separated at birth: accidental Godfrey

https://www.tumblr.com/beatsmybongo/827002648669601792?source=share

DeWitt Godfrey at deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum, 2014

https://www.dewittgodfrey.com/

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)

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.

Harmony Hammond at the Whitney Biennial

A wonderful paragraph, for a variety of reasons, from the review of the 2024 Whitney Biennial in the New Yorker by Jackson Arn entitled "The Whitney Biennial's taste for flesh." Posted March 22, 2024, to appear in the April 1 print edition:

By a close margin, the four fabric assemblages of Harmony Hammond are the fleshiest things in this show. They use a variety of materials to suggest a whole menagerie of bodies, from pimply-shiny to aged and chalky. Colors are subdued for the most part, and strategically so: when a touch of red shrieks out of the dirty white field of "Chenille #11," it almost hurts. Hammond has suggested that flourishes like this were meant to evoke "sexual brutality against women," but take a few steps back and marvel at how this only deepens her work's mystery -- if the red is brutality, what are the string, the smeared white, the grommets? Interpretation is interwoven with the sheer, thingy strangeness of the object, and can't be ripped out. Art like this is built to last, I would guess. But if you prefer your political messaging neat, no chaser, you are welcome to walk to the other end of the sixth floor, go to the terrace, and spend some time with Kiyan Williams's big dirt sculpture of the White House sinking into the ground, complete with upside-down American flag. There's a label in case you can't figure out what it means.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/the-whitney-biennial-art-review

Some of the reasons:

• descriptive words, rich and evocative
• I was lucky enough to spend time with Harmony Hammond when we were both active in the Queer Caucus for Art, an affiliated society of the College Art Association (now rebranding itself as simply CAA).
• particular memory of drinks and conversation after a caucus business meeting in Philadelphia when the last remaining folks in the hotel lounge were several older lesbians and me, and then we walked each other back to our hotels. The younger folks had gone off dancing.
• memories of visits to various Whitney Biennials; this one has just opened and runs until August so there's a chance I might get to the City to see it
• I actually said the word "chenille" today when a friend asked us what color we thought her sweater was. I asked about the material. "Is it chenille?"
• the ending of the paragraph

Sonya Clark's truce flag

At last night's discussion group, the topic was Ukraine: when did the war begin? is "war" the term you'd use? why did it start? how much money has the U.S. spent in support of Ukraine in the last nine months? is that amount reasonable? organizations that funnel donations to the Ukrainian cause? to Ukrainians? would you send money? specific support for Ukrainian relief or to organizations that work in many situations, e.g., International Rescue Committee, Doctors Without Borders, American Friends Service Committee (or other service committees)? how has your opinion changed over the course of the year? can the U.N. or the international courts play a role in ending the Ukrainian conflict?

Most of the people in the discussion supported aid for Ukraine, including military aid. I mentioned in an email before the discussion (which was online rather than in-person) that I was torn by the whole thing. I'm an adamant pacifist but I couldn't explain what that meant in this context. I do believe strongly that war is generally (always?) a result of earlier war or conflict. How do you get to peace? Is it just utopian and totally unachievable? Quakers and Mennonites and others have been trying for centuries to achieve peace. Martin Luther King said that "true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

I'm in Washington at the moment and visited the "This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World" at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. Lots of powerful work but one work that seemed to me to address my dilemma about explaining pacifism. The wall text near Monumental by Sonya Clark read "What if this flag of truce was the flag we knew, instead of the Confederate battle flag?"

The large textile work is based on the piece of cloth flown at Appomattox Court House in 1865 to indicate the surrender of the Confederate army. The cloth is in the collection of the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian. This large version was made by Sonya Clark in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. It was shown in a 2019 exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. For more information on the project: https://americanart.si.edu/blog/sonya-clark-art

Conflicts and wars involve two or more parties. We need justice but, mostly, we just need to all be willing to say "no" to resolving our conflicts through violence. I am discouraged by the situation in Ukraine but I know that peace is impossible when military response is honored.

shock and awe

 

When I turned the page of the T magazine and encountered this advertisement, I was almost as stunned as first viewing the famous dildo picture of Lynda Benglis in Artforum, way back in the 1970s. Stopped in my very thoughts.

Caption: Lynda Benglis by Juergen Teller. loewe.com

art with/by/for your neighbors

Two summers ago, Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr and Cassandra Bull co-curated an exhibition in Alfred entitled "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" in which an artist and a community member developed a collaborative work which involved the eventual audience also collaborating. Sam Horowitz and I developed a piece that we called "Time Becomes Us" based on our preparatory conversations. Sam built a wood trough in which we placed layers of natural and artificial materials.

