separated at birth: index / indexing

I was looking at the Times book announcements and reviews yesterday. One of the reviews was of Index, A history of the: a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age by Dennis Duncan (W.W. Norton). Just my kind of book. I love my indexing gig and the book is about books (&c) and the title is inverted like a subject heading string might be. It's got a pretty zippy cover.

When I think of indexes aesthetically, I generally wander over to the work of Alejandro Cesarco who was often on exhibit at Murray Guy, a favorite gallery on West 17th Street. He has done these wonderful pages of index entries where the indicated mentions may be interlocked though many stand alone. He has also done other book-related art and was matched with John Baldessari in the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. 

You can see more of Cesarco's work on his web page, linked under his name.

art and cataloging and art cataloging

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.

collaborating

Murtha Baca and I co-wrote a chapter on FRBR for cultural objects in Arlene Taylor's book Understanding FRBR. We lost track, in a good way, of who originated which words. I remember some of the words and definitely the examples but the flow of the article became OURS, not hers or mine. There's an article in the Times from June 10th on the Rolex program to pair developing artists with masters. Alejandro Cesarco and John Baldessari are one of the pairs; Cesarco has long been a favorite, for his made-up indexes and other wordy art. Baldessari has of course been doing conceptual stuff with words for years and years. In the article, Cesarco is quoted thus:

The most gratifying thing about this program was working together with him on a work that became a synthesis of our practices. It's not recognizable who did what, which is what's nice about collaborating, because you are trying to work outside your comfort zone and pushing your collaborator to work outside his.

Of course, that makes the metadata more difficult but then Leonardo and Verrocchio have been making that hard for art historians for centuries.

When I went to go fetch a link for John Baldessari, I found his "JB_new" page and it has a groovy graphic tree. Oh my gosh, it's Baldessari's birthday!

today's galleryhopping

My day of galleryhopping started at Murray Guy with the Beat Streuli show: an installation from videos shot at tram stops in a Muslim section of Brussels accompanied by a large photo mural and a few small stills. Her work is so compelling. When I told Margaret Murray and Janice Guy that I couldn't figure out what made it so compelling: was it the urbanity, the color, the faces, the voyeurism?, they mentioned that it was a street watcher's paradise but also the slowed-down speed as well. I hadn't thought about the speed being slower than "reality" but the guy smoking did take a long time to exhale the smoke. Also in the back room were a couple pieces by Alejandro Cesarco, one an index to an imaginary book with entries for Jack Pierson, Jacques Lacan, I'll be your mirror, and various other things. It's reproduced on their web page, along with another table of contents for a book on melancholy. We talked for quite a while, as we often do (they may be my favorite gallerists). After some time, I came to the conclusion that their wordy artists fit with my aesthetic. Cesarco was the artist for a wonderful video installation at Art in General a while ago (they may have sent me there, I realized after leaving). Cesarco is about to go on my page of artists who work with books, reading, libraries, and the like. Their next show will be a 4-person show with Cesarco and three others who work with words. I can't wait.
http://artcataloging.net/miscellany/booksexh.html
http://www.murrayguy.com/

Then upstairs to Axis which had a show by Ledelle Moe -- one huge and a couple smaller pieces plus a wall thing, all made of concrete (I guess) in panels bolted together. From the solid side, it looked hugely heavy and massive; from the underside, you could see through. Axis is in the 3rd-floor space above Murray Guy at 453 West 17th. Richard Anderson was there when I first encountered that building. From the window on the eastern side of the building, you get an incredible view of the Empire State Building.

Gass & Grünert: Alex Kasselböhmer -- one of the paintings with many trees had a shape rather like the lower half of Manhattan but which also could have been a footprint. Hmm, which?

Shainman: Nick Cave -- wearable suits of fabric, fur, string, sequins, wooden sticks, strings, etc. etc. Catalog for his show in Chicago has an essay by James Sanders who I met some years ago at College Art but I guess he hasn't been there since the Philadelphia conference.

Paul Rodgers: Lucinda Devlin "Disparate vision: selections from the Omega Suites and Pleasure Ground series" -- gas chambers and tanning booths, electrocution and sex shops, gallows as empty space rather like spare industrial shots

511: Bryan LeBoeuf -- rather like his paintings; at their last show of his work, the postcard had a lovely man crawling onto the boatdock

Three shows on the next floor of 529 West 20th: Jennifer Bain's delicate panelled paintings with palette knife scraping at Kathryn Markel; coarse people by Mark Takimichi Miller at Edlin; and then Pat Lipsky abstracts at Elizabeth Harris. Quite a wonderful trio.

Bibro: Shane McAdams paintings and Mike Miga abstract Polaroids -- wonderfully complementary

Ricco/Maresca (they're on 3rd floor now at 529): Philippe Weisbecker and the archeology of the future -- simple drawings, rocks, shards

Hasted Hunt: Bohnchang Koo's photos of pots, quite monochromatic; Eliot Porter (thoughts of Amon Carter)

Kim Foster: Kwang-Young Chun -- those wonderful little boxes with Chinese writing, all on a wall or floor piece. There's usually one of this artist's pieces in the small enclosure at the front of the gallery, but today Chun got the whole space.

Stopped at Printed Matter and picked up Matthias Herrmann's new title in the "Hotel" series

Perry Rubenstein: Jesper Just "It will all end in tears" -- video installation, very dark, old man and young man, with Finnish Shouting Men's Chorus

Daniel Reich: "When fathers fail" -- the wall piece I suspected might be Christian Holstad turned out to be Tom Burr (some of his stuff is very subtle; this was more in your face)

Gladstone: Catherine Opie "American cities" -- great panoramic photos including bridges across streets in Minneapolis, World Trade Center, L.A. strip malls

Ramis Barquet: Alex Hank "The melancholic Mr. A" -- floor covered with shellacked images from pop culture, back room with slogans in neon

Clamp Art (in the new space): "Monkey portraits" by Jill Greenberg -- they're ready for their closeups and the wet eyes were quite incredible. In the back space, "Proof that homosexuality is part of nature" but I can't remember the name of the artist. Brian put it up to go with the animals in the front space. He didn't know if all of the guys in the picture are the same person though he does know it isn't the artist (as Giocolea does in his photos).

George Billis: Nicholas Evans-Cato -- lovely landscapes, mostly Brooklyn. One especially reminded me of the view from the apartment that Christie has made an offer on. It's on State Street and her main views are over toward the Williamsburgh Bank Building, now becoming One Hanson Place (condos). Her view will probably not include much of the proposed Atlantic Yards development because of a taller building a couple blocks from her apartment. But that reminds me of Frank Gehry. As I rounded the corner of 17th Street and Tenth Avenue, the new Gehry building on the West Side Highway was gorgeous! The day was bright and sunny and it looked splendid. I very much enjoyed seeing it go up, with the slanted concrete supports.

By then, I was pretty much sated (WELL sated, not stuffed) and getting hungry. Walked home, got the mail (new issue of Art in America and whatever), ate some food, got a call from Rachel, came over to the office.

After supper last night with Sharon, Robert and Sam, I went home for a bit and then decided to go see "Modern living" at La MaMa, 10 p.m. show. It was enjoyable, lively. The characters were nicely played.

I'd give you more URLs for all these things but I figure you can google 'em as well as I can.