there is a god: slow down

"Plus, an artist introduces a device that slows a bike’s brakes in less-affordable neighborhoods, turning wealth inequality into physical sensation. That’s what art can do: Make ideas visceral." (from today's Hyperallergic email newsletter)

https://hyperallergic.com/artists-device-slows-down-citi-bikes-in-less-affordable-neighborhoods/ (copublished with Next City)

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.

typewriters

Today's post brought a postcard from Gina: the picture is captioned "James Baldwin's writing room" and includes a portrait sketch, a drawing of his house in southern France, and a drawing of his Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2200; the text from Gina asks "Do you own a typewriter? Or is it only us GenXers (and beyond) that feel the need to fiddle with type & ribbon?" The card is from Bibliophile postcards, published by Chronicle Books.

What? She had to ask? How did she not know that I was the last cataloger at Cornell to still have a manual typewriter at his desk? There were those increasingly rare moments when you needed to, what, type an envelope? Get some exercise? When I left Cornell in 1989, they gave me the typewriter as a going-away present. (All of the others had long before been abandoned and/or replaced by electric typewriters.) Foolish me, I didn't keep it. My typewriter looked something like this and I think it was a Smith Corona. All of us catalogers had had a card platen as well as the smooth one. The head of the typing section always kept us current on replacing our ribbons and cleaning our type. Rubber erasers work well to clean the keys.

Long before that, when I was getting ready to go off to college in the mid 1960s, I bought myself an Olivetti Lettera 32 with script type. I did like it for its sleek design but kind of outgrew the script type so I traded it with my grandmother for her old Royal portable.

I used that Royal portable in college, grad school, and library school, and after. It stayed in storage at the family home when I moved from my two-bedroom apartment in Texas to a studio apartment in New York City in the mid 1990s. Now I'm back in Alfred and actually have used the Royal now and again. I even bought it a new black-and-red ribbon this year. Now I probably should try to get the back space key repaired. It's kind of annoying to grab the platen and move it back when I need to overtype. I guess I could try to type perfectly, a skill the modern world doesn't require.

Typewriters, especially manual ones, are having a renaissance in art making. Lots of people have used them in artist books or zines. The "Won't you be my neighbor" show closed at the Cohen Gallery at Alfred University a couple weeks ago. Sam Horowitz and I collaborated on a piece called "Time becomes us: theses concerning materials and persons." I used the Royal portable to type the title page of the booklet that was part of our work.

The big question now is whatever happened to the Olivetti. I haven't seen it for years. I did go look in the attic over the back shed, without success. Another work in the Cohen show seems to have used a manual typewriter with script type. Perhaps they know where the Olivetti is.

maker, thinker, viewer

Julian Stair, potter, gave a compelling and thought-provoking talk on Tuesday night here at Alfred. He decided, early on, that he would call himself a potter rather than a ceramicist or ceramic artist. He did admit that he might have picked "maker" but it wasn't invented yet as a descriptive term for artist. The picture above is from his website. I liked that he considered something like this as one work with five pieces. He talked about the plinth as working like a frame for a painting.

But then he dismissed conceptual art because all art has a concept. I started gallery- and museum-hopping in the 1960s so conceptual art has long been part of my world. How could he? Back to the maker business, can a maker do conceptual art? Must a maker make some thing? Can a maker do social practice?

Those thoughts filled my head for quite a while after the talk and I was glad to run into Michelle Illuminato and Laurel Jay Carpenter at the Collegiate. They can probably say maker, conceptual art, performance art, and social practice in the same sentence and not have a problem. Thursdays are one of my work days at the ceramics library so I was upstairs, looking at the current art journals and noticed the title "Conceptual art and the acquaintance principle" in the summer 2015 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, by Louise Hanson. I hadn't heard of the acquaintance principle, the coining of which is credited to Richard Wollheim. "Judgments of aesthetic value, unlike judgments of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissable from one person to another." (from his Art and its objects, 1980, p. 233)

So it's back to objects. Things. Makers. Winckelmann said to Clérisseau: Write as much as possible in the presence of the actual object and return to it if you have second thoughts. (quoted in Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 62) Kind of the acquaintance principle, applied to you and yourself.

Just a couple days ago, a good friend was describing a wonderful moonrise she'd seen the night before. She went on and on. On one hand, you indeed had to be there; on the other, I have often been dumbstruck by a view of the moon and don't mind reliving such an experience while an acquaintance is carrying on about her moonrise view.

Caspar David Friedrich

Northern Sea in the Moonlight

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.

Wilfredo Prieto

I just hate it when I go to Havana and they're showing the stuff

I've already seen in Ghent.

Not really (of course). Still, seeing the Wilfredo Prieto show in Ghent while traveling alone last fall was a very different experience from seeing the Havana version of the show in the midst of the 12th Bienal de La Habana while traveling with about three dozen others. Not only that, I had to try to justify his work to Deb and Barbara. In revenge, they started calling me (Insta)Gram, not sure how they got there, perhaps it's the sonorous "rhyming" of Graham and Sherman?

conceptual art and subject headings

SACO can be fun and also frustrating. I submitted a proposal for a new subject heading "Grandparents in art" based on Gia Michael's My bitter immortal, her BFA final project in the School of Art and Design at Alfred. The colophon states that "All images for this publication were collected by the artist while traveling in Lebanon and Syria, December 2009 through February 2010." The Editorial Meeting rejected the proposal because "The work cataloged does not depict grandparents in art, but consists of pictures of the places through which the photographer's maternal grandparents passed." But it's the CONCEPT of grandparents and it's art.

But as I was having those thoughts, I remembered a discussion with Lynn El-Hoshy, LC subject specialist now retired, about "Cellphones in art." She was right in that case: it was "Cellphone calls in art," not "Cellphones in art." I was very glad we had the discussion because it clarified for me that, in LCSH, "in art" is literal. That is, the topic is shown in the art, it's pictures of or text about that topic as it appears in art.

But but conceptual art, naturally, doesn't come in literal packages. I still think it's grandparents in art but the LCSH editors indicated that it was just wrong. Sometimes they suggest that something is misdirected and can be revised and resubmitted. I guess I'll just have to publish a picture book of my grandparents. Then, I can resubmit the proposal and, meanwhile, I haven't changed it on the bibliographic record yet.

... rather arid semiotic scholasticism ...

"For [Gregory Battcock], Conceptual art had not yet devolved into the rather arid semiotic scholasticism so common today, which, whether descriptive or more ambitiously deconstructive, tends to focus either on Conceptualism's creation of new kinds of objects (albeit 'dematerialized' ones) or on its philosophical demonstration of the artwork's unstable discursive foundations." -- from "Transformer: David Joselit on Gregory Battcock" in Artforum international, v. 51, no. 1, September 2012, p. 508. I remember buying the Battcock anthologies on new tendencies in art, way back in the 1960s and early 1970s.