sat(isfi)ed

Sometimes you go gallery hopping to a couple dozen galleries and you're still a tad hungry. You may have had some good morsels but you need some vegetables to pull it all together. And then there are the days when you visit a couple galleries and, wow, you're just beautifully sated. Today has been the latter.

Mac had mentioned the "Male" show at White Columns with works from the collection of Vince Aletti. The works were interesting (some for very obvious reasons) and the display was wonderful: in clusters on the various walls, some partially in front of others, some attached to the wall, some resting on a picture rail at waist level. A couple busy panels of small photos, art and/or just plain porny, were in the wall cases near the door.

Though I liked "Male" for the predictable reasons, two of the other shows were also interesting to say nothing of the folks gathered for the book launch of Theft is vision by Bob Nickas. One of the smaller galleries had a collection of "Recent acquisitions, gifts, and works from various exhibitions 1985-2007" from the collection, etc. of Bob Nickas. The installation was complementary to the style of "Male."

The next room had about a dozen photos by Janice Guy. I know her way better as one of the owners of Murray Guy Gallery, one of my favorite art spaces and programs. The photos were done in 1979 and feature the artist looking at her naked self through the lens: revealing and concealing.

I didn't have a lot of gallery time today so I thought I'd stop by Tracy Williams and then come on back home. I get the flyers from Williams but couldn't remember what the show was. I missed the Barbara Bloom show which I'm sure was splendid. The recent catalog of The Barbara Bloom Collection is magnificent and compelling. Now at Tracy Williams is Anna Craycroft's "The Agency of the Orphan." Downstairs is a collection of movie star stills, real and imagined, with Craycroft captions. Upstairs is a gallery with two fountains with child heads spewing water and a gallery of large drawings with a short table and chairs at which you can peruse the catalog. Craycroft investigates the idea of orphan and Orphan, identity in the face of social interaction, etc.

So now I'll go home and try to finish the newsletter or at least the parts that I can do. Then in a few hours I'll go to Spaced gallery to gather with others in memory of Judith Holliday who died in February. One of the great collection developers and bibliographers, though I do recognize it was a true copacetic attachment that we both had to architecture, Ungers, Italy, Rowe, Italian, joy.

And then Carnegie Hall for the Thomas Ades edition of "Making music."

I've been thinking a lot recently about moving toward retirement, mostly because work has just been too much of a drag lately. The dysfunction in the office is rampant in so many ways. At the same time, there have been several new challenges on the professional side: SEI Advisory Group, Joint LC/PCC LRCI/RDA Task Group, SEI instructor, VR cataloging at ARTstor. I imagine I could live happily anywhere, including Alfred, the small college town in upstate New York where the 130-year old family home is. Still, it's days like today with a couple galleries under my belt to great satisfaction (plus a nice little visit to Three Lives & Company bookstore where I found a newly published for the first time early work of Tom Spanbauer, an author I really enjoy) that makes me realize one has to find your way. New York City may drop more of it in your lap or under your feet but I do think I could find my way most anywhere.

Martha Wilson at Mitchell Algus

Quite a bit of good viewing in the galleries on Saturday but perhaps the best and most surprising was the Martha Wilson show at Mitchell Algus Gallery on West 25th Street. As usual, Mitchell has dug up some interesting art and displays it well, simply but well. The show is of her "Photo/Text Works, 1971-74." Mitchell had to remind me that she was a founder of Franklin Furnace, the great artist book and publication shop. These are so evocative of so much contemporary and later identity work. I especially liked the decorative-arts switch piece in which the plain woman is in the fancy frame and the dressed-to-the-nines woman is in the plain frame. Bits of narrative on a bunch of the pieces.

