Rieu : violin = Rastrelli : cello

When we were in Capo d'Orlando, our B&B host, Calogero Nici, talked about his love of the violinist André Rieu who plays classical music with glitz and circumstance. Not actually to my taste. I prefer "real" (unadulterated) classical music, don't need it all popped up.

I had read a notice about the Rastrelli Cello Quartet coming to Houghton College as part of their U.S. tour. I read the notice to mean that they were something like a traveling Kronos Quartet. Their "non-traditional programming" is more in the lines of Rieu, classical music for the masses, than Kronos. More Vegas than downtown NYC. Or the Miller Theater at Columbia where I heard some great contemporary classical music when I lived in the City. They're good, don't get me wrong about that, and they played the glissandos and glitz with skill and musicality.

If you're interested, here's a link to the video page on the Rastrelli website. One of the things we really enjoyed was how four Russian guys, all playing the cello, could be so different in physical appearance and playing style.

Indonesia

I have been thinking about joining Nadine Hoover on one of her trips to Indonesia where she works with the Friends Peace Teams in Asia West Pacific. And today's Bergren Forum was Brian Arnold, photography teacher at School of Art and Design here; he talked on "Modernism and photography in Bali and Java." Intriguing. And now I know how to say Yogyakarta, one of the centers of contemporary art in Java. Or as Brian called it: the Chelsea of Indonesia.

Drawing by I Gusti Made Deblog,

from the Sutasome Story

"Gajahwaktra Fighting the Naga, before Sutasoma Comes to Bring Peace"

(ink on paper, circa 1950)

(photo from http://www.arcadja.com/)

Knowing how Brian said Yogyakarta is a bit of a librarian story. Some places in Indonesia used to be spelled with "dj" where the "y" is now. I learned about this from my cataloging, probably items at Cornell which has a magnificent Southeast Asian collection. Anyway, Yogyakarta is pronounced "djogdjakarta" or something of the sort. The authority record for Yogyakarta has several references with DJ, K, or J where other letters appear in the authorized form.

you can call me keith

So I was on my way home from the VRA/Upstate meeting in Salem, New York, at the McNish House, a project of Sheafe Satterthwaite. Sheafe is a part-time teacher and raconteur at Williams College, teaching American landscape history and other courses. The house is lovely, the 17th-century kitchen is remarkable, the book collection is stupendous. On the way home, after walking about some more in downtown Troy, I went over the Menands Bridge to Albany, walked about some more and went to the Albany Institute of History and Art. The mystery of the Albany mummies show had some wonderful Egyptian Revival tchotchkes.

Then it was on my way. As I neared Oneonta, I figured it was about lunch time and I could go to the Neptune Diner ... oh, no, I can go to downtown Oneonta and visit Green Toad Bookstore and eat someplace downtown. Green Toad is paired with a coffee house. I had on my Annie Leibovitz t-shirt with the picture of Keith Haring, from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

After I ordered my sandwich and coffee, the cashier asked if the guy on the t-shirt was me. No, but that's OK, you can call me Keith if you want to.

(Photo from http://www.artnet.com/auctions/)

Makoko Floating School

Makoko Floating School, Lagos, Nigeria. Designed by NLÉ, an architectural firm with offices in Nigeria and the Netherlands, founded 2010 by Kunlé Adeyemi. Picture from the NLÉ website which includes a slide show of this and other projects.

The building is a combination community center and school: community center on first level, school on second level, other educational facilities on top level. Learning about this was a gift from today's indexing for Avery. There's an article in the May 2013 issue of Abitare wherein the author compared the structure with Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo but admitted it might be the particular view. Or maybe it's just a glorious wooden building rising above the still waters of a canal or lagoon. I love my indexing!

utopian benches

Utopian Benches, 2011, by Francis Cape, illustration from the Murray Guy website.

"A bench is a social sculpture, and this is why it interests Francis Cape." -- Frances Richard, in a review of Cape's show at Murray Guy, New York, in Artforum, October 2013, p. 293

reflection

As I listened in rapt attention at the UB Gender Symposium described in the next older post, I couldn't help but be distracted by the reflection of the Darwin Martin House behind the speakers. Here, Jack Quinan (retired architectural historian from UB) and Wanda Bubriski (Executive Director Emeritus, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation). Bubriski moderated a panel with Quinan and Beverly Willis after the film A Girl is a Fellow Here, with "here" being the Taliesin Foundation.

case in point: Read Weber

As we artnacoisti get accustomed to the new fields in NACO records for attributes of the entity being established, the question of coding gender of persons has come up several times. I have told folks that they need to justify gender either by an explicit statement of gender or by use of a gendered pronoun. We should not assume that a Robert is male or a Susan is female. In most cases you'll be right but ...

