-Hubbard House (1856) which I thought gave an idea of the houses in Mt. Vision. The picture comes from Historic Buildings of Connecticut where it is described as: The building which now serves as Wesleyan’s President's House was originally built in 1856 for Gabriel Coite, who became a state senator in 1860 and moved to Hartford in 1862, when he became the State Treasurer. In 1863, his Italianate house on High Street in Middletown was sold to Mrs. Jane Miles Hubbard, the widow of Samuel Hubbard, who had been a US Postmaster General. Wesleyan University acquired the Coite-Hubbard House from her heirs in 1904 to become the new President's House, replacing the first building used for that purpose. [It amuses me that this example is an official residence since that is one of my postcard categories. When Judith Holliday was collecting libraries, I decided I needed a building type to collect and picked official residences. I also did an LCSH subject proposal for "Official residences" which was accepted by LC. They improved it by adding a see-also reference: See also |i subdivision |a Dwellings |i under classes of government or other officials, e.g. |a Governors--Dwellings.]

glimmers of hope

2010-06-30T23:04:00.002-04:00

Lots of interesting stuff during ALA and I'm still processing it. Ronald Murray presented his work on a "FRBR paper tool" which, as someone said after he presented at CC:DA, was either exhilarating, exhausting, or terrifying, or all of the above. What was exciting for me was that it seemed to move us beyond some of my concerns about FRBR. That is, people seemed to be chasing Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item to the detriment of moving forward toward a response that built a richer as well as collocated response to a query. Murray's networks of bibliographic relationships allow a system to build trees that can use the building blocks. Not only did it seem promising for texts but he also momentarily had a parallel 4-layer context for archives: fonds, series, folders, items (I think that was it). I wonder if there's a similar hierarchy for visual materials and cultural objects which will make sense. A starting point into the web stuff on Murray's work can be found at http://dltj.org/article/frbr-paper-tool-presentation/ (first hit when you google "frbr paper tool" -- the report on a November 2009 presentation at the Library of Congress).

Oh ... and his charts were beautiful. As I was looking at them, I was thinking of hiring a silversmith to turn one into a necklace. Or maybe a knit version? If it was macramé, it would probably work for philodendron.

Later that morning, I went to an OCLC program entitled "Cataloging alchemy: making your data work harder" which included Rich Greene talking about GLIMIR (Global Library Manifestation Identifier). They've focused so far on parallel-record and reproduction identifiers which will help them pull together editions/printings/records for closely-related resources. Rich indicated that they might be able to do some enhancing of the resulting cluster, e.g., access points at the cluster level. I'm dreaming of enhanced subject access because of this, or more contents analysis because one edition has a contents note. Hmm, enhanced RLIN clusters. The basis for GLIMIR building is the new version of the duplicate detection report which OCLC has started using. This will help match and merge simple vendor records with fuller ones, both in batch-loading and already in the database. They plan on working their way through the 195 million records in the OCLC database.

There were other exciting things at ALA Annual, that was just on Monday. I'll work on my ALA report as soon as I can. Meanwhile, it's still a couple hours to Binghamton and then three hours to Alfred. Buses with wireless internet access are pretty nice but it's a little cramped for spreading out your ALA notes.

books and zines

2010-06-19T21:23:00.003-04:00

Pretty exciting. I got to meet my closest parallel book collector in LibraryThing: Paul Ranogajec, a doctoral student in American architectural history. cf. paulranogajec.com He's a buddy of Roberto Ferrari, art librarian and now doctoral student himself, both of them at the CUNY Grad Center. Roberto is Paul's closest LT parallel, or is it the other way around? Anyway, we had a good time talking about our collections and art/architecture interests over a nice brunch in the garden at Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I'm not sure that Paul is convinced yet that he should go to library school but we'll keep working on him. After brunch, we went to a couple nearby used bookshops. I escaped without buying any books at either shop or elsewhere today.

On the way to the subway to go to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), I ran into Bill Jones, former colleague at NYU Libraries. That was fun.

The main reason I was running off to MAD was a panel on "Gay print/queer zines" with Scott Hug of K48, Tony Arena of Anonymous boy collection and other titles, Michael Bullock of BUTT, Jason Lamphier and Noah Michelson of Out, and Dan Avery of NEXT, moderated by someone whose name I didn't catch. Each of them described their magazine or project and then they talked amongst themselves and with us in the audience. I had expected that the hall would be jammed to the rafters but it was fairly sparsely populated. I loved the way Tony Arena talked about his desire for the informal and chaotic. The fellows from Out had some interesting things to say about being fairly mainstream, dealing with print versus web capacity and timing. And almost all of them talked about community as part of their mission. I was intrigued to learn that the founders/editors of BUTT started Fantastic man because they didn't want BUTT to have to go commercial, having started it as a cross between S.T.H. and Index. And the first issue of Gentle woman just came out so there was teasing about covering all the ground now.

This is all fine and dandy but I'm really enjoying the book I've just started: In spite of the gods: the rise of modern India by Edward Luce (Anchor Books, 2008) and I think I'm going to go back to that. I did go read for a while in Prospect Park after discovering and climbing Lookout Hill. The sunset was only just beginning and there weren't enough clouds to really light up the sky with color.

"closed": too early, soccer

2010-06-19T07:53:00.005-04:00

It took me quite a while to get going yesterday but I still made it to downtown Manhattan too early for galleries to be open. They mostly open at noon. And ApexArt was playing the Slovenia-U.S.A. soccer game so I didn't go in to see the "Men with balls" show. Artists Space was closed for installation but I did finally get into Leslie/Lohman for "The great LGBTQ photo show" but didn't see any photos that really knocked my socks off. Oh, it's worth visiting.

On to Mercer Street Books, a fine used bookstore near NYU. Getting a bit hungry, I went for the extravagance of a crepe and glass of pinot noir at Shade, a very satisfying lunch. I did hear the guys next to me speculating on the referee in the Slovenia-U.S.A. game. If it wasn't too late or installation, it was soccer but the day was fine altogether.

The Lil Picard show at Grey Art Gallery was on the list so I stopped in. I wasn't familiar with her work and the show is a trip down memory lane, with early postwar and work from into the 1990s. The brochure or wall text included some interesting words about her attempts to be part of the scene but finding the Cedar Bar boys not at all congenial. That is, they just wanted pretty young things, not thinking and acting women. Reminds me of Jo Schaffer's description of visits when she was an art student at Brooklyn College; the girls got to sit in the back row and observe but mostly weren't part of that scene. Thank heavens, we've mostly changed.

It was also interesting to see the drawings of Picard's husband on his death bed in Saint Vincent's Hospital. The last dated drawing in the set was dated June 14th, almost the anniversary.

I ran a couple more errands in the neighborhood and then took off for MoMA PS1 for the "Greater NY" show. Perhaps my favorite moment was the performance in the basement where the artist was putting gold foil on the boiler, using his sweat as adhesive. He was passively standing, brush in hand, on a ladder doing something on a palette. He passed the brush over his neck and then picked up a piece of foil with the brush and applied it to the boiler. Rhythmic and slow-moving. The piece was called "Skewed lies/central governor: a collaborative performance with Saul Melman" by Aki Sasamoto. Among the other works that I liked were Leidy Churchman's paintings, Conrad Ventur's video installation with disco ball, Bruce High Quality Foundation's pedestal exchange, and "Let's face it; we're all queer" (one of the images in A.L. Steiner's "Angry, articulate, inevitable"). Ismail Randall made some interesting mountains out of magazines (sculpted stacks of Vanity fair) in a piece addressing the U.S./Mexico border. Michele Abeles's fine photos had great titles, e.g., "Man, shadow, table, fan, rock" and "Number, fabric, man, hand, rock, icons, cardboard, potatoes."

After I'd done about enough art in GNY, I went to the bookstore and then ordered a cafe au lait. Then, I checked the watch: it was almost 5:30 and I was supposed to be in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn by 6:30. Well, the coffee got drunk more quickly and with less reading than it might have been. Good old 7 to Q however did get me to Cortelyou on the same train that Heidi was on. We went to The Farm on Adderley for some yummy food, with their specialty being local and small-farm stuff. The service and setting were too Manhattan (pretentious) for Heidi's taste but the food was good.

I definitely am of the "eat to live" rather than "live to eat" school but have noticed that these NYC posts from the last few days have all talked about food. The restaurant options in Alfred and environs are definitely thinner than in New York City but the Collegiate Restaurant which has been closed since last fall's fire in the Alfred business district should be open in its new space by the time I get home. Not fine dining, but darn fine food in a friendly atmosphere. When Heidi visits Alfred, she will probably be satisfied that the food and service are a good match.

West Chelsea gallery hopping

2010-06-17T22:37:00.005-04:00

These home-made pencils are only one small bit of a platform with many objects by Ben Gocker in his show at P.P.O.W. Gallery on West 25th Street in New York City. I have been especially enamored of pencils since working at the Amon Carter Museum. There, Paula Stewart and I exchanged pencils as a token gift from our travels. She acquired the habit when she had worked in the photo department before becoming the archivist. Now, I just buy more museum pencils than I can use.

Today's adventures centered on West Chelsea. It started with lunch with Ann Morrell who works at the American Friends Service Committee. Ann and her husband Bill moved earlier this year to the ILGWU apartments on Eighth Avenue. They have a sunny living room with bookcases under the windows. Bright and cheerful. We ate at Le Grainne Cafe, a charming French bistro that used to be Le Gamin. My crepe with turkey, goat cheese, and ratatouille was magnificent.

Food's fine but then we went gallery hopping. Ann joined me for the late Monet show at Gagosian Gallery. As we neared the gallery, we ran into Barbara Reed. Retirement allows one to go gallery hopping on weekdays. It's nice to avoid the crazy West Chelsea weekend crowds.

Ann split after Monet and I crossed 20th Street to Tanya Bonakdar Gallery where Uta Barth and Ian Kiaer were on view. The Barths were especially rich, one with feet on the beach. I am looking forward to going to Fire Island one of the days I'm here in the city. From Bonakdar, I stopped in at Casey Kaplan Gallery and found the Trisha Donnelly sculptures interesting. Donnelly carves big blocks of stone with quite refined parallel lines. Then I went to Printed Matter and actually escaped without buying anything.

Sticking to my list of galleries to visit, I next went to Tracy Williams on 23rd Street to see the Barbara Bloom show entitled "Present" ... as in gift. Great work and Bloom arranged for each of us visitors to get a CD. Haven't played it yet but it is apparently the CD used in the piece with a rug of plans of Steinway pianos. Another piece in the show was a table of glasses with a sound board in the tabletop so that it made sounds as you put your hand over the glasses. This was my first visit to the new Tracy Williams space; they used to be in a rowhouse basement on West 4th Street, an awkward but intimate space. They are working at keeping the intimacy in the new space, partly by interacting with the visitors.