Our object was on display in Cohen Gallery at Alfred University along with the works by other collaborators. Folks were invited to add layers to the initial ones Sam and I had done. We provided a few buckets of clay along with rocks and other objects we found. Some rocks, asphalt chunks, and bricks were collected from the Canacadea Creek behind my house. The Cohen show was up for part of August into the school term. After the show, Sam removed the trough and fired the contents. He's done plenty of experimenting with firing rocks, particularly the shales from this region.

This summer, we took some of the fired detritus of the piece and put it back in the creek bed behind my house.

This afternoon, I came across a video from the American Academy in Rome about their recent Streetscapes series of installations. The works were done by Academy Fellows, partly in response to the pandemic and the desire to have works that could be viewed from the sidewalks around the Academy. The director talks in the video about making the Academy more visible to its neighbors. One of the works -- Novissimo Landscape Goes Silver by Francesca Berni -- looks rather like it might have been mounted in the garden of the Villa Aurelia (one of the buildings of the Academy). Bill and I were lucky enough to stay in the Villa Aurelia when I was in Rome to do NACO training at the Academy.

This is a screenshot from the video. The material looks like soft aluminum foil and makes a fine crinkly noise as it waves in the breeze. How nice it would be to be in Rome and see the installations.

separated at birth: Boullée and Bourgeois

 

  Étienne-Louis Boullée,

cenotaph for Isaac Newton after plans by Boullée,

model by Bernd Grimm, photo by Jan Kraege

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Bourgeois,

Untitled, 1991-2000, white marble

MASS MoCA, photo taken 13 July 2021

separated at birth: ladder to the river, ladder to the sky

 

"ladder to the river"

posted to Flickr by Alberta Mayo, copied here with permission

https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamuseum/50885119208

Martin Puryear

"Ladder for Booker T. Washington" (1996)

(installation at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2015)

separated at birth: firehose or is it art?

The Allentown Volunteer Fire Company

offered 700 feet of four-inch hose, free to a good home.

Tammy suggested it would make for a good stretch of walkway ...

but all I could think of was "Civil tapestry 5" (2012) by Theaster Gates.

 (now in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery)

https://www.albrightknox.org/artworks/20143a-b-civil-tapestry-5

I do not mean to make light of Gates's allusion in this work to the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and the use of fire hoses to spray protestors during demonstrations. The collection entry linked above gives a brief description of the history of the works that Gates did with decommissioned fire hoses.

without wax

Alex Wisniewski was a good and dear friend when I lived in Ithaca in the 1980s. He was an MFA student in painting at Cornell. His lover, Vic Cardell, was the assistant music librarian at Cornell. Alex did wonderful things in his art, graphically and literally, with words and statements. We would sit and talk for hours, drink gin (straight), and smoke cigarettes (unfiltered), listen to Philip Glass or David Byrne (loud).

The poster for his MFA show was graphically busy with letters and numbers along with the information about the time and space of the show. Alex was interested in etymology of the words too and somehow got it into his brain that "sincere" came from "without wax." The "sin" was without in Spanish; the "cere" was like the "cire" in French for wax. You know, as in "cire perdue" or lost-wax casting. "Without wax" started appearing in his work. He may have mentioned it to me but somehow it became a thing in our conversations. He gave me a copy of his show poster with the words "without wax" in pink acrylic across it, like graffiti.

There's a bar in Alfred called Alex's. It happens to be owned and managed by a fellow whose surname is Wisniewski. I have to work hard to come up with his first name since Wisniewski is so associated in my memory with Alex the artist. Alas, Alex is one of those gay men that were taken from us too soon by AIDS. So I cannot invite him to come visit and we'd go to Alex's and meet Stan Wisniewski.

Back to without wax. It came up again this week during a virtual artist talk with Roberto Lugo. He started his talk with a short video and I about fell off my chair when he said the docudrama was entitled "Without Wax." He credited the phrase to sculptors who sometimes would inscribe the two words on their work to indicate that they had fully sculpted it without going through the wax model phase. The video is very moving and personal but I was sure set up for an emotional ride when he announced the title. Lugo's catchphrase is "ghetto potter and activist" so that all resonated at this moment.

We've all had some disappointments because of Covid restrictions of various sorts. Rob Lugo was supposed to have spent this year as a Rome Fellow at the American Academy.

site specificity redux

Site specificity came around again today. I'd done a post about it at the beginning of the month. I was working today with Bronwen on whether we should propose "Performance scores" for LCGFT and came across a webpage entitled In Terms of Performance which is "a keywords anthology designed to provoke discovery across artistic disciplines." It includes three short essays on site, by Simon Dove, Tania El Khoury, and Joanna Haigood.

As I looked for help in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus on performance scores, I was somewhat distressed to find "scores (documents for music)" and "dance notation" in totally different hierarchies (documents and writing styles, respectively).