I spent this afternoon, into the evening, at the "Building Talent: Women, Patronage, and Mentoring" symposium, coordinated by the University at Buffalo Gender Institute and held at the Greatbatch Pavilion at the Darwin Martin House. One of the features of the symposium, which was fantastic and inspirational, was a showing of the short documentary from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation entitled A Girl is a Fellow Here--100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of the six architects featured in the film was Read Weber (1908-1990). She was listed as male in the registry of American architects of the American Institute of Architecture until 2008. The profile of Weber on the Willis Foundation page mentions this and below is an illustration of the Coney Island Hospital, designed in 1957 by Weber. (Photo credit: Stoller/Esto Photography)

In the film, several of the women are interviewed and express their appreciation of Wright's attitude toward women. That is, he was unwilling to give them any more credit than he gave his male associates.

The speaker that had me in the palm of her hand was Marika Schioiri-Clark, now principal of SOSHL Studio. I had seen some of her work with MASS Design Group as part of my Avery indexing. MASS did a hospital project in Butaro, Rwanda. Schioiri is now living in Cleveland and working on an artist housing and residency project among other things. Her key words are "empathic design" and her mission is founded in her studies at Harvard where aesthetics trumped social engagement.

They said they were filming the symposium. Perhaps it will be available one of these days.

connect the dots

At the ARLIS/Western New York (aka the "upstate" chapter) meeting last week at the Watson Homestead, we had two artist talks. One was by Chris McEvoy who described the methodology he uses to make his paintings. It was intriguing. Here's "Some Kind of Nature" (2011) from his website:

I was doing some maintenance in the Scholes catalog and came across several forms of name for Mary McInnes, one of the art history professors here. One of the books attached to her name is Telling Histories: Installations by Ellen Rothenberg and Carrie Mae Weems, the catalog for an exhibition at the Boston University Art Gallery, 1999. It turns out that Chris McEvoy was a preparator for the exhibition, according the credits in the catalog.

I was sorely tempted going to see the Carrie Mae Weems show at the Cleveland Museum of Art which closed just a few days ago. I didn't make it and it is some consolation that it will be at the Guggenheim early next year. Weems has done a wide variety of work and is one of the new MacArthur fellows this year. If you don't know her work, I recommend a trip to her website and here's one of the "African Jewels" from 2009:

I saw some of Weems's photographs of Timbuktu at the Brooklyn Museum some years ago so it was especially troubling when the rebels were battling there. And that reminds me of Chris Huemer who went to Timbuktu one year for Christmas. Chris was then the librarian at the American Academy in Rome though I met her in 1969 or 1970 when we were both at Cornell libraries.

The other artist who spoke to us at ARLIS/WNY was Paul Bartow. Mostly he is involved with social practice and collaboration, with several projects having a nature and science bend. The last book I finished reading was What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl (Duke, 2013). The social practitioners are strong around Alfred and I was surprised by a colleague's dismissal of Bartow as not an artist. Oh, well. I enjoyed Bartow's talk and Finkelpearl's book.

And if you read about my enjoyment of the Kyle Abraham concert at the beginning of the school year, it was good to read that he too was selected as a MacArthur Fellow this year.

missing NYC

Missing NYC. Yesterday the New York Times had reviews of a show of work by Elaine Reichek at the Jewish Museum and work by Eleanor Antin at Columbia University. Reichel's needlepoint work about being Jewish looks compelling. "If you think you can be a little bit Jewish, you think you can be a little bit pregnant." Antin's work on identity has been around since the 1970s and has lost none of its power. Social practice from way back.

I was reading the paper as I waited for the Kyle Abraham and Abraham.in.Motion performance of Pavement to begin. It was incredible, reminded me of many visits to the Joyce, Danspace, BAM, Dance Theater Workshop, Duke, etc. etc. etc., in the quality of production and presentation.