Deborah Bell had a couple dozen photographs from America illustrated by George W. Gardner. Fine photographs. One was of "Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Crumb, Marathon, New York" (1975); I can't wait to get back upstate and ask my sister's partner Barb Crumb if she had relatives in the Marathon area. Another photograph -- "Langhorne, Pennsylvania" (1965) -- included the sign for Flannery's Restaurant along with other roadside stuff. Having just finished reading The violent bear it away by Flannery O'Connor, I was easily finding parallels between O'Connor's characters and the "real" Americans and Americana in Gardner's photographs.

On to the Gocker show entitled "There is really no single poem." Gocker graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. Lots of his works resonated with my librarian brain: pencils, words, letters.

I stopped in at Mitchell Algus Gallery and found him packing up to move his space to Morton Street in the West Village. The mean economic times make for even more volatility in the gallerist's life than usual.

Further West on 25th Street, I stopped at ClampArt to see the "Jesse Burke: intertidal" show. I'd first run across Burke at the New York Art Book Fair last fall. Really love the photos. And Brian Clamp had one of my favorite John Arsenault photos in the back "alley" of the gallery: "Getting it in Italy" (2000). I just have to get me one of those John Arsensault photos someday. Have to quit buying so many books (but I did do some freelance cataloging before I blogged). As much as I like the sexy Burkes and Arsenaults, the prints by Stuart Allan were really fine, the varying light of different hours of the day. Reminded me of Spencer Finch's work on the High Line.

On to Galerie Lelong for the Andy Goldsworthy show: "New York dirt water light" with ephemeral "sculptures" on the sidewalks of NYC which faded with traffic. And next door was the William Pope L. show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. This last show opened with a print which had the word "melan-colicky" across the middle. Just cruising, not feeling very melancholy at all.

I've spared you some of the parallels drawn from the gallery visits, e.g., Barbara Bloom's adopted Chinese daughter (think Karen Muller), the new assistant librarian at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies who is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as is Flannery O'Connor, the whole O'Connor connection to Debra Kruse's art ... well, I HAD spared you those parallels.

uptown

2010-06-17T09:06:00.004-04:00

I don't consider myself religious but I am certainly moved by religious art. I'm in New York City for a week or so before going to the ALA conference in Washington. Diana Mitrano is letting me stay at her Brooklyn apartment while she's in Hong Kong. As I left her apartment yesterday thinking about the day's adventures, I decided to go up to the Cloisters, partly to see if I could find Building the medieval art in the bookshop. Being in that space with the fine art is always very moving for me. The view above is of the apse from the Church of Saint Martin in Fuentidueña, Spain with a crucifix from Palencia. Romanesque and Ottonian are probably my favorite medieval periods.

I'm not really sure where the love of medieval art comes from. My 12th-grade art teacher was fond of Romanesque Catalonian frescoes, or at least I got the small books on them that were a couple of my first art books about then. Them, along with the facsimile of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

Whatever, I found myself tearing up several times in the Cloisters: for the love of the art, for the joy of being in its company.

From Fort Tryon Park, I took the bus down to the Hispanic Society where I was delighted to find that the Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster show was still on view (closes June 27th so get there soon). She created three dioramas with books as the object in the landscape. There's a wonderful wall of quotations too. Since my last visit to the Hispanic Society, the Sorolla murals have been rehung in the room now called the Sala Bancaja. And it's never a problem to visit the collection of Goya, Velazquez, El Greco, and others.

I didn't have a guidebook with me but realized that the Morris-Jumel Mansion wasn't far away. I was too far South and missed it but did visit the hole where the Alexander Hamilton house used to be, crowded between a church and an apartment building just North of City College of New York. It's hard to believe that the house fit in the space, the hole doesn't look near big enough.

They picked the house up and moved it around the corner. It isn't open again yet but the setting is certainly more gracious and spacious.

Since I was there at CCNY, I figured I'd go say hi to the librarian, Judy Connorton, and see the new space. The architecture library has way more space, as does the school. Part of the library is double-height with stacks mostly on a mezzanine over the offices. The roof is open for visiting and there is a funky yellow amphitheater which also serves as the sunshield for the skylight over the central atrium. The end-of-year projects were up on the walls so there were some fun projects to look at. There were also some models of buildings by Palladio, Neutra, and others.

On to the Studio Museum which is showing highlights from its collection. Lots of good stuff. They have a print version of the Lorna Simpson video "15 mouths" which I first saw at Sean Kelly Gallery a few days after 9/11. The video is a grid of mouths quietly humming. It was mesmerizing and soothing in the days just after the World Trade Center attacks. The print version is quieter, just still prints of the mouths with a CD of the humming barely audible.

Supper was at Chennai Garden on East 27th Street, with John Maier, Elizabeth Lilker, and Dan Lipcan. We shared three of the combination platters and barely made it through them. The food was incredibly tasty. John and I walked down to Union Square and I figured I might as well as well veer off to the Strand and St. Mark's bookshops before leaving the neighborhood. I did find Building the medieval world at the Strand. It wasn't the fabulous study of architecture in medieval manuscripts that I'd hoped for, more of a general picture book with mediocre illustrations. Nonetheless, I figured that I'd just regret it if I didn't buy it ... and the price was down from retail.

Thinking about buying books obsessively, I am thrilled that I'll get to meet my closest LibraryThing parallel on Saturday. Paul Ranogajec is a grad student at the CUNY Grad Center and a friend of Roberto Ferrari's. We're getting together for brunch on Saturday. We get to talk books, books, books until the cows come home or we decide to go to the panel on queer zines, 3 pm at the Museum of Art and Design.

thinking about "insanity" and incarceration

2010-05-23T10:13:00.005-04:00

The Willard State Hospital (1869-1995, originally Willard Asylum for the Insane) was open for tours yesterday, a fundraiser for the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Children's Center which occupies one of the historic buildings. My sister Carol and brother Doug, along with Carol's partner Barb, had gone last year. Carol, Barb and I went yesterday. The hospital site was originally the State Agricultural College at Ovid but Ezra Cornell convinced the state, with land and money, to move the college to Ithaca where it became Cornell University.

The hospital and village of Willard sit on the East side of Seneca Lake a ways South of Geneva. The setting is beautiful with the land rising from the lakeshore, not too steep but enough to give you good views from many places on the grounds.

The hospital plays a role in my family history in that Chester Smedley Clarke (1849-1925), my great grandfather, was a patient there for a time between 1904 and 1907. He worked in the shoemaker's shop and there was an old photo of the shop in one of the display cases in the administration building. As I was looking at the picture, some other tour participants were asking about the canary cages that are visible in the picture. The guide mentioned canaries' use in mining but wondered if it was a kind of Muzak for the patients. After being released from the hospital, my great grandfather settled in Binghamton and ran a shoe repair business, and was never in contact with the family again. My brother has the address of the business and it was probably in one of the wonderful brick four-story thin buildings across the train tracks from the current bus station. Several of the buildings have been torn down in my memory and replaced by simple (boring) buildings. Sigh.

There is now a boot camp correctional facility on the grounds of the hospital. It's for minimum security drug-related offenders who can serve 90 days there or several years or whatever in a traditional prison setting. The boot camp is strict and busy and attempts to build discipline and responsibility, no slacking. My nemesis Sonny was given the "opportunity" to serve there and only lasted a week or two. The state was, I guess, no more successful than I in building responsibility in his case. As I took pictures of the abandoned male dormitory, I could hear the prisoners chanting as they did calisthenics or some chore. Being on the grounds of the hospital with both of these personal connections was quite emotional though not spooky. When we were in the basement of Grand View, the old administration building, one of the women in our group shivered as she looked into one of the closet-like spaces in the basement. It probably wasn't a patient room but you couldn't help but think about being locked into a physical space while your mental space was probably troubling you as well.

Especially in the basements of Grand View and Hadley Hall, I also kept thinking about my visit to Eastern State Penintentiary in Philadelphia. I visited in 2005 when they had an installation by Janet Cargill and George Bures Miller. Sonny and I had been to the Cargill/Miller show at P.S. 1 and even though Sonny didn't have a lot of experience with viewing contemporary art, he loved the P.S. 1 show which was marvelous. The Eastern State installation was chilling in ways that the visit to Willard wasn't, perhaps the time, perhaps the space, perhaps me.

There are some more pictures of my visit to Willard on Flickr.

resonances and connections

2010-05-12T22:46:00.005-04:00

As you may know if you read this blog or talk to me about life and art, I love it when life wraps around and makes connections. The house above is Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, one of the homes of the Duke of Norfolk. It is the setting for the movie "A Handful of Dust" (1988) based on the book by Evelyn Waugh and directed by Charles Sturridge. It stars James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas, along with Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, and Alec Guinness. I cannot remember who recommended the film but I was delighted to see the actors' names as they appeared in the opening credits. I'm quite a fan of Kristin Scott Thomas but Wilby and Graves will always be favorites because of their roles in "Maurice."

So why the opening reference to connections? You see I was looking through The Victorian country house by Mark Girouard (Yale University Press, 1979) just the other day which includes Carlton Towers among the featured houses in the second half of the book. It's got a grand tower with an outsized and rather awkward Mansard cap. As often happens in movies, the interior shots don't seem to have been done at Carlton, or at least they seemed to use a different staircase and what's a country house movie without the right staircase?

Not only the house but when Tony, the owner of Hatton as the house is called in the movie, is "kidnapped" in South America, some of the scenes were shot near some dramatic falls which reminded me of Iguacu Falls which were part of one of my ARTstor cataloging assignments. I guess it wasn't Iguacu Falls since the closing credits claimed the movie was shot in Venezuela and Iguacu Falls are on the border of Brazil and Argentina. Details, details. What good are resonances without a bit of slippage?

At any rate, Tony ends up in the hands of a Barbardian-Indian fellow who just wants someone to read to him. He gives some potion to Tony who falls asleep for two days and misses the English adventure hunters who are given his watch and other mementos which will convince them he is dead. They will go back to England and tell the family that Tony is dead. His widow is ruined, I guess, though it would appear that she marries Jock. And now I wonder if there is a fate worse than being lost in the jungle and having to read for your meals.

Those aren't the only resonances. One could revisit the Klukas plan for my country villa, built like Carlton Towers on an ancient foundation. One could talk about how "resonances" and "connections" are both based in French and there have been a lot of French statuses in Facebook recently, thanks to Jonathan Walz and others. But we'll stop and go to bed. By the way, the next movie that Netflix has brought me is "Desperately Seeking Susan" so I'll probably reflect on Sue Sylvester as that flashes before my eyes.

