funnels

For thirty years and a bit more, I have been involved with the Art NACO funnel of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. It enables us art catalogers to participate in authority control more fully than we might be able to do individually. I coordinate the efforts of a dozen or so art libraries that create or revise name records that are included in the LC/NAF international authority file. There's also an Art SACO funnel that allows us to propose subject headings to add to the Library of Congress Subject Headings file. So "funnels" has been a (good) trigger word for me for a long time.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email announcement from the SS United States Conservancy today that announced that the "second SS United States funnel [was] to be preserved." They use the word "funnel" to describe the smokestacks that were so prominent on the ship.

This illustration is a rendering of the proposed SS United States Museum and Visitor Experience designed by Thinc, LMN Architects, and Buro Happold. More information here.

writing in space

Sometimes my indexing or cataloging takes me to places I really want to go or where I have very happily been. Sometimes it's a bit of both. I really enjoyed my trips to Milan in 2018, including a climb up to the roof of the Duomo. Hanging out with the gargoyles. My indexing a day or two ago included an article about eL Seed in Abitare. His work usually includes some Arabic calligraphy and the work above was on the plaza in front of the Duomo in Milan. He is Franco-Tunisian so I assumed his nom d'art was derived from something like al-Said. But no. One of the bits of biography that I found on the web described his love of El Cid as a child and his appropriation and respelling of that name.

I often check the Library of Congress Name Authority File when I encounter a new person and want to see if their record looks ok. I was amused to note that the record for eL Seed was done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art so I sent them a note of gratitude. William claimed it.

Thanks, William, and thank you, Bassam Makansi on Facebook, for the good picture of the calligraphy on the plaza. The picture from the roof of the Duomo is mine from 2018.

newest trend: architectural office name from tail of personal name?

Twice in the last couple days in my indexing, I have encountered an architectural firm that invented their name from latter portions of their personal names.

This is a project by Miogui Architecture, a collaboration of Sabine Fremiot and Léo Barestegui, in Le Havre, France.

This is a project by elaNández, founded by Manuela Fernández Langenegger, an architect based in Milan.

Naming is an art. Why not do it creatively?

cataloger tools & reference questions

Meredith Hale, metadata librarian at the University of Tennessee, asked on ARLIS-L if anyone could provide an authoritative source for the birth and death dates of the photographer who signed his photos Wasow. She needed the information for rights clearance and authority record creation. She noted that there are several images on Wikimedia Commons, including this portrait of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin from 1924.

Spyros Koulouris, archivist at I Tatti in Florence, responded with the link to Wasow's record in the Deutsches National Bibliothek authority file. The DNB records, as well as those of the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Getty Union List of Artist Names and several dozen other organizations, can be searched together in the Virtual International Authority File or VIAF. This is a really useful tool in name authority work.

Reflecting on this exchange on ARLIS-L, I was reminded of a little reference question I helped a fellow graduate student with, way back going on fifty years ago (early 1970s). Caroline Boyle-Turner (then Caroline Rachlis) was studying the French symbolists and was trying to verify some book by one of them. Paul Gauguin, I think. It had been elusive and she mentioned it to me. I had done plenty of searching in the book catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale when I worked on the reclassification project at Cornell University. She told me the title and we went to look in the BN catalog. I don't remember the details of the book but she was very happy to find that the book did actually exist. Catalogers can be successful reference librarians. Cataloging tools can be good sources of information. Of course, the BN book catalog, which has been supplanted at least for newer items by an online version, was not just a cataloger's resource but it wasn't on Caroline's radar. Fast forward some fifteen years or more, Caroline and I were delighted to coincide at a reception at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

[my photo of the Van Gogh Museum from a later trip, 2016]

Lady Croft by Philip de László

 The Hon. Nancy Beatrice Borwick, Lady Croft (1884-1949)

Portrait by Philip Alexius László de Lombos

(viewed in email from the Royal Oak Foundation,

the American affiliate of the National Trust of England,

Wales and Northern Ireland)