Among the other shows I visited: Matthew Buckingham, at Murray Guy (one film with text in French on Le Prince and early moving-image camera; other text and image video on Charlotte Wolff, psychologist and writer on homosexuality); Marc Swanson: the Saint at large, at Bellwether Gallery (yes, as in the disco but the connection is pretty postmodern); Marcel Dzama, at Zwirner (yes, the piano music in the video installation was live); Subodh Gupta's "1 KG war" (a kilo of gold with "war" engraved), at Jack Shainman; Robert Gober, at Matthew Marks (in the small gallery on 21st and the smaller gallery on 22nd); Meg Webster, at Paula Cooper on 23rd Street (just five or six works but powerful); Guerra de la Paz, at Daneyal Mahmood (I really like their work though this wasn't my favorite example, and it closed on Saturday).

weird, bumpy hillocks

I should be looking out the window because I'm sitting in the Phoenix airport on my way to San Diego for the VRA conference. I borrowed a staff MacBook so I can maybe keep up with email while I'm away. My Macintosh Performa at home still struggles on (I refuse to say soldier on, as the Times seems to say a lot) and I haven't fully decided whether to go lap- or desktop though the idea of laptop is certainly attractive.

So what's outside the window? The Phoenix Skyharbor Airport is quite close to downtown. You can see several downtown skyscrapers but you can also see some red hillocks that look rather than those drip sandcastles that are such fun to make when the sand is fine. For some reason, my Orbitz reservation didn't include seat assignments so I was in a middle seat. The guy next to me kept the shade up and was mostly out of the way but I certainly couldn't study the landscape as I usually would. My flight home is red-eye so that will be minimal too.

Still, those bumpy hillocks are of that wonderful red stone that doesn't show up so much in New York State. At least the dry variety doesn't. My favorite red rock venue is still Caprock Canyons which I visited totally unawares on my way between Amarillo and Fort Worth. I was there mostly alone and not worried about scorpions or rattlesnakes. The sky was bright and clear, the temperature was gentle. The canyons are at the break between the high and low plains. You're just driving along on the flats and, all of a sudden, the land drops a thousand feet or something. It's really incredible. That was just part of a wonderful trip overall: coming home from SAH in Albuquerque; stayed overnight in Canyon and visited the museum there, then Palo Duro Canyon, then did a stair pattern from county seat to county seat. Just me and my little gray-violet Isuzu pickup. It was pretty splendid.

But back to Phoenix ... as we came in toward the airport, I was reading The Middle Sea and looking over the shoulder of my neighbor out the window. Once when I looked up, there was that wonderful view of the city all stretching stretching and then these incredible mountains rising out of nowhere. Nature is so weird.

Judith Holliday

I just signed on to gmail and as I glanced at the inbox, there was a notice that Judith Holliday's birthday is coming up. Well, this year, it will be bittersweet because Judith died last month. I had known Judith since the late 1960s when I was at Cornell, doing my alternative service. It was folks like her and Chris Huemer and Pat Sullivan that helped me realize that the art historical course (BA to MA to PhD) that I was on was not my natural course.

I returned to grad school in 1971 and we (Dorothy and I) took a trip back to Ithaca to see family and friends there. Probably spring break in 1973. We got back to Cleveland and there was a party/reception for a candidate for a position in the art history department. The competition and whatnot at the party stood in such contrast to the library folks that we'd talked to in Ithaca. I can't remember if we saw Judith on that particular trip, but I do know that I went to the library school the very next day and started the application process. I started library school as I finished my art history master's.

A year later, having finished my M.A. and well along in my M.S. in L.S., I accepted a job at the University of Pittsburgh. The Frick Fine Arts Library there is in a 1960s Italianate palazzo. Almost six years later, the job of art cataloger was open at Cornell since Pat Sullivan had moved over to the Fine Arts Library to be assistant librarian under Judith. It was wonderful to be back with Judith and Pat and in Ithaca.

Judith had lived in Rome for a while and really worked with me on my Italian pronunciation. It must have been hard on her when I'd pronounce Chigi as "chee gie" (soft ch, hard g) when it should be the other way around. With her help and several trips to Italy, I can usually say an Italian word pretty well these days. Now if I could just put a sentence together.