The picture of Carlton Towers at top is from the Ryan Browne wedding photography site.

art and cataloging and art cataloging

2010-04-30T14:30:00.008-04:00

Fannie Hillsmith. "Christmas Tree" (1949)
(Currier Museum of Art)

Just got home the day before yesterday from the ARLIS/NA annual conference in Boston, with day trips on either side for art and architecture. I drove to Boston so I'd have the flexibility of such side trips. On the day before the conference cranked up, I drove up to Manchester, New Hampshire to see the Currier Museum of Art and its Zimmerman House, a Usonian house by Frank Lloyd Wright. An added benefit was lunch with Alison Dickey, currently the librarian at the Currier. The museum has a nice collection. Some of the special treats were Ruisdael's view of Egmont (I've been reading Holland mania by Annette Stott about Americans who visited Holland in the 19th and early 20th century, including Egmont), Fannie Hillsmith (local and NYC modernist, experimenting in a variety of styles), James Aronovich (NH super-realist), "Marc Antony and Cleopatra" by Jan de Bray, and a lovely view of the Campagna by Sanford Robinson Gifford. And they had a fine show of watercolors with several by Arthur Garfield Dove.

The Zimmerman House is nice. The ceilings are even high enough that I didn't feel the need to duck, rather a rarity in a later Frank Lloyd Wright house.

The conference cranked up on Friday with a prelude tour of the North Bennet Street School in the North End. Other than the bird pooping on me in Old North Church yard, it was a lovely morning. The school has a book arts specialty and that was the focus of our tour but we went quickly through the piano and string instrument workshops and up to the furniture finishing room. And I ran into Floyd Zula and his partner Kelly again; they were in Manchester at the Currier as well.

Highlights of the conference for me:

Table of contents as a marker of clarity and complexity: both the Wittenborn and Dwyer book award presenters talked about the value of a good TOC or other apparatus. It evoked, for me, the work of Alejandro Cesarco who has done indexes and TOCs for nonexistent books. You have to put the book together based on the proximity of index references, for example.
The honorable mention for the Dwyer Award was the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. Always love a new addition to my biographical resources for building NACO records.
The Avery Library is thinking about building a Built Works Inventory. It would make a fine complement to the Cultural Object Name Authority which the Getty is working on. More exciting for me is the role the inventory might play relative to our longstanding struggle over the neat bipartite "divided world" in LC authorities land. I hope we can get to a point of an entity authority file, instances and not classes of instances. By the way, there's a CONA webinar on May 4th.
The Cataloging Advisory Committee is just about done with the access points chapter of Cataloging exhibition publications--best practices.
Cataloging Problems Discussion Group (now in its 35th year, give or take) was a fine gathering. We talked about RDA (testing about to begin), shelflisting (curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have enough books in their office that they try to arrange them by call number and notice discrepancies?!?!), OCLC Institution Records (do you make them for all items? no items? selectively? Brooklyn does them selectively and we hope they have criteria to share), and museum publisher contributions to CIP (parallel to a few university libraries that do the CIP for their press).
The Joan Mitchell Foundation is funding a pilot project with late-career artists on legacy and estate planning. A database was set up for entry of works. Some of the older artists are being paired with a younger artist. They're also investigating self-journaling and social software. Eumie Imm-Stroukoff talked about this work and the other panelists were Heather Gendron on Cai Guo-Qiang's archive and Greg Hatch on the Utah Artists Project. One of the UAP's treasures is 500K slides from emeritus professor Lennox Tierney and videos and oral history.
We western New Yorkers got together with the Ontario folks to begin cranking up for the 2012 conference in Toronto. But first we get to get excited about Minneapolis and the joint ARLIS/NA-VRA conference next year. I haven't been there since the early 1980s and really want to see the new Walker building and the MIA, and Saint Paul, and ...

After the Cataloging Section meeting about shelf-ready copy and new sources and energy for NACO work, Daniel and I went back to the hotel to check out. Daniel went off to the bus and I went to Bill's with my suitcase. After taking a deep breath, I decided to walk over to Mount Auburn Cemetery. Like Forster without a Baedeker, I took off and walked around the whole bloody cemetery before I found the Egyptian Revival gates. It was a lovely day in America's first landscaped or garden cemetery. Back to Bill's and then off to have supper with Alix Reiskind and her family.

Next morning, Bill and I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art to see the Roni Horn show. It was really wonderful and the most sublime moments were in the narrow gallery with the audio piece: Roni Horn "reciting" the lines from the bottom of the water photographs. The gallery overlooks the harbor and the clouds were settling in on the northern part of Boston.

Bill went off to work and I went to Calamus Bookstore for a while and then back to Bill's and then took off for home. I had decided that I'd somehow get to New York City to see the Dijon mourners and "Belles Heures" at the Met. I had mentioned to Hugh Wilburn who has a new country house and pottery studio in Great Barrington that I might come by and we finally connected ... by email, from Fuel coffee house in Great Barrington. Great evening but the post-midnight bedtime maybe wasn't too wise.

We awoke to snow flakes in the air but I got to the Met a little after noon. It was tough to be at the Met and realize that it is no longer always there for me, just a subway ride away. Especially when there are special shows but just the permanent collection takes my breath away. I stopped to see some of my special favorites in the medieval galleries and then took off for Alfred. The rain stopped after a while and the sky was clear for the last hour or so. The sunset was magnificent but I was glad to stop driving.

FLW for the main course and dessert

2010-04-22T17:21:00.003-04:00

Darwin Martin House, Buffalo, NY, at the ARLIS/WNY meeting on April 8th

Zimmerman House, Manchester, NY, as a personal tour before the ARLIS/NA conference in Boston, April 22nd

giants, sardines, and apples

2010-04-04T09:53:00.003-04:00

Who would have thought when I took this picture in January that I would be reading about how the Beach Cliff sardine packing plant in Prospect Harbor, Maine would be closing in April? Today's New York times has an article entitled "A clattering heritage of Maine's industrial past closes in on a final spin."

A 70-year old woman who wasn't ready to retire, Nancy Harrington, is quoted: I don't know how to do anything else [other than packing sardines]. I don't want nothing to do with computers. I don't have one, I don't want to learn. No, sir. I'm going to do my scrapbooking and quilting."

And thinking about computers and the passage of time, there was also an article in the paper about the lines of fanatics ready to buy an iPad. "Matthew Thouvenin, 26, was born the year Apple introduced the Macintosh ..." But wait, that means that I've had a Macintosh almost as long as Matthew has been alive. I got my first one -- a 128K with external drive -- in the spring of 1985. Now on my fourth, a MacBook ... and still loving it.

ideal villas

2010-03-23T11:27:00.005-04:00

As we rode in the cab from the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel to Rathbun's Restaurant for supper last Saturday night, we passed an interesting building. There it rose on a bluff overlooking downtown Atlanta, rising over the multi-lane street. The style is gentle deconstructivism (if that's not an oxymoron). The view from the big windows (toward the West) must be glorious at sunset.

After I got back to Alfred, I sent a note to VRA-L to see if anyone knew anything about the building. Frank Jackson, Emory librarian who had done some of the local arrangements for the VRA conference responded with a real estate advertisement for the house which is a 1929 or 1930 garage-like building with a villa atop. Now if you know me very well or not even very well, you know I love the works of Palladio and he is, of course, Mr Villa. Frank also led me to the post-pessimist who blogged about the house in 2006. (The pictures above are from the blog entry.) And that led to another Atlantan who blogs about unusual architectural sightings. Love this social networking. If somebody with an extra half million buys the house, I'd love to come visit in real time.

And thinking about villas and ideal homes, I was reminded again of the plan that Arnold Klukas drew for me twenty-five years ago. Arnie was a medievalist and architectural history grad student at Pitt when I worked there just after library school. We loved to talk about architecture and things medieval. He one time doodled up a residence for me, actually "being a library with house attached." The house started around the remains of a 1350 cloister and the last part was a new brutalist garage from circa 1970. Of course, by now, there would be new wings in pomo and decon and Ungers- or Krier-influenced late modern, and perhaps a neotraditionalist development down the road, out of sight (I hope).

high

2010-03-19T11:16:00.005-04:00

Seen in the English Ceramics gallery at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta ... and then a couple hours later, on my plate at the VRA dinner and awards ceremony:

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2010-03-17T22:12:00.002-04:00

Three or four times today here at the VRA conference, the thought has gone through my head that our modern world is just a faster version of yesterday's world. Or we're going back.

At the Transitions lunch in the spectacular (even on a cloudy day) revolving Sun Dial restaurant at the top of the Westin, someone was talking about how the art faculty members were all building their own collections of digital images as the university collections were being eliminated. In the old days, a professor probably collected the slides they needed and they were just kept on the shelves of their office. Then folks got the brilliant idea of building a collection and there was economy of scale. Now the collection is being dismantled, partly because of ARTstor and other image databases but also because of economics. Now we're seeing individual collections again.

Peter Brantley of the BookServer project at the Internet Archive gave the opening plenary speech. He talked about how information gathering is focused on discovery rather than content. But research has always been discovering the information you need. Social networking does bring it to you but you're really just doing the same kind of thing, just faster. I think he was trying to argue that the networking actually did change the information. Brantley talked about the redundancy of some of the paths and did pass on a wonderful quote he'd heard from someone about trying to keep up and worrying about missing something. Someone had said "if it's really important, the news will find me."

The redundancy of effort came up again in the blogs and wikis panel later in the afternoon. Not everyone will find the same path and information will fly around and you'll maybe find out what you need to know. But it's still just trying to find what you need to know. And I really can't buy Brantley's contention that content isn't the most important thing. Even when he said that sharing is more important than content, it's not worth sharing if it's not meaningful. Or, maybe, the receiver of the content will make something valuable of it even if it isn't inherently valuable. (This is probably all bunk ... as he changed his Facebook status to something else that didn't matter.)

Brantley started out by talking about everyone as publishers and communicators. I couldn't help but think of Benjamin and his writing on authorship (not that I really understand it). Maybe I should have just kept thinking about the modern architecture that we'd seen on the morning walking tour rather than trying to process what they'd said at the sessions. When I saw Dustin Wees, I said I really should do up some SAHARA cataloging, like the First Presbyterian Church in Bath.

J. Wrey Mould and Caravaggio

2010-03-15T14:27:00.004-04:00

A week or so ago, I went over to the nearby town of Bath, New York, because I thought I remembered seeing a bookstore on the main street. I didn't find a bookstore but I did find a nice church -- the First Presbyterian Church on the village square. I took the picture above and a couple others. When I got home, I googled the church to see if their website identified the architect. The website said the architect was John Wrey Mould (aka Jacob Wrey Mould) and that the new building was done in 1977. That didn't seem right so I did some more investigating. Mould (1825-1886) worked with Olmsted and Vaux on Central Park and he designed the Belvedere Castle and other monuments. Discovering that was pretty exciting because I'm very fond of the Belvedere Castle which sits high above the Turtle Pond. The church, by the way, was done in 1874-1877 and there's a Tiffany rose window done in 1895. They are doing church tours on Wednesdays in July and August so there will clearly be another expedition to Bath this summer.