Never having heard of Philip Alexius László de Lombos, I naturally (it being me) checked the LC/NAF authority file for the painter. I picked "lombos" as my entry word for a left-anchored browse and found nothing. Not Lombos at all. Never give up too early. Searched "laszlo" and found him:

010	__ |a no2004037532
035	__ |a (OCoLC)oca06327328
040	__ |a ICU |b eng |e rda |c ICU |d DLC |d FU
046	__ |f 1869 |g 1937 |2 edtf
100	1_ |a László, Fülöp, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a De László, Philip Alexius, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László de Lombos, Philip Alexius de, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Fülöp Elek, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Philip de, |d 1869-1937

What? No reference from Lombos??

The Royal Oak Foundation email was about the "National Trust Property of the Week" -- Croft Castle in Herefordshire. The Crofts had settled there by the time of the Domesday Book and the castle dates to the 14th and 15th centuries. The Crofts lost the house in 1746 but were back in 1923. The house went to the National Trust in 1956, not that we'll be able to visit it any time soon.

the villa of Denise Scott Brown's family

The Architect's Newspaper posted a link on Facebook to a 2013 video interview with Denise Scott Brown. It is fascinating and she is captivating. The interview is entitled "Denise Scott-Brown: An African Perspective." I had not ever read significant biographical information about her and had not realized she grew up in South Africa. Her family lived for a time in a modernist villa-style house designed by Norman Hanson, along the lines of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier. You may have read a couple earlier posts -- Villa Savoye and northern Italy and The villa as building type -- that I wrote on villa-style modernist houses, inspired by traveling in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria, that is, Milan, Turin, and Genoa. As I fetched the links for those posts, I was amused to note that Blogger, in its wisdom (artificial intelligence), had chosen "villa-savoye-in-savoy-country" as the title for the post I had called "Villa Savoye and northern Italy." Meanwhile, here's a still of the childhood home of DSB, from the video interview:

I am sorry to see that architect Norman Leonard Hanson (1909-1990) doesn't yet have a LC/NAF authority record but he does have a ULAN record from Avery. Scott Brown says "people are writing about him nowadays" so there may be a book one of these days that will lead to a NAF record.

it's on the shelf

I've blogged several times about LibraryThing but not recently. (see posts)  When I first started cataloging my library in LibraryThing, the closest libraries to mine (based on a weighted measure of common books and how many books altogether) were mostly architectural. Then I left New York City and started cataloging my books at the upstate family homestead. The closest libraries shifted to those with lots of gay titles or a mix of architecture and gay titles, and the amount of fiction climbed. I was delighted to notice today that the closest library is now HTCBooks which seems to be affiliated with the History, Theory and Criticism of architecture and art program at MIT, part of the Department of Architecture. Some of the tags look personal, such as SOA Home Guest Room Shelf 1. Maybe that's a good idea: you might be able to find a book when you want it. It might be especially good for the skinny little things without any spine presence. Still, it surprises me how many books are where I first look.

For example, I was indexing an article about a project by Wang Hui. There was an undifferentiated personal name record in LC/NAF for Wang Hui but none of them had any latin-script language titles so I couldn't tell if my guy was included or not. I thought I didn't have the Chinese character version of his name until I checked the firm website: Urbanus Architecture & Design. The projects there included Tulou affordable housing. Almost a decade ago, Tulou was included in a show at the Cooper-Hewitt and I had bought the catalog which was right there on that shelf downstairs with some other architecture titles. Wang Hui is in the colophon so I do have the Chinese character version of his name.