In Janine Antoni's short essay on choreography, she lists "Ikea pictographic instructions for assembling furniture" in her list of references.

site specificity

 Site specificity in art, as a concept, sometimes troubles me but especially when someone claims it to be absolute. All installations are at least somewhat specific to the place in which they are installed, and almost anything can be moved to another site or reproduced (reconstructed) in a new place. My interest was piqued when the Library of Congress added a subject heading for Site specific installations (Art) as distinct from and a narrower term than Installations (Art). If you click on the "troubles me," you'll be taken to a few earlier blog entries that dance around this matter. And now I've had a couple interesting experiences and readings with site specificity in the past couple weeks.

"Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven" was presented at Alfred University in mid September 2020 after being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring. It is "a play for all audiences about finding your place in the universe and intelligent life in your hometown." The original plan was for a traditional theater presentation. COVID health concerns moved it outside and, mirabile dictu, the setting became the parking area at the observatory on campus with a couple bits actually taking place inside the telescope buildings. The story was all about Annie Jump trying to come to terms with life beyond this planet and how to deal with her quirky astronomer father. The play was pretty heartening but seeing it under the starlit sky at the observatory was fantabulous indeed. What a site for this specific play.

I love my indexing work for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. One of my titles is Future Anterior and an issue I just did -- volume 15, number 2, winter 2018 -- was on the theme "Ex situ: on moving monuments." That is, ex situ as contrasted from in situ. The issue includes a description by Ryan Mendoza of his deconstruction of Rosa Parks's house in Detroit when it was threatened with demolition and its reconstruction in Berlin. When its time in Berlin was ending, there was talk of moving it back to the United States but it has now been reconstructed at the Palazzo Reale in Naples. What a trip this supposedly immovable structure has been taking, and what a time this is.

I'm not sure either of these experiences has convinced me that Site specific installations (Art) is a necessary subject heading but they certainly have given me plenty to think about. I think I'd prefer Site specificity in art in combination with Installations (Art) when the artist really talks about the specific site of an installation.

separated at birth: Hoffmann & Ruby

Josef Hoffmann

Musée d'Orsay

(from the Wikipedia page for Hoffmann)

Sterling Ruby

Stove 4, 2013

(in the retrospective exhibition at the

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston)

Josef Hoffmann did plenty of design objects that have a slender shape and pierced metal. I thought of Hoffmann when I saw the stove by Sterling Ruby last week in an exhibition at the ICA in Boston. Evocative attenuation. Hoffmann is quite widely exhibited but I particularly remember an exhibition that I saw with Christie at the Neue Galerie in New York City. One of the objects was my introduction to shagreen, an untanned rawhide now mostly produced from farmed Asian stingrays.

Sterling Ruby addresses climate change with his stoves which were featured in a 2015 exhibition at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature, held in conjunction with the Paris climate summit.

Indonesian scarf, caught in the wind

"Last week, she told me to dance like an Indonesian scarf caught in the wind. I don't even know that that looks like."

Stevie Budd, in "The Roast" episode, Season 5

Schitt's Creek (2015-2020)

Yinka Shonibare MBE

"Wind Sculpture (SG) I"

Central Park, New York City

(photo: Jason Wyche)

separated at birth: the illusion of space

David North

Doorway to Imagination (2020)

built by David North in his backyard (photo by David North)

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871023673/2-uncles-and-a-doorway-to-imagination-spread-love-on-social-media

Robert Gober

site-specific installation (1992)

Dia Chelsea, New York City

(photo by Bill Jacobson Studio, New York)

https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/robert-gober-exhibition

The title of the Gober piece reminds me of a subject cataloging conundrum from some years ago. LCSH had long had the term "Installations (Art)" for installation works, with the scope note:

• Here are entered works on a type of art form in which an entire exhibition space is transformed into a three-dimensional work of art by the arrangement of objects and materials within the space.

They added "Site-specific installations (Art)" in 2001 with the scope note:

• Here are entered works on art installations created for a specific site that use elements of the site as an integral part of the work of art and are intended to be displayed and viewed only at that site.

I tried to convince the subject specialists at LC that the new heading was not valuable. It might have literary warrant and one might take issue with either scope note. More important, trying to split "Site-specific installations" from plain old "Installations" seemed likely to lead a cataloger to use the words in the resource being cataloged rather than being able to make an objective determination concerning site specificity.

I looked at the LC record for the 1992 Dia exhibition at which the site-specific installation was shown. The record has "Installations (Art) -- United States -- Exhibitions" because it predates the establishment of "Site-specific installations (Art)." I am quite sure that I've seen the Gober work included in other exhibitions. There are internet pictures of the work at Glenstone.

Even though I didn't want the new subject heading, I was delighted to get a t-shirt that said "site-specific installation" at the Whitney.