Not sure why the variation in first forename. At other points in history, folks have Americanized their names to make them less foreign-sounding. John seems more "normal" than Jacob but I don't know as folks were trying to be less German in the middle of the 19th century.

Completely unrelated (I think) is a small note in the Week in Review section of last Sunday's New York times. The note said that art historian Philip Sohm has determined that Caravaggio has overtaken Michelangelo as a subject for academic study. When I googled that, I found that Michael Kimmelman had written about it on March 9th.

reading historical novels seems to run in the family

2010-03-08T15:29:00.004-05:00

My current book is In the company of the courtesan by Sarah Dunant. It's set in Italy in the 16th century. The courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, were in Rome for the sack of 1527 and ran off to Venice and are working at restoring their dignity and fortune. Fiammetta had her hair cut off by the invaders and both she and Bucino are rather the worse for wear.

A few books ago it was Roma by Steven Saylor, not that I liked it very much. But it was historical fiction. Sometimes I'd rather read just plain old history, like the history of Habsburg Spain that I read after Bill and I got back from Spain and I had felt pretty ignorant of those guys in the Prado portraits that lived at the Escorial. And then one of those Habsburgers goes and sacks Rome.

This afternoon, I decided to try to make some order of the boxes and detritus in the front upper bedroom. There is a box of books that belonged to my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. There's a Lew Wallace novel in two volumes -- The prince of India, or, Why Constantinople fell (1893) -- and also Darkness and dawn, or, Scenes in the days of Nero by Frederic W. Farrar (1891). Why, gosh, I'm tempted to try one or both of them ... not that there aren't also many other books on the waiting list.

if a disco ball whirled in the woods, would anyone dance?

2010-02-17T17:10:00.007-05:00

When I was in Chicago for the College Art Association conference last week, I stopped in at the Museum of Contemporary Art. There were a number of things that interested me but I was stopped in my tracks by thought on seeing "A disco ball in the woods" by Adam Ekberg (photo above from his website). In the woods behind my sister and her partner's farmhouse at the North end of Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, there is a tree with a rotted portion at the base. The tree is out near Carol and Barb's ritual circle and the hole in the tree is called the Fairy Ballroom. When I was up in Maine in January, we saw some fallen trees in the Sunset area on the Blue Hill Peninsula. One of them was a ripe candidate for a faerie ballroom: (You'll please forgive my lack of vocabulary control in using both "fairy" and "faerie." The latter may be used by some of the New Age community but it is also used by the Radical Faeries.) The discovery of the faerie ballroom in Maine has circulated around my brain every time I see the picture in my Flickr photostream or think about that part of our Maine trip.

And it keeps coming back to me. Yesterday, I went on an expedition to Meadville, Pennsylvania to see the "In Between: (re)Negotiating Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality" show at the Penelee~Megahan~Bowman Art Galleries at Allegheny College. The show was curated by gallery director Darren Lee Miller with two non-art colleagues Emily Chivers Yochim and Vika Gardner. I had met Darren at CAA and he had left some tempting brochures in the back of the room during the Queer Caucus panel session. The brochure squawked at me even though there was only one more day of the show (yesterday) after my return from Chicago. There's a nice little catalog but most of the content can currently be seen on the gallery website (linked above). I particularly liked the "Climbing rope" drawings by Cobi Moules, the drawings of nude men by Jacob Kincheloe, and Melissa Boyajian's "Grand odalisque (for Saïd)." Jesse Jagtiani did a video animation called "Paradise" which screamed Bosch to me (I'm partial to Bosch) but in the interview in the catalog, he said he was more influenced by Paul Chan. Whatever. The video seemed to be just sitting there and I don't know if I wasn't patient enough or the video was having a last day of show sit-down strike. I'd seen Mary Ellen Strom's video "Nude no. 5, Ellen Dubinsky and Melanie Marr" somewhere before but can't remember where. It's a takeoff on Courbet but it also evokes Giorgione's recumbent nude women. All in all, lots to think about.

Darren and I had lunch and our conversation drifted all over the place. I'd checked out his website so I had some idea of his work. I was struck by a couple of his pieces that involved getting one's hair cut in patches. My hair has now gotten pretty long (as long as it's ever been) and I've been getting a little tired of it. So the pieces caught my attention when I cruised the website. In our conversing about that, Darren talked about his use of hair cutting and other simple tasks as ritual, especially homosensual erotic. So back we go to the faerie ballroom and perhaps do a little dancing.

There's more to say about College Art. I just love that conference. While I don't know as many people in the CAA circles as VRA, ARLIS/NA or ALA, or haven't known some as well or as long, the content of the conference is probably my favorite. I ran into Chris Sundt and she and I concurred that coming to CAA was practically a necessity for our lives. Lucky Chris gets to go back to Chicago in a couple months for the SAH conference.

Before the conference, Roberto Ferrari had summarized some of the panels he would have gone to, or which raised questions in his mind. I read his summary before going which prompted my going to the "Moguls, mansions, and museums" panel, chaired by Sally Webster from the CUNY Grad Center where Roberto is studying. The paper by Petra ten Doesschate Chu was on the collecting of European art by late 19th-century American robber barons. She talked about the networks of dealers and collectors and showed some slides of George Eastman's collection, with his paintings mostly now in the Memorial Art Gallery. Sounds like another expedition: the Memorial Art Gallery is only a little more than an hour from Alfred. In that session, I also really enjoyed the paper by Kirsten Jensen on the Interstate Industrial Exhibitions in Chicago which led up to the World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893. She talked about the taste for Parisian works which was criticized as not American enough. This was the time of the Haymarket Riots and concern about immigration and trade unions. We still hear complaints about immigration but the art world has become mostly international.

It used to be that I would try to figure out how to hear the greatest number of papers that stood out in the program. And then you'd mostly end up missing the beginning or ending of a paper, and arrived in a crowded room without any seats, as you darted from room to room. Now I decide at the panel level unless there should happen to be a couple papers that seem really significant. So this year I heard about medieval costume, "How is "queer art" relational?" (Roberto wondered what that meant and I hope he doesn't ask me what the answer to the question is), design and democratization (all pretty interesting but I particularly liked the paper on Ikea by Jeff Werner), building and managing artist book collections (the ARLIS/NA session), "Desire is queer!" (not what I expected: more the art and spectator than the artist and model), a session on Michael Camille (1958-2002) and the "shifting contours of art history," and a panel on alternative publishing and distributing models in art and curatorial practice (sponsored by the Art Spaces Archives Projects, based at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College). The abstracts are supposedly available on the CAA website but I don't see a link and don't know if you have to login to see them.

Anyway, it was great to go to all of those sessions and hear about stuff I didn't or did know something about. Never hurts to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art or other art venues. I didn't get into the Art Institute but had been there to see the new Renzo Piano wing last summer during the ALA conference. Anne Champagne reminded me it was "Free February" but I still didn't even get in for a brief visit to see my "Mater Doloroso" by Dirk Bouts. Enough of this. I think I'll go dancing or engage in some ritual.

thinking about bumper stickers

2010-01-26T11:32:00.005-05:00

When I hear a pithy statement, I think of bumper stickers or sig files. And Fanny the Forester needs a bumper sticker. When I got my Isuzu pickup in Texas, I had a series of bumper stickers. The first one I remember was "I brake for Greek Revival." Bob took my pickup to work one day and someone wondered why he would want to brake for Geek Revival. Well, gosh, those westerners didn't get to live through Greek Revival so they might have been happier if I braked for Arts and Crafts or American Vernacular.

And then there was the bumper sticker from the Art Guys: "I [heart] the art guise." I was disappointed when it wore out.

Not having a car from 1995 to 2009 when I lived in New York City meant that I had to live my bumper sticker life vicariously. I guess I could have gone the sig file route but instead I added those pithy statements to my commonplace (e)book. A few bumper stickers came my way but none of them had a bumper to stick on. Now I can go there.

Aaron Krach is an artist who lives in New York City and works at Condé Nast or did the last time we checked in. He has done a series of "Indestructible Artifacts" and a couple of them are bumper stickers. The one that just knocks me out is "Art makes me horny." For me, art is indeed a sensual experience, thrilling from head to toe. I found the bumper sticker and will attach it to Fanny as soon as the weather permits. Yesterday was 58 degrees when I left Oneonta, melting snow, flash floods, gusty winds. Today is more like 30 degrees with a dusting of snow overnight and occasional snow in the air. Now, that's more like it ... but probably not bumper sticking time.

more Maine

2010-01-26T10:57:00.004-05:00

I meant to use the lower photograph above in the blog entry a couple days ago but the one I did use did show the way the water was different colors because the sky was blue and gray. Very civil. But neither of the clouds and water pictures grasped the intense silvery brilliance of the day so you probably weren't ready to see Maine as the Sunshine State. The skies and landscape, and waterscape, were incredible.

Maine: the Sunshine State

2010-01-23T21:52:00.005-05:00

Our days in Maine have been delightful in a variety of ways. The weather has been incredible: bright and sunny, low winter sunshine, crisp and clear air. JL and I drove up from Boston to CDS's in Orland, Maine on Wednesday. The drive was pretty as the amount of snow along the road increased slightly. Supper was prepared at home: pork loin, wilted spinach, potatoes. On Thursday, we drove around on Blue Hill Peninsula: the village of Blue Hill, Sargentville, and Castine; nice mix of dry roads and snowy bits; lots of coves and other views of the water (fresh and salt); a interesting tidal waterfall near Castine. Friday we went off to Deer Isle. The bridge between the Blue Hill Peninsula and Little Deer Isle is one of those skinny and scary suspension bridges with narrow lanes and a curvy causeway between Little Deer Isle and Deer Isle. Stonington is down at the bottom of Deer Isle and we stopped for lunch at the Harbor Restaurant, with great clam chowder. We drove out to the Sunset area a bit North of the village center and the landscape was delightfully snowy. We also meandered over to Sunshine where the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is located. I drove on Friday and really loved the narrow roads with lots of snow still left on the trees and a bit on the road. Today (Saturday), we went over to the Schoodic Peninsula, the point of which is part of Acadia National Park. The day, yet again, was bright. After breakfast at the Seabreeze Restaurant in Bucksport, we drove through Ellsworth out on the Schoodic Peninsula to Winter Harbor. We drove down Grindstone Neck before heading off to Schoodic Point. The views were sometimes quite similar to earlier days but the main reason we picked Schoodic was the chance to see the open ocean as well as the closed coves and snowy interior roads. The ocean was pretty calm and the low winter sun landed with a blinding silvery glow. As we drove out the island, I noticed that the Hancock Grocery had "fresh scallops" and we stopped for some on the way back toward Bucksport. We got home and supper was divine: scallops, collards, and squash. It might be hard to go back to peanut butter.