Sometimes I feel like my thousands of books are a burden. Too much stuff to just pick up and go live in Palermo for six months. I sometimes feel like I should give my architecture books to Alfred State which has a new B.Arch. program. On the other hand, it's nice to be able to have Tulou: affordable housing in China readily at hand.

the curator and the cataloger

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, painted by Rembrandt, and one of the great Dutch paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings, was tragically killed in the Metro North commuter train accident in early February. My good friend, Daniel Starr, Associate Chief Librarian at the Watson Library at the Met, wrote the following tribute to Liedtke, which I post here with his permission. The tribute was sent on February 5 to the list of the Art Libraries Society of North America.

--------------------

Last fall I received one of those e-mails catalogers hate to get:

“I see that when one searches Watsonline keyword ‘ter Brugghen,’ you get some recent lit, but not (anywhere in the list) the classic monograph by Nicolson. However, if you go with the Anglicized ‘Terbrugghen,’ you get his book and some of the other key works on the artist drop out. The results should be the same using either form. This would apply also to ‘ter Borch,’ etc. Thanks!”

Over the years I’ve learned that it pays to be flexible about cataloging whenever possible since it usually doesn’t pay to get into long discussions about rules with the unilluminated. So I was willing to make some changes, especially since this message came from Walter Liedtke, our distinguished colleague, who died so tragically in the MTA crash Tuesday.  I added some keywords to our records to address his concern. It was easy to do and didn’t break any rules. Since it was Walter I thought I’d go one step further and explain what was happening:

“I have adjusted our cataloging records to make the improvements you suggest. A keyword search for ‘ter Brugghen’ will now include the Nicolson book (http://tinyurl.com/mlthewj) as well as some of the other titles that were missing. Because Nicolson used the form ‘Terbrugghen’ in his title there is no way for me to make this work appear earlier in the results than number 15 since the ranking is by an algorithm I can’t control.

If you’d like the technical explanation for why the problem arose it is because American libraries use ‘Terbrugghen, Hendrik, 1588?-1629’ as the preferred form of his name based on Princeton’s formulation of the heading in the National Authority File. The different forms matter less in a subject search because all variations will be brought together under the preferred form: http://tinyurl.com/lvj9el7. If someone searches the subject ‘ter Brugghen’ they will be directed to a hyperlink that takes them to the ‘Terbrugghen’ form of the name: http://tinyurl.com/nfsxmw2. Thank you for making these suggestions. It is gratifying to know scholars still use Watsonline and care about these things.”

I never thought I’d get a response, but one arrived quickly:

“[T]hanks so much for this full explanation. I wonder what the ‘National Authority File’ does with Van Dyck. As you'll see in my Dutch and Flemish catalogues, and any scholarly American publication of the past 30 years or so, these artists are all alphabetized as in Europe, so Borch, Dyck, Gogh, Goyen, et al. Anyway, the important thing is that the search reveals what we have. “

This exchange was going much better than I thought possible. Maybe I should have stopped here but I went on:

“When Princeton decided to use ‘Terbrugghen’ instead of ‘Ter Brugghen’ in 1988 they based their decision on how the name appeared in two general Dutch languages encyclopedias in spite of the fact that the book on Dutch painting they were cataloging used the latter form:

1.      Holländische Malerei in neuem Licht, 1986: t.p. (Hendrick ter Brugghen) p. 65 (Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen, Den Haag (?) 1588-1629 Utrecht)

2.      Grote Winkler Prins, 1974: v. 18, p. 348 (Terbrugghen, Hendrik, 1588 (?)-Nov. 9, 1629)

3.      E.N.S.I.E.: v. 10, p. 1160 (Terbrugghen, Hendrik (1587/1588-1629), Ned. schilder)

Rest assured that whenever the prefix (van, ter, van der etc.) is written separately for a Dutch name the artist is alphabetized by the form following the prefix and there is a reference from one form to the other--except for Van Dyck. Because he died in London the Library of Congress consulted English language sources and decided he was ‘Van Dyck, Anthony’ not ‘Dyck, Anthonie van’ just the way they would treat the American name ‘Van Buren, Martin.’

These are some of the compromises we have to live with because we are part of a national network of libraries.”