Judith was a consummate bibliographer, particularly in architecture. The 1980s were a time of interesting ferment in architectural output and criticism. Ungers and Rowe were at Cornell. Judith and I had many conversations about architecture, and looked at lots of books together. While I've never had a job as selector, I really enjoyed telling Judith about little treasures I discovered one place or another.

One of my favorite Judith stories is, however, during an ARLIS/NA conference, 1978 I think, in New York City. There was a panel of art book publishers. During the question period, Judith asked the Abrams guy why they didn't put the dates in books. He replied something about not wanting the book to seem stale on the bookstore table or coffee table when you gave it to someone as a Christmas gift. He didn't realize how much trouble it made for librarians and folks trying to cite the item. Soon thereafter, Abrams started putting the date on the verso of the title page and they still do it, even though they've been bought and sold a couple times (at least) since then.

So here's to Judith on what would have been her 70th birthday!

Open Source ILS

(I'm amazed that there has not been a great hallelujah raised because of this proposal. Or maybe the migration cobwebs around here are obscuring the cheers!?)

To the DLF [apologies for duplicates received on this or other lists]

The Duke University Libraries are preparing a proposal for the Mellon Foundation to convene the academic library community to design an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). We are not focused on developing an actual system at this stage, but rather blue-skying on the elements that academic libraries need in such a system and creating a blueprint. Right now, we are trying to spread the word about this project and find out if others are interested in the idea.

We feel that software companies have not designed Integrated Library Systems that meet the needs of academic libraries, and we don’t think those companies are likely to meet libraries’ needs in the future by making incremental changes to their products. Consequently, academic libraries are devoting significant time and resources to try to overcome the inadequacies of the expensive ILS products they have purchased. Frustrated with current systems, library users are abandoning the ILS and thereby giving up access to the high quality scholarly resources libraries make available.

Our project would define an ILS centered on meeting the needs of modern academic libraries and their users in a way that is open, flexible, and modifiable as needs change. The design document would provide a template to inform open source ILS development efforts, to guide future ILS implementations, and to influence current ILS vendor products. We would use the grant to fund a series of planning meetings, with broad participation in some of those meetings and a smaller, core group of schools developing the actual design requirements document.

At this stage, we're seeking feedback on our ideas and finding out who might be interested in participating, prior to our formal submission of the proposal to the Mellon Foundation in early March. We would greatly appreciate your responses to the following questions.

1) Does designing an open source ILS seem like something worth exploring for academic libraries?

2) Given the information above about the proposed project, is your institution interested in:

-- staying informed of our progress?

-- contributing time and effort to the planning process, even if only through the first or second workshops?

-- possibly being one of the core schools that participates throughout the full planning and writing process

3) If you have any initial feedback on our ideas, we would love to hear it!

**Please email us at openlib@duke.edu**

Thank you for your interest and considering this opportunity to work with us on this project. If your answer is yes to number two above, we will be contacting you to further explore participation. **Please send your reply to openlib@duke.edu**

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jean Ferguson
Reference Librarian, Coordinator of Virtual Reference
Duke University
Perkins Library, Box 90175
Durham, NC 27708
919.660.5928
jean.f@duke.edu

Save Time. Ask a Librarian.

WorldCat Identities

When searching my email for a message by "Deborah" Ultan Boudewyns, I came across a message from Deborah Johnson at University of Minnesota Duluth Library. She was noting that she'd visited WorldCat Identities and found it rather nicely evolved. I had also been somewhat underwhelmed when I first visited Identities. Maybe I've evolved too. It looks really good now.

WorldCat Identities = http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities/

Today, I searched on Elizabeth I, as Deborah did, and then Palladio. It's true that typos in OCLC lead to multiple entries on these folks. But the bulk of the hits are on the authorized heading and faceting from the clustered data is quite interesting. I meandered off from Palladio to Teatro Olimpico to find that its classification number was in PN. Now it is a theater and all but we architecture fans think of it as NA material.