We got glorious sunsets both last night (red!!) and tonight (more golden). The curvy roads and snow-covered trees along them were delightful. The conversations were a wild mix of catch-up and landscape. Tomorrow, it's back to Boston and then turn West toward Alfred.

More pictures from the Flickr photostream link at the bottom of the page.

words to look at, seeing songs

2010-01-19T15:59:00.005-05:00

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.

buildings moments at ALA

2010-01-19T11:08:00.004-05:00

I've been in Boston for ALA Midwinter and now have a day of whatever before Janet and I go up to Maine. One day we were seeing sailboats out on the harbor and, two days later, I was nearly being blown off my feet by gusts of wind coming off the Hancock tower. Those gusts were accompanied by pellets of ice. It wasn't especially cold so it was strange to be in a blizzard but not particularly uncomfortable. It WAS sloppy underfoot!

In addition to looking at various interesting buildings, I did have a couple cataloging moments that showed me the "buildings" issue will always be with us. It is our friend. Diane Hillmann said she'd been in a CC:DA conversation about whether buildings were places or not. I need to look up the CCO chapter and verse for her. I would argue that not all things with geographic coordinates are places though you might want your fancy linking software to treat them that way. At the Subject Analysis Committee meeting, we talked about whether memo H1095 of the Subject heading manual could be effectively divided so that widely free-floating subdivisions could be coded distinctively from those that are free-floating under persons, classes of persons, ethnic groups, nationalities, corporate bodies, and other categories. It made me realize that one might do subject-oriented subdivision lists such as -- ta da -- buildings.

OK, enough of this. I'm going out in the light snow to see the Dürers at the MFA and maybe stop at Calamus Book Store to see if they have a copy of Steven Riel's The spirit can crest. We were talking about the Radical Faeries and his poem "My invisible dress." We're men, we don't want to be women, but still we're interested in the transitory and ambiguous nature of gender and dress.

the connections

2009-12-21T11:55:00.007-05:00

I finally got my Christmas letter written and took it to the copy shop this morning. Now, I'm up in the library catching up on the latest issue of Artforum. It was good to see that one of the books I cataloged at Bard in November was selected by a critic as a "best of 2009." That book is Stüdyo Osep by Tayfun Serttaş (Beyoğlu, İstanbul: Aras, c2009), selected by Banu Cennetoğlu. Things Turkish always make me think of Hikmet Doğu who has written about Robert Smithson as well as being a librarian, now in Salt Lake City. She also happened to knit my winter hat which has a tail. I would love to see Turkey: the Roman and other archeological sites, the arid landscape and Mediterranean coast, the Muslim heritage as well. Someday. One of my NYU colleagues (Scot Dalton, whose wife is Turkish) said it would be possible to travel there, even into the countryside, by yourself which was encouraging.

Another of the year's best books is Art workers: radical practice in the Vietnam War era by Julia Bryan-Wilson (University of California Press), selected by Carrie Lambert-Beatty. JBW is a member of the Queer Caucus for Art and her book is to be featured in the issue now being compiled.

The music "best" was diverse and I hadn't heard of most of it. Just Shostakovich's "The nose" as done in Boston. I'd seen the announcement of its NYC presentation but missed it. You know I'm pretty sensitive about nose stuff and wished that I could have gone. My friend Sara Jane Pearman sent some Frosty the Snowman jokes that were quite insensitive AND funny! One of my recurring musical treats over the past year was the flute playing of Tara Helen O'Connor. I heard her two or three times at Miller Theater at Columbia and also at Zankel Hall.

The latest number of Mein schwules Auge came in yesterday's mail. It's a lovely and exciting mix of pictures and texts. Alas, most of the text is in German and mine isn't up to the task. But there was an article entitled "Alles für Roberto" so it all came around to more connections.

Madrid, Bosch, and Sorolla

2009-12-13T22:03:00.006-05:00

My trip to Madrid just after Thanksgiving was delightful, not just for the Palladio exhibition at the CaixaForum which was the impetus. The building for the CaixaForum is a redo by Herzog + de Meuron. The vertical garden they did with botanist Patrick Blanc on the wall of another building on the plaza just outside the museum is incredible. The paintings at the Prado were just thrilling and chances for a bit of Stendhal Syndrome. Bosch is a favorite painter and the Prado has five including the Garden of Delights and an Epiphany that I wrote about in grad school. The Thyssen Bornemisza has one or two Bosches. The Lazaro Galdiano has one. I lost track but a Bosch a day keeps boredom away. I took a bunch of pictures and I think my favorite is this one of the paint pots in Joaquín Sorolla's studio: You can see more pictures by clicking on the Flickr photostream link at the bottom of this page. I hope to get more notes written up eventually. Bill Connor was my traveling companion and his pictures are also loaded in my photostream. We got to Segovia and I really enjoyed the Roman aqueduct and the Romanesque churches. We also went to the Escorial which was delightful.

It's always fun to be reading something that matches or conflicts with your traveling. While we were there, I was reading Our magnificent bastard tongue by John McWhorter. So it was a history of the English language while trying not to screw up too much in communicating with Hispanophones. But we did pass a restaurant called Route 66 and that reminded me that I was reading Phil Patton's book on Route 66 while sitting in an Amsterdam coffee house of that name. By the way, McWhorter's book was very interesting. As the blurb on the cover says, the book "wears its erudition lightly."

make that the caixaforum by herzog + de meuron

2009-11-27T20:10:00.002-05:00

If you were thinking of following me to the Palladio show at the Prado that I mentioned a few days ago, change your plans. Go a bit further North, up the Paseo del Prado. The Palladio show is at the CaixaForum Madrid, designed by Herzog + de Meuron. On another side of the plaza between the CaixaForum and the Paseo is a vertical landscape by Patrick Blanc. The link under the museum name above has more information about the museum and the landscape.

I had seen press about the vertical landscape a few years ago but had totally forgotten that the CaixaForum was a Herzog + de Meuron building. My last European trip also included a building by the firm: the Schaulager in Basel. The show there was the Robert Gober retrospective which was pretty wonderful, as was the building.

shiny richard serra

2009-11-26T12:04:00.004-05:00

Sometimes you take a picture and it comes out unlike what you expected. This Richard Serra is one of three or four at Storm King Art Center near Newburgh, New York. I stopped on the way back from another week of backlog cataloging at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. I wanted to see the Maya Lin "Wavefield" which is out beyond Andy Goldsworthy's wall. The "Wavefield" was pretty interesting. From the front side, it looked about like pictures I'd seen, but on the back side, it's wonderfully rustic this time of year, in the dried grass stage of autumn when they've started the reseeding for next year. It was drizzly as I walked around the grounds; not quite enough to get you soaked or to force you to get the umbrella out, but drippy. The Serras were slick wet and I liked the way the surface reflected the crest of the hill into which the slabs are inserted. The reflection turned out making the piece looking like the "start" arrow of a YouTube video.

My stop at Storm King was after I'd visited the campus of SUNY New Paltz, my alma mater. In 1967-1968, my senior year, the Wooster Science Building was being built. Designed by Davis Brody, it reminded me of Le Corbusier's La Tourette. We're talking high new brutalism. I thought it was just wonderful: the concrete, the pour forms, the staircases. When Daniel Starr and I visited the campus a decade or so ago, again on a drippy day as I remember, Daniel thought it was the ugliest campus he'd ever seen. Well, I couldn't really argue; it's the state college stuff from the 1960s SUNY boom. Thanks, Nelson Rockefeller. There are now a good number of post-1960s buildings around the edges but it's still a SUNY campus. And I love the Wooster Science Building.

the cabbage fairy & Getty surrogacy

2009-11-18T11:23:00.006-05:00

Who could resist a woman whose first film was entitled "Le fée aux choux" (The cabbage fairy, 1896)? I'm reading the new Artforum which includes an article on Alice Guy Blaché by Alison McMahan, entitled "The most famous woman you've never heard of" (November issue, p. 81-82). Guy was the secretary at a camera and optics company in Paris in the 1890s. Her boss was developing the Biographe 60-mm motion-picture camera and she persuaded him to let her use it. The result was the one-minute "Cabbage fairy" in 1896, one of the first films and she is credited with developing the art of cinematic narrative. The Whitney has a new show about her work but I'm not likely to get there. BUT, on Netflix, I found "Gaumont treasures: the films of Alice Guy" and moved it to the top of my queue. Gaumont is the film company for which she worked as head of film production.

Rather than mope that I'm not likely to get to the Whitney show (I might have missed it, even if I was living downtown), I will just enjoy whatever is included on "Gaumont treasures." And while looking at the Artforum, I also noticed two shows in Boston that I might be able to get to on Thanksgiving weekend or thereabouts. I'm going to Boston in preparation for my trip to Madrid with Bill Connor. The impetus for the trip was the Palladio show which is at the Prado. One always goes to Madrid for Palladio, right? It won't hurt that one can also see the great Spanish and Flemish paintings there, the great works at the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofia. And I want to get back to the Lazaro Galdiano which is rather like the Gardner in that domestic way.

The Boston shows are both at 460 Harrison Street: John O'Reilly at Howard Yezerski and Liz Glynn at Anthony Greaney. The title of Glynn's show is "California surrogates for the Getty." Sounds fun, no? Glynn is the progenitor of the "Build Rome in a day" project which she did at the New Museum in April and which I helped on. The whole idea of Getty surrogates sounds pretty intriguing. The John O'Reilly show is curated by Trevor Fairbrother and says it includes works by Rembrandt and Joseph Cornell; since O'Reilly includes other works, usually in bits and pieces, it could be interesting. And Fairbrother has written a lot about Sargent so there's just layers of possibilities.

When I wrote "Build Rome in a day" above, I first typed "Roma" for Rome. I just finished reading Steven Saylor's 555-page novel Roma. The book started slowly but grew on me ... I guess. Not the best writing style so I just let the sentences flow past me. The centerpiece is the fascinum, a totem/necklace which is worn through the centuries and passed down from father or grandfather to son or daughter, crossing family lines a time or two, becoming so worn and legendary that the last wearers don't know who the god was. "Fascinum" is from the same route as fascination. The telling of the Ides of March assassination of Julius Caesar was rather coyly amusing as Caesar's nephew visits Cleopatra in Trastavere and then stumbles upon the plotting and into the hall where the assassination happens.

twice fanciful

2009-11-03T20:25:00.002-05:00

I love it when an amusing word appears before me more than once in a short time. In an email exchange with Nancy Norris today, she quoted an LC Rule Interpretation:

For books, generally restrict the making of the note about the nature, scope, or artistic form of the item to the situations covered below. For books that are belles lettres, record in a note the term for the literary form only when the title is misleading. Do not consider titles of literary works misleading simply because they are fanciful.