Walter’s response showed what a good teacher he was: he always had something useful and interesting to add.

“Actually it's worse overseas. Today Flemish names use the prefix and when compound run it together, so that my colleague in Brussels is (in a bibliography) Vander Auwera, Joost, not Auwera, Joost van der. This is perhaps one of the diseases they caught from the Spanish. Ter, by the way, is a contraction of ‘te der,’ meaning ‘at the.’ Henrick ter Brugghen = Henry at the Bridges.”

We will miss him.

Daniel

********************************

Daniel Starr

Associate Chief Librarian

Thomas J. Watson Library

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

---------------------------

Watsonline is the online catalog of the Met. Sometimes we wish that our authority records interacted seamlessly with our bibliographic records, that is, gave a combined result of "ter brugghen" and "terbrugghen." On the other hand, some argue that it is better to let the catalog user know what is happening, as here you are notified that "Ter Brugghen" will be found under "Terbrugghen."

the kitchen work triangle

Today's indexing included an article by Heidi Overhill in Design issues entitled "Apple pie proxemics: Edward T. Hall in the kitchen work triangle" (spring 2014 issue). Not only did I get to meet Mr Hall as the developer of the concept of proxemics (or "spatial behavior" as the AAT has it), I got to meet home economist Christine Frederick who lived from 1883 to 1970. The Wikipedia article on Frederick describes her as an American home economist and proponent of Taylorism as applied to the domestic sphere. Her NACO heading included only her birth date so I set upon revising the record to include her death date and other updating to RDA. As I was doing that, I was thinking about my grandmother who was also a home economist. They were near contemporaries and I wonder if they ever met.

I am now living in the house with the kitchen where she spent many an hour, throughout her life. The kitchen is not (now) particularly efficient, doesn't follow the work triangle theory, but then it's also not very large. I wonder if Gram was frustrated by the layout, and I am quite sure she would have been even more horrified by an enormous expenditure on renovation.

I have no idea how many times I was in the kitchen as a child, watching Gram wash the dishes with Great Aunt Dora sitting on the stool drying them. Oh, I probably helped with the dishes as a kid when we visited Gram but it was the two sisters in their regular positions that I vividly remember.

houses in art

It's Sunday afternoon at the Scholes Library of Ceramics. The issues of Kunstforum International are proving to be an interesting trove of information as well as NACO records, new and updated. Issues 182 and 184 focus on houses in art: as object, as subject, as inspiration, as shelter, as part of social practice.

This work entitled Soap City (II) by Werner Alt in 2001 caught my fancy. A medieval town made out of soap. The red in the illustration in Kunstforum is much more saturated and orange and the houses are more yellow, looking more cheese-like. Perhaps the red houses belong to the 1%. Watch that you don't slip into the drain during an evening walk, one of the delights of visiting a medieval town center. This image is from the kulturatlas-oberfranken website.

And there was also an article in issue 184 on provisional architecture by Jürgen Rapp that is subtitled "Kioske, Baracken und Container."

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.

Donald Charles Seibert, 1929-2010

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.

Francis Alÿs in NYC

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 the Tate page for the exhibition (no longer on the web). Link for the press release on the Tate exhibition:

https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/francis-alys-story-deception

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.

Poor Jack Wrangler

Jack Wrangler's obituary was in last Thursday's New York Times. He was a gay porn icon when I was first becoming aware of the genre. He met Margaret Whiting and started living with her in 1977 and married her in 1994. Jeffrey Schwarz, a close friend and producer of the documentary "Wrangler: anatomy of an icon," described the marriage as not being about sexual orientation but about mutual affection and respect. Wrangler, born John Robert Stillman, didn't acted in porn after the early 1980s. He wrote cabaret shows, with Whiting performing, and did other producing gigs. As I was reading along and feeling sympathy for the poor fellow who didn't escape his porn reputation, I got to the part about his being born just three weeks after I was. Life is fleeting so get on with it.