This picture is from the company website and gives some idea of the energy. But it wasn't only the hard energy seen here; the dancers were also capable of loveliness and softness. A fine mix of modern, balletic, jazz, and street, and, gosh, just movement. Some text, mostly recorded. Oh, it was inside at Alfred with projections on the basketball backboard, and a single orange line marking the box of the in-or-out floor space.

One of the most powerful scenes was with Abraham as a street guy saying "help me" and the rest pretty much ignoring him, or worse. The lights went way down and the red revolving lights of a cop car came from off stage right. The street guy kept saying "help me" as a duet was happening in the near darkness. It was very compelling. I saw the darkness as protection from the overwhelming sadness of the social interaction (or non-interaction). In the talk back after the performance, Abraham said he thought it was "abstract" but I found it perhaps the most literal part of the narrative on fallen down neighborhoods.

You will note that the company includes both black and white dancers. Abraham himself is black. Some parts of the dance played very much off race and the race of the dancer mattered. Other parts were very mixed or silent on race. The term "post black" came to mind but I decided it was more like "race optional" (parallel to the clothing optionality of naturists). Besides, "post" anything is too easy, too ubiquitous.

I was sitting next to Laurel Jay Carpenter so of course we had to talk about performance and New York City. She just got back from sabbatical, some of which was spent in the City. She lived in the City for a decade or so, mostly before I lived there from 1995-2009. I first saw her when she did the Red Woman work in Tompkins Square in the early-mid aughts. I told her I wished I could find someone who had an extra room in their house/apartment or a small live/work space so that I could impulsively take off for a few days in NYC and not worry about imposing on someone or selling off my stock to stay in a hotel. She said "everybody wants that." Sigh. We know it's really not EVERYbody but there are a lot of us in Alfred that are very fond of the opportunities and street life of New York City.

All of this flowed through after Thursday night's Village Planning Board meeting with the ritual discussion of the drunkenness and litter and noise of Alfred nights. NYC is undoubtedly cacophonous but it's a constant, exuberant, gritty noise, not to everyone's taste or anyone's constant desire. The number of Styrofoam boxes along with cans and other litter on the streets of Alfred on Saturday or Sunday morning is devastatingly depressing for me. I can't believe that so much crappy post-drinking food can be consumed and that so many consumers of said stuff can be so sloppy in disposing of the containers.

Added to this cacophony of thoughts was the review on Thursday entitled "A small-town girl who wants out": the Hill Town Plays, a cycle of five plays by Lucy Thurber, produced concurrently by Rattlestick Plyawrights Theater in Greenwich Village theaters, set in western Massachusetts. Charles Isherwood, reviewer, has some pithy things to say about the "soul-deadening anomie" and "grim determinism" that infects the characters and setting.

So I've been missing the City after several months of seeing art in various upstate and other locations as I traveled around. The Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George show at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, for example, was really fine. So I thought I wasn't minding too much that I haven't been to the City since February but perhaps that's been part of the soul-deadening anomie that's been hanging over me.

Sherman Maxon

I just finished reading Grand Wood: A Life by R. Tripp Evans (Knopf, 2010). It is well-written and I really enjoyed the telling of Wood's story by a gay art historian. It is written in a popular style, that is, footnotes are relegated to the back and mostly give citations for quotations and other facts.

Wood was certainly interested in young men, both in social action and as art subjects. As is probably typical for his day (1891-1942), it is not clear how much he acted on his homosexuality. After his mother's death and not so long before his own, he married Sara Sherman Maxon. She was a powerful woman and the marriage lasted only a few years and was not happy. Her son, Sherman Maxon, and his wife, Dorothy, came to live with the Woods in Iowa City where they had moved from Cedar Rapids and renovated a fine brick house on East Court Street.

Sherman and Dorothy modeled in 1936 for illustrations from Main Street by Upton Sinclair. "In The Radical, Wood's illustration for the character Miles Bjornstrom, Sherman appears not as Lewis's ragged, disaffected intellectual, but as a caricature of rugged masculinity. Wearing a heavy sheepskin-lined coat and hunting cap, he stands in a toolshed and brandishes a rather phallic-looking wooden baton. With his broad shoulders, muscular neck, and exaggerated mustache -- a feature neither Lewis's character nor Sherman shared -- this über-masculine figure is more Tom of Finland than the bookish Scandinavian of Lewis's novel." (Tripp, p. 223; illustration from ebay)

Sherman and Dorothy continued to live with Grant Wood after Sara left him and moved to New York City. I am not especially pleased that Sherman was a scrounger.