And then as I was eating my supper, I was reading the New York Times for October 7th (not quite a month behind there):

In defending the 1999 law, Neal K. Katyal, a deputy solicitor general, cautioned the justices against pursuing an “endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals.”

The whole article.

thinking about upstate cities

2009-11-03T18:32:00.009-05:00

Ithaca has changed a lot since I moved from there to Providence in 1989. When I left, there were way fewer stores on Route 13 as you came into town. Several car dealers, a big grocery store, Manos Diner. There are now oodles and oodles of big box stores, a couple multi-floor hotels, just lots more buildings. Meanwhile, the Commons seems to be looking shabbier and shabbier. Even the Rosebud (diner) is gone, replaced by, what was it, a sushi place. I'm not sure I like these transitions but at least, overall, Ithaca seems to be thriving.

Arnot Art Museum
On the way home from a recent weekend trip to Ithaca to have supper with Margaret, Jim and Jo, I drove home through Elmira to stop at the Arnot Art Museum. The museum is a lovely Greek Revival building but, alas, wasn't open on Sundays. But it is surrounded by several lovely buildings: the county courthouse in a mix of Gothic and Greek, a church in castellated Gothic, and a Beaux Arts city hall. I know I should give you the fuller information but I haven't looked it up. It wasn't an especially inspiring day but the area looked pretty bleak. How can we have done such a nasty job on our cities?

Chemung County Court House, Elmira, NY
And these thoughts are coming on top of a fire in Alfred last week that destroyed one of the five buildings in the main business block. In addition to the businesses and apartments that were obliterated, it means that about 10% of our business spaces are gone. Hopefully, the gap will be filled in with a decent looking building. The wine store was one of the businesses burned out. The Collegiate Restaurant, aka The Jet, is currently closed because of smoke and fire damage but there was a professional cleaner van out front this afternoon as I walked home from the library. That's promising. Alfred without the Jet is a very different place.

we'll always have Edith Wharton

2009-10-21T15:12:00.003-04:00

Subscribing to The New Yorker always intimidates me. I can't keep up with all of the articles I want to read, to say nothing of just skimming the issues. When I went up to campus to get my daily Times, I decided to stop in at the main library to look at magazines. I've done that at the Scholes Ceramics Library but hadn't done it yet at Herrick, the main library. I was in the periodicals stacks and decided to skim the contents of the unbound issues of The New Yorker. A bit of this, a bit of that, found quite a few things to actually go to the article for a brief visit.

Imagine my delight when I came across "The age of innocence: early letters from Edith Wharton" by Rebecca Mead in the June 29 issue (p. 32-38). The letters were addressed to Anna Bahlmann, a governess employed by the Joneses from 1874 to 1915 or thereabouts. Most of Miss Jones's letters were when she was not at home, and they describe what she was reading and doing. The letters were to be sold at Christie's on June 24th and let's hope someone prepares an edition ... soon! According to what I could find on the web, the letters sold to an unnamed academic institution. Her archive at the Beinecke Library at Yale already has twenty boxes of correspondence, mostly written after her marriage, so I hope it's Yale.

This Wharton amusement (pronounced as in French) came after reading this morning the article in last Sunday's travel section: "Edith Wharton always had Paris" by Elaine Sciolino. There we trace Wharton's steps, including points of assignation with her lover Morton Fullerton. They met under the Diana at the Louvre and Sciolino notes that it still is a fairly untraveled gallery. Hmm. Next time I'm to meet my lover in Paris, I might suggest the Diana. It's way more romantic than the clock in Grand Central or the "meeting point" at some international airport, or maybe it depends on who you're meeting.

city / country / Hockney

2009-10-20T12:40:00.002-04:00

Many people have asked me how I'm doing in Alfred. Yes, it's small town to New York City's urban. In Sunday's Times, there's an article about David Hockney who has been spending much of his time over the past couple years in Yorkshire, doing landscapes. He still considers himself a Californian and has his green card but he's making hay in the country. The last four paragraphs of the article read thus:

“People have asked me,” he said, “ ‘Isn’t it boring in Bridlington, a little isolated seaside town?’ And I say: ‘Not for us. We all think it’s very exciting, because it is in my studio and it is in my house.’ ”

Mr. Hockney is now working toward a mammoth show of these landscapes for the Royal Academy in London, to open in January 2012. “They came to me,” he said. “I went to look at the rooms and thought: ‘My God, what an opportunity. We’ll do it!’ So I need this great big studio.”

Yet he also has no intention of giving up California. He still has his house in the Hollywood Hills, he said, not to mention his office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard and his green card.

“I would say I’m on location here,” he said, laughing wryly. “That’s what we say in Hollywood.”

footnote to "the course of nature": on decay

2009-09-17T10:39:00.004-04:00

When Linda Weintraub was talking about Damien Hirst, she mentioned that she'd been studying the names of heavy metal bands. Very few names mention death though many include decay. She recited several. Jenny Tobias has been regularly posting hypothetical band names as her Facebook status, and some are really wonderful and thought-provoking. And, today, Meghan Musolff had "Peter, Paul, and Mary all day. I always thought we could be like them. Corey, Chad, and Meghan" for her status. Hmm, what's in a name and, as Weintraub said, is Damien Hirst our first heavy metal visual artist? Probably nowhere close.

the course of nature

2009-09-16T21:31:00.006-04:00

I saw a notice about a short video about Thomas Cole and his art on the Thomas Cole Historic Site's webpage. It's pretty good and it's never hard to look at Cole's paintings or at Hudson River Valley landscape views. "The course of empire" plays a sizable role in the Cole video and I've been thinking a lot about the course of empire, or rather the course of life as it plays out for me. The transition from urban life in New York City to small college town life in Alfred is mostly fine. It's been nice to have school in session because there are artist lectures and more folks around. And Monday-Friday New York Times subscriptions available for under $30 for the term. I have to go fetch the paper at the campus store and it doesn't come until mid-afternoon but I'm always a few days behind anyway. I thought I was cruising along OK without the daily paper but I have been enjoying it. I'll never be an online reader (never say never).

Linda Weintraub was today's artist talker. Her topic was artistic beauty and nature with a bend toward the environmentally correct and, yes, the natural course of nature. It was a very interesting talk and I couldn't help mulling over Cole's "Course of empire" as she talked about the life cycle of nature.

She started by saying that in her student days it was not possible to talk about art and beauty. I guess we'd been burned out by the connoisseurship school of art history and criticism. So she is actually having a lot of fun reconsidering it now. She started her lecture by talking about a Sophie Calle triptych series that deals with descriptions of beauty by people who have been blind since birth. The subjects of each of her examples talked about natural things like ocean waves. Nature is, after all, harmonious, full of truth and virtue, and therefore good. Weintraub's real interest is in how we can use the beautiful to help us preserve the planet.

Her case studies were the "poster child" and the "enfant terrible": Andy Goldsworthy and Damien Hirst. Oh, boy, you could just tell this was going to be fun.

Weintraub talked about several Goldsworthy works: how he organizes the leaves or rocks, how nature is manipulated to perfect harmony long enough for the picture to be taken, how the manipulation is sometimes acrobatic. One of my favorite Goldsworthy works is the wet leaves in the bark that burst out and blow away as they dry. This doesn't fit her guiding principle so well but I didn't challenge her.

Moving on to Hirst, Weintraub chose "Thousand years" as the test piece. It was in the "Sensation" show and involves two chambers: one with a fly and maggot hatchery, one with a cow's head and fly zapper light. Voilà, the full natural cycle from birth to adulthood to death. She continued to talk about emblems of decay and how much we generally revile such animals as vultures and plants such as fungi and bacteria, even though we probably all recognize that decay is part of the life cycle. But we don't want to look at it or smell it.

She then presented the work of several artists that follow the Goldsworthy or Hirst route. The controlling artists: Marta de Menezes who pokes pupae so that they grow up into more colorful butterflies, Eduardo Kac who inserts fluorescent green DNA into various animals so that they turn green in certain light, and Verena Kaminiarz who carves up body worms. The worms are able to regenerate so you get, for example, a two-headed worm, both heads with eyes, which must negotiate its petri dish without a single brain and focus.

The Hirstians: Gelitin whose "Hare" is a big, pink, knitted, straw-stuffed rabbit on an Austrian mountain that is serving as fodder for cows, base for mushrooms and other plants, moisture in the shade between the legs. Gelitin group members got the knitting, etc. assistance of the local townspeople and also an agreement that they wouldn't try to repair the rabbit for 25 years when it will, naturally, have been reabsorbed into the ecosystem. George Gessert does reverse hybridization by "re-wilding" over-cultivated plants. Jae Rhim Lee alters her diet so that her urine produces the exactly appropriate formula for plant growth; she makes kimchee with the resulting plants and serves folks. Life cycle, get it? Michel Blazy does work in which microbes eat up the work in the course of the display, and he lets the alteration happen as it will. Pawel Wojtasik does beautiful shots of strands of waste, fooling the eye (and brain) with glittering beauty until you discover it's feces. Gregor Schneider's "Death: be not proud" is a room he's constructed in his studio but he hasn't yet found a terminally ill person who is willing to die in his room. (This, naturally, resonates this year as we have had news about "death panels" and are thinking about health care costs and doctor-assisted death.) As I left the talk with Elizabeth Gulacsy and Tom Peterson, we talked about suicide and graceful life termination. Tom lived in a commune many years ago and a suicidal co-inhabitant was "saved" by a psychologist who asked her to get things in order before she committed suicide and the ordering gave her enough strength to go on. Well, I don't know about the "saved" and "enough strength to go on" but the thinking about life value apparently was restorative. More life cycle, I guess.

Weintraub ended with a fairly long description of "Cloaca" by Wim Delvoye. He built a beautiful spotless machine which replicates the human food stream. It must be fed and then its mouth, throat, liver, pancreas, intestines and whatnot produce, ta da, of course, some beautiful feces. This naturally invites discussion of whether machine shit is better or cleaner or more edible than human shit.

In the question and answer period, Weintraub talked about humanure, green cemeteries, and other activities that are trying to help us humans work with the ecosystem rather than accumulating waste and wasting it. She mentioned an artist who has put lists of the toxic elements in common medicines and foods on the back door of bathroom stalls at the Whitney. Are we just toxic corpses who should be delivered to toxic waste dumps?