When I went to check his LC/NAF record to see if the death date was recorded, I found that the updater had used the L.A. Times and had only mentioned the porn part of his career. Poor Jack Wrangler, still no credit for his later producing work. But Bette Davis might counsel that any reputation is better than none.

670 __ |a Los Angeles times WWW site, Apr. 8, 2009 |b (in obituary dated Apr. 9, 2009: Jack Wrangler; b. John Stillman in Beverly Hills; d. Tueday [Apr. 7, 2009], New York City, at 62; 1970s-era porn star)

Vasari's form not used

Can I tell you how disappointed I am that the heading for Benozzo Gozzoli is not "Gozzoli, Benozzo" but "Benozzo, di Lese"? And it's all because the surname didn't appear in conjunction with the forename until Vasari. Or so says the LC/NACO authority record, based on the Encic. ital.

010 __ |a n 50059011
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |d OCoLC
100 0_ |a Benozzo, |c di Lese, |d 1420-1497
670 __ |a Encic. ital. |b (Benozzo di Lese (detto Benozzo Gozzoli); nowhere (neither in documents, epigraphs, nor signatures of the artist on paintings) does the surname Gozzoli appear with the forename Benozzo; it is used for the first time in the Vite of Vasari)
[not all fields included]

The Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze catalog uses "Benozzo Gozzoli" as the heading.

NACO stop frustrated so it's off to the galleries

Sam Duncan of the Amon Carter asked me about the Park Place Gallery which is the theme of a recent show at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. I don't think I'd heard of it but it is where John Gibson and Paula Cooper started before they opened their own eponymous galleries in Soho and later Chelsea. Park Place Gallery started out on Park Place near the City Hall of NYC. According to BobCat (the opac that NYU shares with several other schools), the catalog was supposed to be on the shelf at Gimbel Library at Parsons the New School for Design. I left home before 11 and found that Gimbel doesn't open until noon on Saturdays.

Off to the galleries: Daneyal Mahmood Gallery's "Darkrooms -- homme made" was the only Chelsea gallery on the list for this weekend. I got to Tenth Avenue at 20th Street so decided to stop in at Jack Shainman Gallery. They've got a show of soundsuits and other sculptures by Nick Cave. I had seen a show of the soundsuits a couple years ago. The first gallery as you enter was a parade of sculptures with lawn jockeys holding up other objects on bent metal: model ships, braided rug as emblem, porcelain birds in a tree, flowers wreathed about in a tree, porcelain birds in a bush (with seated jockey). One of the jockeys was painted whiteface. The metal frames are more visible than the frames of the soundsuits but evoke them. There were also a couple wallpieces with Aunt Jemimas and a male counterpart: one on a box with the caption "Holy, holy, holy" and the other a cross. Another one of the wallpieces was a bootblack with the caption "Boo!" The back gallery had about a dozen soundsuits. I really like the way that Cave plays with humor, race, gender stereotypes. He had a show up in Alfred at the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art last fall but I missed it. I think it was on during one of my visits but I just didn't get up to the museum. The fellow at Shainman said that the Alfred show was five soundsuits.

Next stop was the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at Gagosian on 21st Street. The first room was six of the subtle sea images on one wall of the white and light room. There were guides to help you into the second room which was as dark as the first was light. Again, six images but the inner gallery was only illuminated by the spotlights on the images. The entrances were a U-turn light trap and after you'd been in the inner sanctum for a while, your eyes adjusted. On one hand, the subtlety is powerful and turns one meditative; on the other, it was perhaps insignificant. From the busyness of the Cave to the minimal Sugimoto, quite a jump.

On to Paula Cooper with "Every revolution is a roll of the dice," curated by Bob Nickas. I was really drawn by the title but the show didn't do much for me. I did like the Louise Lawler wall piece: Once there was a little boy and everything turned out alright. THE END.