That reminds me. I saw Palladio's children by N.J. Habraken at a bookstore recently. It is not really a book about Palladio and his influence but it looks interesting anyway.

... and I quote: Hermione rules!

Art history can be fun (I'm at College Art in Dallas). This morning at the Rauschenberg session, we talked about copying and it soon turned to appropriation. Yesterday or sometime, rephotography was used for Sherrie Levine-ish appropriation. I've never heard rephotography used in this way. I think of it much more for the folks who do reconstructions of the western surveys. Today in a manuscript session, we heard about quotations in subject matter or composition. And one of the papers was entitled "What's in a name?" Other papers in the manuscript session talked about workshops and inheritance or family operations, and the women usually weren't mentioned unless they happened to take over the family operations. In grad school, Nancy Stowell and I "invented" Hermione van der Goes as the unknown early Netherlandish painter. Perhaps there really was a Hermione, the widow or sister of Hugo van der Goes, who goes largely unsung because she happened to be a woman.

I found it interesting that quotation, copying, imitation, inspiration, and appropriation have all been used with varying amounts of art historical weight. In some settings, it's been considered ironic. In other, normal or ironic.

The word of the conference that I wasn't familiar with is indexical. I'm probably way behind since several people used it with ease.

49 state capitols

You should go to Storefront to see the Ramak Fazel show. They have a small triangular space at the corner of Kenmare and Lafayette/Centre, near the Police Building (now condos). Usually the office is in the back (East end). For this show, they added a little room just inside the door that looks like the reception office for the tour and education office of a, duh, state capitol building. The attendant is sitting behind an Early American office desk. The larger gallery space has the photos of the state capitols that vary from something approaching a postcard view to a picture of someone polishing a air duct. All lovely and many evocative of the stereotype of the state. The smaller gallery has the covers of mail from Fazel to Fazel, using a wide variety of stamps. Chronological and thematic variety, arranged sometimes to match the theme. There is text to match, just a little text, mostly a thought show, not a reading show. http://www.storefrontnews.org/

I went on from Storefront to Thrust Projects on the Bowery. "Freeze Frame" includes paintings by several artists including Carrie Moyer who I know from Queer Caucus. Her painting is really wonderful, just enough of the glitter to give it sparkle without going camp. Jane and I talked for a while about the paintings in the office area which play off each other very nicely. http://www.thrustprojects.com/

From Thrust to Canada where they have a David Askevold show. Again, the connections between aspects of life played out. David Askevold died on January 23rd and I updated his NACO record based on a message from Art Metropole to ARLIS-L. I didn't know that the Askevold show was at Canada. The pieces in the outer room were nice but the inner room video was mesmerizing. A contraption with small candles was endlessly spinning as the candles burned down, and then went out, ending in darkness, with mellow saxophone music. Almost Quaker.

On to Ludlow Street for the Ludlow 38, the contemporary outpost of the Goethe Institute of New York. http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/ney/en2970416.htm Nice little show of art and culture magazines. A ways up Ludlow and across the street is the "Pawn Shop" project of Flux. http://e-flux.com/projects/list In the window was a wonderful Simryn Gill necklace composed of some Lenin work from the Foreigh Languages Publishing House. We get tons of their stuff to catalog for Tamiment. Inside an AA Bronson/General Idea multiple of Jockey shorts waistbands in a plastic bag. Not so expensive ($350) but that money isn't available at the moment. Sigh. It invited thoughts, however, of the underwear of famous people or pornstars that you can buy. Is it art? Is it pornography? I know it when I see it. There were quite a few things that I'd be happy to have, at a fairly wide variety of prices.

I had seen a notice for a photo show at LITM in Jersey City. Photos of Radical Faeries. So I hadn't been to Jersey City for a while and figured I'd go take a look. It ends at the end of February and I'm off to Dallas for College Art next week. I walked up to the Christopher Street PATH station but when I got to LITM, it was closed. It's more of a restaurant/bar with art on the walls than a gallery. Oh well. Over to the Jersey City Museum where they had a good show of women artists responding to the Feminine mystique by Betty Friedan which was published 25 years ago. I liked the "Uzi Coozis" by Heather Hart, guns with knit covers and Lorna Simpson's "Cure/heal" especially. They also had a Victorian parlor which was rather nice.