Jasper Johns in the snow

It's not like I was hoping for another round of snow in the middle of April but that's what we got overnight. It was glorious in the early morning sun under a nearly cloudless sky. The sun was beginning to melt the snow on utility wires and the snow was falling to the ground in random patterns of stripes a few inches long. I was reminded of works by Jasper Johns from the 1970s and 1980s.

Jasper Johns: Usuyuki (1981)

(screenprint, Simca Print Artists)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

As it happens, "usuyuki" means "light snow" in Japanese.

"Random patterns" may be an oxymoron. Lest you think that yesterday's obsession with Schitt's Creek has passed, "random" is a favorite adjective of Alexis Rose. She uses it to describe just about anything. The Met's page on this print uses "cross-hatching motif" in describing the work.

what did we use to say?

I was looking at the January 2020 issue of Art in America which is a theme issue on "Generative art: the history and future of creative machines." I wasn't familiar with the term in art and started investigating. The "Generative art" article in Wikipedia is quite mature and traces the history of the term in the arts back to the 1960s. A keyword search in the Library of Congress catalog yielded about 100 hits and about a dozen of them seemed to be relevant, that is, the phrase "generative art" appeared in the title/subtitle. I looked at some of the records and several had the subject heading "Computer art" along with other headings.

The Wikipedia article starts "Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist." It's a little like social practice with a machine. You give it a situation and it proceeds as it can. Wikipedia also compared it with algorithmic art ("algorithmically determined computer generated work") but generative art doesn't need to be based in an algorithm, I guess.

It definitely seemed like it was time to work on a subject proposal for LCSH. I checked the Art & Architecture Thesaurus and they have a record for generative art. The scope note defines it as "electronic art that incorporates process in the creation of the work. The work itself is usually experienced through time and space, and may include sound, motion, animated graphics, sculptural elements, or any combination of these. Generative art has a performative aspect. For visual art that incorporates algorithms to produce static visual works, use 'algorithmic art.'"

And then the word "generative" started leaping into my life: right, left, and center. Not as part of "generative art" but, for example, to describe the origin of an idea. Sam and I talked around it after an artist talk a couple weeks ago. I was at the College Art conference last week and heard at least a half dozen speakers include the word generative in their paper. I was reading the January 24th New York Times after I got home and this sentence appeared in a review of a book entitled The longing for less by Kyle Chayka: "More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term." What word would have been used a while ago? Not generative, I don't think. Maybe I'm just noticing a word that's been out there all along. Whatever, it's good to have an expanding vocabulary.

Houdon Paul-Louis

I've enjoyed playing here with name mashing, e.g., Olafur di Paolo, Albrecht Gonzalez-Torres, Palermo Springs. Kehinde Wiley likes to do it too. This bronze portrait bust by Wiley is in the recently-opened "Jacques-Louis David meets Kehinde Wiley" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is focused on "Bonaparte crossing the Alps" by David and the Wiley painting "Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps" that it inspired. Also on display is this bronze portrait bust by Wiley entitled "Houdon Paul-Louis" after the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, a contemporary of David. The bust is in the Brooklyn Museum collection.

everyday wonders

Yesterday, somehow, I happened upon a citation for Everyday wonders: Luigi Caccia Dominioni and Milano: the Corso Italia complex, the catalog for a show at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. His name is most enjoyable to say and the buildings he designed are also pretty special. The catalog is particularly focused on the 1957-1961 mixed-use (commercial and residential) complex he designed on the Corso Italia in Milan. I stupidly missed it, or perhaps vaguely missed it, when I was walking up the Corso last year.

https://blog.urbanfile.org/2016/11/18/milano-luigi-caccia-dominioni/

I didn't realize I was supposed to be looking across the Corso as I walked up to find the 1951-1956 mixed-use (offices and apartments) building designed by Luigi Moretti, a block or so further into the center of town.

Note that the Torre Velasca is peeking over the upturned roofline at the left. My t-shirt with the Torre Velasca is just another everyday wonder. Its caption is "Milano loves design."

All of this was coursing through my brain (and heart) as I walked the loop this morning and "everyday" reminded me of Vija Celmins who did many sculptures of ordinary objects, natural and manmade, in her early career. She shifted to drawings later and there is a retrospective on at the Met Breuer now. Ends soon; I'll probably miss it ... but I didn't miss this pencil at a 2010 show at the Brooklyn Museum of women in pop art.

It's about three feet long. She also did some wonderful painted bronze "stones" which are displayed with the original natural objects. I enjoyed the review by Cigdem Asatekin of the Celmins show, entitled "Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory at The Met Breuer." I don't know: does "fixing the image in memory" play well with "everyday wonders"? Sure, as long as you leave space for tomorrow's wonders.