On the way from 21st up to 25th for Mahmood, I stopped at Printed Matter and found some things I really liked but resisted. I will have to go back to work full time if I don't get my book buying under control. Near the cash register was Fifteen pornography companies by Louisa Van Leer, done Ed Ruscha style (credited thereto). Really fine and only $16. I tagged it "wannaread" in my del.icio.us tags though it's really more "wannabuy." Back in the alphabetical section was S(h)elf portrait by Leandro Katz. I tagged that "books_as_art" and "artists_book." And then in the back room was a lovely little catalog from the Casey Kaplan Gallery entitled Not so subtle subtitle. More play on library words, and the show started on my birthday last year. Gosh, sometimes I wish I DID have collection-development responsibilities for a library. I could be the one they pick on for overspending his budget.

OK, now the 511 West 25th Street building, home of several favorite galleries. I checked the posters on the outside of the building and figured I might as well just take the elevator to the top and walk down.


"A winter's bounty" at Alan Klotz Gallery included this wonderful Brett Weston "White Sands, New Mexico" from 1946 (my birth year, so more birthday stuff). I love the way the landscape and sky are ambiguous and reflective of each other.

Deborah Bell is on the same floor and she was showing "Figure studies." As I circled the room, I happened on the woman dressed as Queen Victoria. I knew I'd seen it but couldn't think who the photographer was. Peter Hujar. Further along was a piece and my mind said "John O'Reilly" but it was by a Dutch photographer named Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924-2009). Very nice, with two images of the artist naked. The second Fieret piece was of a woman's upper body and that reminded me that one may see things in art that weren't intended. The self-portrait set off my gaydar and looked like O'Reilly who is unabashedly homoerotic, mixing naked male bodies with bits of old masters and stage sets. At the Queer Caucus show in Atlanta, I bought a picture of a young man that looks a lot like David Wojnarowicz as a young man. The photographer of that picture was a woman. Now she was in the queer show but her queer aesthetics might not match mine.

I did stop at a few other galleries before getting to "Darkrooms -- homme made" curated by Avi Feldman at Daneyal Mahmood on the third floor. The first piece as you enter is a video monitor with films by Amir Fattal addressing issues of gay male sexuality. Pretty direct. No back room approach to the show here. Some of the pieces were pretty interesting but as often happens when galleryhopping, the one on the list isn't necessarily the lasting experience of the day. Nick Cave and the Brett Weston will probably stick with me. I did like the Dean Sameshima photos at Mahmood too though.

Leaving Chelsea, I went back to the Gimbel Library to check on the Reimagining spaces catalog. It wasn't on the shelf, it wasn't on the new book truck, it wasn't on the overflow and shelving shelves. I looked at the staff display of the record and it was handled by a Bobst staff member on January 29th so I suspect it's still in processing rather than on the shelf. I'll just have to go back to Gimbel in a few days and read some more magazines and see if the catalog has appeared. No problem, I've got time.

"Things Fall Apart" so put 'em back together

Julie mentioned a panel discussion at Winkleman Gallery with Paul Chan and members of The Front this afternoon. While I regret she didn't make it, it was really compelling and uplifting. Paul Chan developed a production of "Waiting for Godot" in cooperation with Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time. It was based on his reaction to having been in New Orleans in the fall of 2006 to give an artist's lecture at Tulane. He felt that the landscape of New Orleans was much like the backdrop to every production of "Godot" that he'd seen. When Anne Pasternak of Creative Time approached him about doing a project, he suggested "Godot." Her initial reaction was negative but she soon came back with approval. Part of his agreement was that he could teach while he was in New Orleans, and that his courses had to be cross-listed in all of the colleges. He approached the schools and asked them what they wanted him to teach. He taught two one-evening-a-week seminars: contemporary art at the University of New Orleans and a practicum at Xavier which only had a BFA program and students needed to know about putting together a portfolio for MFA programs.