Since the Thomas Cole paintings had been drifting around in my mind through Weintraub's talk, I asked her if she thought 18th- and 19th-century works such as "Course of empire" and ruins were precedent for some of the Hirstians. She replied that she thought we were now out of frontier and that made it very different. I guess it's appropriate that we sometimes describe the ruined structures in a neoclassical park as follies.

By the time this is all done swirling in my brain, I'll probably be ready to bury. No impervious box, please.

(N.B. The pictures are step 1 and step 5 from "The course of empire": "The savage state" and "Desolation", pictures from the Wikipedia article on the painting series.)

dance and clay

2009-09-13T12:22:00.004-04:00

Marcela Giesche, Amsterdam-based dancer, is a guest artist at Alfred University and she presented her work on Friday and Saturday night. The Saturday evening concert began with a work on the stairs leading to C.D. Smith Auditorium by the student dancers. It involved their doing movements that were apparently being instructed via iPod: a few steps down, a couple back up, a few paces to the left, lean over the rail. It was interesting as they got tangled with audience members waiting for the doors to open. The program acknowledged John Gill for his advice about the clay. It wasn't until she was a ways into the clay part that I realized that Giesche was being contextual in using clay to mark her residency here at Alfred, home of the New York State College of Ceramics.

"Wanderers and Wonderers" started out with Giesche "hidden" under leaves of newspaper, along with a light layer of newspaper spread about the whole dance floor. They asked us to leave the auditorium, if we were able, during the intermission. We returned to the single layer of newspaper covering the floor and the mound of Giesche in the upper center of the floor. In the first half of the piece, Giesche moved about, mostly horizontal, and pushed the newspaper around, ending with her sweeping the rest to the edges. For the second half of the piece, she, nearly naked, covered her body with clay slip and "drew" on the floor as she moved about it with her slipp(er)y body. She ended by brushing some of the drying slip back into the basin from which it came. Going full circle, I guess. Parts of it were very lovely, including the shadows. Her partner, Bruno Caverna, was not able to leave Norway to join her and I wondered how the piece would have been different as a two-person work rather than solo.

The program notes said "How much of our identity is constructed by the opinions and beliefs of others? What does it take to strip these layers away and find ourselves floating in the unknown again? The body becomes our only reference point, timelessly recovering itself through the senses -- in a state of perpetual wonder --" I wasn't sure that any of this really played out in the work for me but it was interesting to see the use of clay for an Alfred dance.

reading whatever you want and like

2009-08-30T09:53:00.005-04:00

Six years ago, my bookclub read the new translation in verse of Dante's Inferno by Robert Pinsky. At about the same time, the Mary Ryan Gallery held an exhibition of Michael Mazur's illustrations for the Inferno. The installation was spectacular with the etchings on the wall and the text on slanted reading shelves in front of the illustrations. Mazur died on August 18th at age 73. In his obituary published today, the last couple paragraphs were especially interesting to me:

"Although deadly serious as an artist, Mr. Mazur had a sly wit. In 1984 he wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times proposing a W.P.A.-style project under which artists could decorate nuclear warheads, just as Renaissance artists embellished armor and weapons.

'It is not hard to imagine the vivid colors, bas reliefs, even graffiti, that would make spectacles of beauty of those dull cones,' he wrote. In time, he suggested, the warheads would find their way into private collections and museums, thereby ending the possibility that they might be deployed."

Always the pacifist and trying to be always the optimist.

In the Arts & Leisure section today, there's an article about upcoming shows of Sandow Birk's "Personal meditations" on the Koran at galleries in California. They look very interesting. In 2006, Birk was working on a film, using puppets, that used Dante's Inferno as its inspiration. That was just about the time of the attacks on the Danish cartoons that included what were seen as disrespectful representations of Muhammad. The Inferno bits disappeared from that film but Birk's project on the Koran has reached the point that it can be shared with all of us. If it promotes understanding of religious and cultural difference, that will be great.

Also in today's Times was an article about English teachers who are assigning students to read what they'd like to read rather than particular books. You can read the article for the full story but your reading is related to your age and predilection, intellectual and physical. I haven't re-read To kill a mockingbird since it was assigned many years ago but I'm sure I would react to it differently now. One of the other books they mention in the article is Moby-Dick which I don't think I read until a few years ago, another bookclub selection. I really enjoyed it and even read another Melville novel (Redburn) not long after. Reading them recently, as an openly gay man rather than a repressed teen or twenties year old, was wonderful. I could react to the bits of potential homosexual or homosocial as an adult. I don't think I would have gotten nearly as much out of them as a kid. Same with the Inferno. It's just too bad that there's so much to read. Well, no, it's great that there's so much to read. If the teachers letting the kids select their reading encourages them to read and find joy and knowledge there, it will be far more important than the loss of collective memory. Teachers can certainly compensate for the varied readings and the students may even find each other's discussions of their reading more illuminating and inspiring than discussion of common reading. We can hope, can't we?

Barbara Kruger, book designer

2009-08-24T10:41:00.004-04:00

So here I am, merrily adding books to LibraryThing, and I notice that the cover design for my copy of Medieval humanism and other studies by R.W. Southern (Harper & Row, 1970) is credited to Barbara Kruger.
Checking her biography, I note that she did indeed do magazine design and illustration after graduating from Parsons. The cover has the zodiac and the labors of the month and similar blockprint-like images in a circle against clouds and stars.

I've seen articles recently on Andy Warhol's early contributions to illustration, e.g., his album covers. I find it interesting to think about how the artist's "fine" arts are visible or not in the commercial work. Kruger's (or her editor's) use of moral images plays rather well into her polemical collages.

(Sorry about the image. It's "borrowed" from LibraryThing.)

LibraryThing paradigm shift

2009-08-09T09:45:00.003-04:00

I haven't talked here about LibraryThing in a while and my LT universe shifted a couple days ago. One of the features on your profile is a comparison of your library to those of others. There's a weighted, raw, or recent choice on the comparison. Since I started significantly entering my books, the nearest libraries in the weighted category have been libraries with strong gay collections. Now that I'm with my books here in Alfred, I've been cataloging a shelf or two of books almost every day. My nearest library just shifted to one that is strong in architecture and I've still got many shelves of architecture books to enter.

When I was in Chicago for the American Library Association conference in early July, I went to the Stonewall Book Awards brunch and one of the speakers was Marie Kuda who had long ago contributed a Chicago profile to a Queer Caucus for Art newsletter issue when we were about to meet there. I talked to her briefly after the brunch and she emailed me with thoughts about Tee Corinne, my co-editor. She also said my LibraryThing profile picture with clipped hair was not as much fun as my liberated hair (description thanks to Dan Eshom).

contemplative

2009-08-09T09:28:00.003-04:00

Sunday morning. The Times and pancakes. Thinking about Woodstock, mostly because of Jan Pareles's memoir of that magic "moment of muddy grace." I didn't go to the festival though my sister and her husband got close. They were a couple of the people that parked miles away but didn't keep going when it was clear that the mud and craziness were pretty overwhelming.

The Woodstock article continued on page 22 and the continuation was face-to-face with a profile of Milton Rogovin, optometrist turned photographer after his business was decimated for not testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. An interesting conjunction of peace, love, and justice. The words trip so easily out of the brain, and trip too on the thoughts of how the world could be better.

This weekend has been New York Green Fest 2009 here in Alfred. I didn't go, partly because the registration was $85 (not that I haven't spent $85 less wisely) and there seemed to be no session registration fee. My brother Doug, who has been involved with the planning, said I probably could just attend (aka sneak in). But I decided to do my own little green fest and picked up a bunch of cans, bottles, and trash from one of the sites on Pine Hill where people clearly go for partying. Most of the cans and bottles had been squished and broken so the can/bottle refunding opportunity was slight. But then I wasn't doing it for the money.

Maybe it's the misty air that's bringing on the contemplation too. No problem. I like thinking and musing.

honey in the landscape

2009-07-28T22:16:00.006-04:00

So here it is: Honey House at Bard College. The lovely cube building that I passed as I meandered from the Center for Curatorial Studies over toward the student union. There's something about the geometric balance of the building that really attracts me. If I could have one of these for my library, out on the back forty of my brother's property up on the hill, why I'd be in seventh heaven. A nice little hermitage, hopefully with a pond view someday. I'd like to know who designed it. When I googled likely words, I found a link to a slide database at Syracuse University but the link was dead so I'm checking with Barbara Opar to see if there's some ghost of the files that identified their architecture images.

Honey is one of those resonant words for me. My dad raised bees off and on, so there's memory there. My brother and I are both trying to figure out how you live close to a sibling.

All that culture at CCS drew to a close as Ann and I drove to the house she shares with Moira Kelly in Amenia, near the Connecticut border, about 40 minutes from Bard. The house is very comfortable and feels remote even though the grocery store is within walking distance. On Saturday, Moira and I went to her quarry and found some wonderful miniature landscapes in the treads of the abandoned steam shovel:

So I didn't make it to Storm King or New Paltz because we spent time at the quarry looking at miniature landscapes and libraries of rocks ... but we did stop at Wassaic Project. It's an abandoned seven-story flour mill that opened recently as an art space. The art on display could almost as easily have been shown in white-walled galleries and one longed for something that responded to the building. The renovators did a fine job filling in the gaps between the old lumber with new. And the progression through the building is fun; you don't feel like you're going up seven flights of stairs and there's plenty of mill equipment to look at as you meander.

the week at bard

2009-07-23T21:34:00.004-04:00

I cannot believe my week at Bard College is drawing to a close. I've been doing backlog cataloging at the Center for Curatorial Studies where Ann Butler, formerly archivist in the Fales Library at NYU, is now the librarian. The CCS collection is wonderful: great books in the backlog, Millennium has proved pretty easy to get a handle on, the setting is lovely (mid Hudson River Valley), great burritos at the truck just a mile or so down the road. If this itinerant cataloging can keep going, I'll be delighted.

I also cannot believe that it's been almost a month since my last posting here. That "hommage à Martín" was written just before I left the city to take the last of my stuff up to Alfred. It's now been almost a month and it's been busy. After a few days in Alfred, my family went on a camping trip for the week of July 4th. We were in a couple cabins, a campsite, and RV at Fillmore Glen State Park in the eastern Finger Lakes. The gorge was beautiful, thick with greenery, loving the wet spring and summer we've had so far. After Saturday through Wednesday there, I left for Chicago and the annual conference of the American Library Association. I love Chicago and being at ALA is generally a treat. Daniel, Scott and I stayed at the Palmer House which has a wonderful old-style lobby. We were on the 13th floor and the halls were lined with celebrity photos.

