Walden on the harbor

How would Thoreau have dealt with a grand view of New York harbor from his cottage?

A group of us art librarians (and a few hangers on) went on a tour of Governors Island today. The Hills opened this year and the southern end of the island is taking shape as a park looking out into the harbor and back at the skylines of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. The Hills are part of the landscape plan by West 8, a Dutch urban design and landscape architecture firm, who have also done proposals for helping NYC handle the rise of sea level.

Hiding in the Hills, well, not really hiding, is the Cabin by Rachel Whiteread. It's similar to some of her other ghost, inside-out, memorial projects. A conglomeration of bits and pieces from several buildings, including some corrugated metal bits.

So I'm thinking how different Thoreau's writings might have been if he had walked out of the front door of his cottage and looked out over the expansive view of New York harbor. Or maybe it's just that I went over to the NY Art Book Fair after our tour of Governors Island. There, I ran into a couple books by Elisabeth Tonnard which played with biographical re-creation. One was a collection of events from the lives of American Renaissance writers called Song of Myself and another was a collection of sentences on death and dying from different books printed on successive pages of a book, turning into a new narrative. The dealing with death reminded me of my current book -- Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope. It took the dean about 200 pages after his apoplexy to finally die. And when I was looking for a link to Elisabeth Tonnard's work, I mistakenly typed "elizabeth tunnard" into Google and got obituary notices for a person of that similar name.

After the tour and lunch, and before we returned to Manhattan on the ferry, we visited the "Michael Richards: Winged" show, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Richards had a studio in vacant space in the World Trade Center in September 2001 and was working all night on his upcoming show. He died in the morning's attack. A good friend of mine at NYU was a dear friend of his and that made his death especially poignant. His work dealt with the Tuskegee airmen, and airplanes and flight were recurring themes. Eerie and moving.

artists books and atriums

Back in the late 1990s, I bought a small artist's book at Printed Matter when it was still on Wooster Street. It was only a couple bucks and had no identifying text. The clerk said that the artist came in every once in a while, dropped off some copies of a book, didn't give his name, didn't ask for reimbursement, just left the books and left. Actually, it has no text at all; it is just drawings of geometric shapes looking like flags, floorplans, architectural details, or objects.

When I was at the Estudio Carlos Garaicoa in Havana a couple weeks ago, there was an artist's book that had a similar feel but rather larger in size and with less busy pages. It also had a title page and statement of authorship: Loidys Carnero.

I thought maybe I'd found my artist even though the geographic difference argued against it. I checked Carnero's webpage and he wasn't born until 1982 in Havana so not at all likely that he was dropping off books at Printed Matter as a teenager.

What I also discovered at Carnero's webpage were some pictures of his Visita Guiada (Guided Tour) project from 2012 in which he revisited the sites in a 2004 Stan Douglas photographic project which had appropriated the settings of a 1968 film "Memories of Underdevelopment" by Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Talk about layers of memory and revisiting. One of the images in the Visita is identified as the Presidio on the Isla de la Juventud.

(You can see a bigger version of the photo on the artist's webpage, this being the thumbnail from the webpage.) Those of you that followed me on the road trip in March will not be surprised that I was reminded of the West Baden Springs Hotel in southern Indiana.

For accommodations, I imagine the hotel beats the prison.

all things pencil

When I was at the Amon Carter, archivist Paula Stewart and I loved exchanging pencils from our travels. She had picked up the habit from the photography department where she worked before her years as archivist. My pencil-philia extends to sharpeners, erasers, pens, and other related objects. Even art ....

Vija Celmins

Pencil, 1966

(on view at Brooklyn Museum)

or cartoons ....

Hankin, in The New Yorker, May 27, 2014

And of course everything relates back to cataloging. When I was checking for the title of the Vija Celmins work which I saw at the Brooklyn Museum several years ago, I happened on an article that also included her Flying Fortress. Wouldn't you know that yesterday I submitted a SACO proposal for "Fighter planes in art" for the Erik van der Weijde book I was doing for MoMA.

commas and just one semi-colon

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

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

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

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

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