After reading a bit of the paper, I eyed the ad for "I'm not there" and figured I'd go there. It's a wonderful movie in a number of ways, not least of course getting to hear Dylan songs. I wasn't that taken with Cate Blanchett's character but the young black boy was wonderful. It was weird to see Heath Ledger (and Michelle Williams) so soon after his death.

I had been pretty weary last week. The weariness of working in an office that tries the soul, at a range of projects that go on endlessly. Today's art and cinema was a lot but not at all soul weary.

Last night, I went to see "The Cenci" at the Ohio Theatre, staged by John Jahnke's Hotel Savant company. The play by Antonin Artaud hasn't been much produced since its original staging in Paris in 1935, closing after 17 performances. The New York Times has written about it a couple times: pre-review article with lots of facts and interest, review which said it was worth seeing but problematic. Yup. The gallery owner of Postmasters was there too. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/theater/10blank.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=cenci&st=nyt&oref=slogin and the review: http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/theater/reviews/13cenc.html?scp=1&sq=cenci&st=nyt (if those don't link, go the nytimes.com and search "cenci")

social/asocial

One of the reviews in the New York Times Book Review yesterday was entitled "Log on. Tune out" (by John Lanchester) and concerned Against the machine: being human in the age of the electronic mob by Lee Siegel. The illustration showed a computer warning box: "Disconnected. The Internet's connectivity has unexpectedly isolated you. Sitting alone in front of your computer encourages exhibitionism and asocial behavior." I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before that there was some weird contrast between the rise of social computing and the asocialability of the internet. Perhaps because I am mostly socializing with people I know in the real world. Connections. Disconnections. It's not really that different from other correspondence exchanges. Like everything else, the internet speeds it up without necessarily adding oodles of value.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Lanchester-t.html?ref=books Somehow I'd missed the whole shebang about Lee Siegel and his incestuous and pseudonymous commenting on his own blog entries. And when I googled to find the citation for the book review, I see that others have written on the book.

Still, I've been enjoying playing Scrabulous on Facebook and actually saw a couple students playing realtime physical Scrabble the other day in the library.

And the NGC4LIB (next generation catalog for libraries) list is having a vigorous discussion on privacy of library patrons in a Facebook world.

coasting to a soft landing

I've been reading Mike Perry's Truck: a love story and enjoying it. In recent sections, he's been on a lot of book tours. Yesterday, John, Jacquelyn and I went to a panel on urban exploring at Flux Factory in conjunction with their "New York, New York, New York" show, sort of a riff on the Panorama at Flushing Meadows. It all came together in my dream last night. I had to get up to pee at 12:45 or so and the plane was just landing on the country road. It sure didn't feel like a crash landing.

The plane was really more like a country bingo hall or church recreation room: wide and not too full. I was sitting in the back row (more like the back seat of a bus), next to a small kid (Perry's Amy). We were flying along and went into a down swoop (not scary, more like a gentle amusement park ride). Then I was looking out the window at beautiful pine trees in the Cascades but I remarked to the kid that we were flying kinda low. Then we landed on the combination country lane/boat dock (that's probably a combination of the urban adventurers and Jacquelyn's going to Santa Monica) and coasted over to the edge of a cornfield. Folks were glad to be getting off the airplane for a while, some grabbing their toothbrush (good chance to freshen up, I think that was Dan Eshom). Margaret Webster was in a short skirt and kneeling on the floor (the floor was more like a van, probably the Contemporary Trends (Ithaca furniture store) van that was improbably in front of my NYC building yesterday morning). Then I woke up.

The morning dream was pretty colorful too but I don't remember it. Perhaps it's all the Perry sentence: Sometimes life is so simply good. (p. 163)