Then back in Alfred for a few days before leaving for Bard. I have been pleasantly surprised by the comfort that I've found in Alfred even though the bulk of my stuff is in a storage unit a short drive away. Since the house is full of six generations of stuff, there wasn't a lot of room to move in wholesale. I have begun to get my study in order and to blend in some of my dishes and similar things. Fortunately, the upstairs kitchen isn't too full and I can move some of the things I don't need up there. Perhaps we'll have trade-out every once in a while, or maybe I'll have summer and winter dishes. I never did that with my wardrobe but ....

Tomorrow night, I'll stay at Ann's because there's no room at the inn. I've been staying at the Grand Dutchess B&B in Red Hook. On Saturday, I hope to get to Storm King Art Center to see Maya Lin's new wave field and to New Paltz to see the Hudson River landscape paintings that are on view. The latter are from the collection of the New-York Historical Society so may be familiar. It will be good to see them in context, however. I had supper with a woman who works at New Paltz State and she says there's a very interesting side show that has panoramas from then and now. Those repeat photography images can be very compelling.

After lunch today, I went to the student union to find some coffee and some postcards. As I walked back to CCS, I passed a cube building of concrete blocks that was idyllic. Loved the geometry and simplicity. I'll have to take a picture tomorrow to add to the dream pavilions folder.

hommage à martín

2009-06-28T11:21:00.004-04:00

I love the way NYC works. It has been written about. For example, there was an article a few years ago about how you know the newsstand and deli people but not the details of their life. You're both familiar, in both senses.

This morning, I told Martín at Silver Spurs that I was moving from NYC tomorrow. He looked like he wanted to hug me and he did wish me well. We don't usually say much beyond "the usual?" and "more coffee?" but when I went to the cash register, the guy there said "I hear this is your last Sunday with us" and shook my hand and wished me well. It's that friendly anonymity that is so satisfactory.

In the fall of 1997 when I had my nose reconstruction, I'd been going to the same newsstand for a couple years, buying the Times, and saying "Have a nice day" (trite, perhaps, but well meant). As the bandages lessened in size, the woman at the newsstand said "better?" and I nodded and said thanks. She didn't have much English but it didn't matter.

Leaving Silver Spurs this morning, the usual Sunday morning routine, I was overcome by the feeling of loss. Not bad loss, but sentimental for that friendly anonymity. I'll find my way in Alfred but I'll live there, at least in the short term, as an urban person: friendly but not needing to know every detail of your life. Generally, I'd just as soon talk about art, architecture, queer stuff, politics, sustainability, even religion.

Yinka shown a rainbow

2009-06-27T20:03:00.003-04:00

Though I could have stayed home consolidating the remains for Monday's drive to Alfred, I had to see the Yinka Shonibare show at the Brooklyn Museum. It opened on Friday, like, yesterday. It is wonderful but mostly not too surprising for me since I know his work pretty well. There are a couple videos on the first floor. I didn't give the first one its due and the gallery between the videos has a wonderful sculpture of 14 figures around a table with a map of the world. If you read the Times coverage, you know it's a map of the world and it's like they're dividing up the space. The video in the back gallery is wonderful: "Odile and Odette" or a black ballerina and a white one dancing in mirror image. Upstairs for the rest of the show: mostly the great figure sculptures but also the Victorian Dandy series and "The Victorian philanthropist's parlour." The parlour was new to me and I preferred the Studio Museum installation of the Fragonard lady in a swing.

After leaving the main exhibition galleries, I thought I'd stop in for a visit to the Moorish Room which I dearly love. Well, gosh, there was a Shonibare kid in the room, jumping rope. And in the Civil War dressing room, a child playing with a puppet. In the library from Saratoga Springs, a Shonibare boy was playing with marbles under the table. Love the intervention.

As I left the museum, I was overcome with thoughts of how it will not be as easy from Alfred to visit a show at the Brooklyn Museum so I'll just have to get my finances (moving is expensive!) in order and get down here "all the time."

Janet Linde lives across Eastern Parkway and we'd made plans to meet for coffee after I was done at the museum and she was done with duty at the food coop. We were sitting in the garden at Cheryl's when it started raining enough for the tree umbrella to not keep us dryish. We went inside to finish. Then as we left the restaurant, it was rainbow light and indeed there was a rainbow.

Over to the subway. When I was walking back to the apartment from the Christopher Street exit, there was another rainbow and a lot of Pride business in Washington Square. Even the goddess had on her Pride rainbow!

the day the movers came

2009-06-27T00:25:00.007-04:00

Before the movers came (a few days earlier):

After the movers took most of the stuff away:

Now, all I have to do is finish consolidating the stuff that I'll take in a carload of precious things. Then, it's off to Alfred on Monday.

do not cut bait, fairies in the garden

2009-06-14T17:32:00.013-04:00

A couple weeks ago, a woman stopped to talk to me as I stood in front of Trader Joe's on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I was waiting for Diana Mitrano, the woman was amused by my site-specific installation t-shirt that I got at the Whitney some years ago. She (Maitreya Levanchild) was to be in a performance of "What we can see from here" on the 69th Street Pier in Bay Ridge on June 14th. Today. The day started gloomy but brightened considerably. The performance was pleasant, colorful, appropriate.

I've been reading The language of landscape by Anne Whiston Spirn and it keeps reverberating. After the performance, I continued walking through the waterfront parks of Bay Ridge and came upon the rose garden. My third rose garden in a week! It is the season. Yesterday, Mac and I went to Jackson Heights for the annual Garden Tour. The gardens were mostly on the inside of blocks, surrounded by apartment buildings, mostly built in the decade before the Great Depression. We saw four of them and the gardens were quite different: one was quite overgrown and very pleasant on a summer afternoon, another quite formal with a baldaquino supported by Doric columns, another a simple center lawn with great trees (only one Dutch elm left). And of course there were some roses.

I had only just gotten back from Boston and the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management on Friday night. When I was in Boston, Bill Connor and I went to lunch on Thursday with Darin Murphy (School of the MFA) and Rachel Resnik (MassArt). On the way through the Fens to Thaitation, we stopped in the ... ta da ... Rose Garden! It was extraordinarily beautiful. The scent of the garden today in Brooklyn was stronger however; it must have been the breeze off the bay, blowing the rosy scent right at me. The Fens Rose Garden takes us back to the Spirn book wherein she talked about how one Boston neighborhood was asked for favorite places as they were planning their community garden. Yup, the Fens Rose Garden was at the top of everybody's list and became the inspiration for a public space within the neighborhood garden.

SEI went pretty well. I presented thrice on Tuesday and Wednesday, along with several others. I thought the flow was quite fine. On Thursday, Bill and I went to see the "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese" show at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was extraordinary. The room of "Mythological Nudes" was dumb-striking, jaw-dropping, almost too overdressed but lovely. The Tintoretto "Baptism" was amazing and was installed next to a Baptism by Veronese, just one of the good comparisons in the exhibition. The comparisons were perhaps obvious but the installation really worked. After the Venice show, Fens walk, and lunch, Bill and I went home to make vegetarian chili for supper. It came out very nicely. Bill was the haut chef, I the sous.

Before catching a late afternoon bus on Friday, I went to see the Shepard Fairey show at the Institute of Contemporary Art. I really enjoyed the images and the words included therein. I was also very taken by the "Acting out: social experiments in video" show which included the wonderful Javier Téllez video of six blind people touching an elephant in McCarren Pool which I'd seen at the Whitney Biennial, along with four other interesting videos. After the ICA, I walked over to the gallery district on Harrison Avenue to see the Joe Fig show at Carroll and Sons.

So it all comes back to plants, e.g., figs. Part of the interest in all of these rose gardens has been that I have been thinking a good deal about what I'm going to do with the yard in Alfred. And if I were to win the lottery right now, I'd want to appropriate Ross Bleckner's studio building as created in miniature form by Joe Fig.

rest on the flight to Alfred

2009-05-24T19:36:00.007-04:00

Though I could (or probably should) have stayed home and packed some more books, I wanted to see the newly reopened American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Roberto Ferrari had blogged about the reopening a few days ago and that made me even more curious. He mentioned that it was good to be able to walk around the sculpture in the round but I must admit I think I preferred the Victorian patches of ivy. He also liked the touch screen information panels in the period rooms. Again, I guess I'm a fuddy duddy and prefer the old-fashioned text panels.

Meandering up through the various period rooms, I did stop to look at the wonderful Paris wallpaper that I'd love to find so I could make a frieze of buildings, inspired by it, around my library up in Alfred. Better check out the wallpaper catalogs.

I also went up to the roof garden to see the Roxy Paine installation. It's pretty stupendous, lots of snarled branches with reflections and views through the real vines:

A trip to the Met isn't complete without stopping in to see my favorite ivory of Mary and Joseph resting on the flight to Egypt, described on the label as one of the finest bits of Romanesque ivory carving.

Lisa Ross at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

2009-05-14T22:33:00.007-04:00

This evening, I went to Daneyal Mahmood Gallery to hear Lisa Ross in conversation with Nan Goldin. It was an incredible artist talk. The gallery was crowded and many of us were sitting on the floor, perhaps appropriately ascetic. The YouTube video embedded here is from Daylight Multimedia and includes still pictures set to Uyghur music and Lisa Ross talking about prayer and spirituality. There are also some evocative pictures on the gallery website. When I looked at the list of her exhibitions, I realized that I had seen her work before, two years ago at Nelson Hancock Gallery in Dumbo.

The video at Daneyal Mahmood has a very different feel from the YouTube video from Daylight. The video on view at the gallery is very quiet. The gallery text indicated that you could only hear the natural sounds of the holy site in the desert. With quite a few people in the gallery, you couldn't even hear that and the silent flapping of the flags was mesmerizing.

Seeing the Uyghur scenery was especially evocative since I cataloged some ARTstor images from the Silk Routes recently. Lisa Ross first went to Xinjiang to see the ancient cities but found them disappointingly touristic. Wandering off, she discovered these holy sites.

LibraryThing beats worldcat.org?

2009-05-10T16:35:00.002-04:00

As I was sorting books to put in boxes today, I came across the library copy of Cruising: Architektur, Psychoanalyse and Queer Cultures by Helge Mooshammer (Böhlau, 2005) which I have checked out. I couldn't remember if I'd put in the bibliography for the Queer Caucus for Art Newsletter or not. I thought I'd google it to see whether it showed up that way. I was surprised to see that the LibraryThing work record showed up as the first hit. The second hit is from the author's webpage and the OCLC WorldCat record doesn't show up until the third entry on the second page, not far above the listing from the new books list at Berkeley. While I'm quite a fan of LibraryThing, as you know, I'm sort of disappointed that the WorldCat entry doesn't show up first. After all, if someone wants access to the book, they'd have more luck with the public collections in OCLC than with the mostly private libraries in LibraryThing.