Out of the courses grew a core of people who became The Front, a collective of fourteen artists. Two of the members who are married were able to buy a building and the group renovated the space. Each of the artists can show their own work but also has accepted responsibility for curating shows of other artists. There is a lot of excitement in the visual arts community currently because of the first Prospect biennial, put together by Dan Cameron. An NYU colleague -- Lucinda Covert-Vail -- was down in New Orleans in December and said it was amazing. The works were interesting but, even more, the spread of the art around the city was very exciting. The two women from The Front -- Rachel Jones and Natalie Sciortino -- also talked about the excitement of the art, the venues, the people. They felt that this was working to convince the general public in New Orleans that the visual arts could be a draw. Music, particularly jazz, has long been a draw in New Orleans and it was heartening to think that the visual arts could join the bandwagon in such a thrilling way.

Natalie and Rachel also talked about the spirit in The Front and in other collectives. An arts corridor is growing up on St Claude Avenue. There is much of politics and activism in the artist community. They, with Paul Chan, clearly indicated that good things can happen even if you don't have a lot of financial resources. When Paul mentioned organizing without resources, I had to think of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. And just a moment later, curator and panel moderator Joy Garnett mentioned that The Front's web presence was strong. And as I looked at the show "Things Fall Apart" in the gallery, someone in the office said they didn't know how many would come: "you know how these Facebook things are, people say they'll come and they don't." Back to Shirky and the power/chaos of social computing.

"Things Fall Apart" included a wall with works by the artists at The Front and Paul Chan. There were other interesting works including a video by Renata Poljak about Serbia and Croatia, and love and reality. It was pretty interesting and I liked the way it ended: was that a romance as we meandered in Serbia and Croatia, I don't remember, we can begin again.

I went to several other shows before and after the panel, and must admit that I stopped at Printed Matter to find the Henrik Olesen book entitled What is authority? You knew I'd have to buy that one. It's interesting, not quite as groovy as his new Some faggy gestures but then I haven't studied it yet to see if it's compliant with RDA and NACO guidelines.

The vintage photographs by Karlheinz Weinberger at Anna Kustera were pretty interesting but much like the book illustrations I'd seen. The Dirk Stewen collage/reliefs at Tanya Bonakdar are wonderful, mixes of books and photos and dowels. There's a Yuko Murata piece at Casey Kaplan that is really beautiful: just a circle and three horizontal rectangles on a dark background, suggesting a sunset or sunrise. Not big like a Rothko but very evocative. Michael Waugh's drawings of dogs in "The more I see of men" uses the words of presidential inauguration speeches in the lines of the drawing. A mix of Westminster Kennel Show and Obama inauguration, according to the press release. At Trìa, there was a show called "Malescapes" so I went in because I had to see what made a 'scape male. Not sure I know the answer but there was a beautiful encaustic painting by Frank Olt. Last stop was Aperture where they had an exhibit of photos by Luigi Ghirri -- "It's beautiful here, isn't it?" Duh, they were mostly of Italy so of course it was beautiful. There were views of places like the Farnese theater in Parma where I've been and can still remember the smell of old wood. The theater is rather like Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. Must get to Italy!

Gómez Gómez Gómez took a trip to Rom(e)

You may have read the "Gómez, Gómez Gómez" post from a few days ago. If you're not a NACO contributor, you might not care but Mary Jane Cuneo passed on a 670 from the record for "Rome" (the empire, not the city):

670 __ |a Yavetz, Z. Meridot ʻavadim be-Romi, c1983: |b t.p. (Romi) p. 319 (Rome [in rom.])

Gómez, Gómez Gómez

At NYU, we love the authority record generator in OCLC, just like we loved the RLIN generator. It is such a fine start on building the authority record. Like all algorithms, it only works when the heading follows expectable patterns. The heading I wanted to generate an authority record for was "Gómez, Juan Vicente (Gómez Gómez)" and the generator helpfully gave me a 400:

Gómez, Gómez Gómez
Yep, it's right, according to the algorithm: turn the $q into forenames. Nope, I didn't hit save right away.