Ghent to Brussels to Ghent to Brussels to Amsterdam to Brussels, and lovin' it

When I left the U.S., my hotel reservation for the whole time I'm in Belgium was for the Hotel Erasmus in Ghent but I decided it made sense to move my base to Brussels for the last few nights so I'd be closer to the airport for the 10 am departure on Saturday. And then last Sunday I heard from Geurt, my friend from Amsterdam, that he couldn't make it to Belgium but we could get together in Amsterdam. So it's been a bit of a week. Tuesday, I took the train from Ghent to Brussels for the day and spent most of it at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. More Flemish primitives: The Judgment of Emperor Otto by Dirk Bouts, Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch, Saint Sebastian by Hans Memling, among those that particularly grabbed me. For the Italophiles in the crowd, I saw another trio of Italian-speakers: man with presumed parents, and then I saw the same fellow I'd seen in Antwerp answering his mother's incessant "questo? questo?" The museum is pretty comprehensive in the painting universe with some fine Bruegels and Rubens. I didn't realize that the Death of Marat by J-L David was in Brussels so it was delightful to find that around the corner as I entered a French gallery.

The Royal Museums has just opened a section they call the Fin-de-Siecle Museum which has works from the 1860s into the 20th century with quite a bit of Ensor. I was especially taken by Hugo van der Goes in the Red Cloister by Emile Wauters:

Hugo van der Goes has been a favorite artist for many years (since Nancy and I teased in grad school about the unknown Netherlandish painter Hermione van der Goes to whom we attributed many works). I hadn't studied his biography however and learned during this trip that he ended his life in a monastery after his melancholy turned to madness. I also discovered that the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch is planning a big Hieronymus Bosch exhibition in 2016 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death.

Wednesday I went to the city museum in Ghent (Stadsmuseum Gent or STA.M) and wished that I'd done it early on. The displays start with a model of the city today and the floor in that room is a satellite photograph. Lots of interesting historical things and manuscripts and archives. Toward the end of the circuit, there were some models of 1970s plans for urban development. I'm glad those megastructures weren't built just outside the historic center of town. The art center at Sint-Pietersabdij had an interesting show of Turkish calligraphy and there was a sign for the show on Vivian Maier (this year's photography sensation) that had just closed. And then it was off to get my stuff and take the train to Brussels to meet the fellow whose apartment I'm staying in via misterbnb. Great price, central location.

Yesterday (Thursday), I took the Thalys fast train from Brussels to Amsterdam to spend the day with Geurt. What a fine day. We walked from Central Station over to the Museum Het Schip, a museum devoted to the Amsterdam School of expressionist architecture in the early 20th century. The museum is centered in the Eigen Haard block of apartments built by a workers' housing association. We got to tour one of the apartments and look up into the tower which is inspirational rather than functional (no problem).

 

The brick work is magnificent. This neighborhood was being developed by various groups in the 'teens and into the 'twenties and this picture is taken from the front of apartments built at the same time by a Protestant housing organization in a traditional style. Behind me is a complex built by a Philosophical group (said the guide, did he mean Theosophical?) with a bit more expressionism in its details but overall quite traditional.

After a bit of lunch, Geurt and I went to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam where Geurt treated me to a tour of the office spaces in the new wing (mostly to drop off our bags) and then a tour of the galleries and the Marlene Dumas exhibition. Geurt has worked at the Stedelijk for 32 years so it was great to see the works and spaces with him. And then it was off for a beer at a canal-side cafe and then to the Central Station to return to Brussels. It was raining lightly when I got back, the first time the whole trip. The weather has been mostly glorious and bright with temperatures in the 70s and not even chilly overnight.

missing NYC

Missing NYC. Yesterday the New York Times had reviews of a show of work by Elaine Reichek at the Jewish Museum and work by Eleanor Antin at Columbia University. Reichel's needlepoint work about being Jewish looks compelling. "If you think you can be a little bit Jewish, you think you can be a little bit pregnant." Antin's work on identity has been around since the 1970s and has lost none of its power. Social practice from way back.

I was reading the paper as I waited for the Kyle Abraham and Abraham.in.Motion performance of Pavement to begin. It was incredible, reminded me of many visits to the Joyce, Danspace, BAM, Dance Theater Workshop, Duke, etc. etc. etc., in the quality of production and presentation.

This picture is from the company website and gives some idea of the energy. But it wasn't only the hard energy seen here; the dancers were also capable of loveliness and softness. A fine mix of modern, balletic, jazz, and street, and, gosh, just movement. Some text, mostly recorded. Oh, it was inside at Alfred with projections on the basketball backboard, and a single orange line marking the box of the in-or-out floor space.

One of the most powerful scenes was with Abraham as a street guy saying "help me" and the rest pretty much ignoring him, or worse. The lights went way down and the red revolving lights of a cop car came from off stage right. The street guy kept saying "help me" as a duet was happening in the near darkness. It was very compelling. I saw the darkness as protection from the overwhelming sadness of the social interaction (or non-interaction). In the talk back after the performance, Abraham said he thought it was "abstract" but I found it perhaps the most literal part of the narrative on fallen down neighborhoods.

You will note that the company includes both black and white dancers. Abraham himself is black. Some parts of the dance played very much off race and the race of the dancer mattered. Other parts were very mixed or silent on race. The term "post black" came to mind but I decided it was more like "race optional" (parallel to the clothing optionality of naturists). Besides, "post" anything is too easy, too ubiquitous.

I was sitting next to Laurel Jay Carpenter so of course we had to talk about performance and New York City. She just got back from sabbatical, some of which was spent in the City. She lived in the City for a decade or so, mostly before I lived there from 1995-2009. I first saw her when she did the Red Woman work in Tompkins Square in the early-mid aughts. I told her I wished I could find someone who had an extra room in their house/apartment or a small live/work space so that I could impulsively take off for a few days in NYC and not worry about imposing on someone or selling off my stock to stay in a hotel. She said "everybody wants that." Sigh. We know it's really not EVERYbody but there are a lot of us in Alfred that are very fond of the opportunities and street life of New York City.

All of this flowed through after Thursday night's Village Planning Board meeting with the ritual discussion of the drunkenness and litter and noise of Alfred nights. NYC is undoubtedly cacophonous but it's a constant, exuberant, gritty noise, not to everyone's taste or anyone's constant desire. The number of Styrofoam boxes along with cans and other litter on the streets of Alfred on Saturday or Sunday morning is devastatingly depressing for me. I can't believe that so much crappy post-drinking food can be consumed and that so many consumers of said stuff can be so sloppy in disposing of the containers.

Added to this cacophony of thoughts was the review on Thursday entitled "A small-town girl who wants out": the Hill Town Plays, a cycle of five plays by Lucy Thurber, produced concurrently by Rattlestick Plyawrights Theater in Greenwich Village theaters, set in western Massachusetts. Charles Isherwood, reviewer, has some pithy things to say about the "soul-deadening anomie" and "grim determinism" that infects the characters and setting.

So I've been missing the City after several months of seeing art in various upstate and other locations as I traveled around. The Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George show at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, for example, was really fine. So I thought I wasn't minding too much that I haven't been to the City since February but perhaps that's been part of the soul-deadening anomie that's been hanging over me.

contemplative

Sunday morning. The Times and pancakes. Thinking about Woodstock, mostly because of Jan Pareles's memoir of that magic "moment of muddy grace." I didn't go to the festival though my sister and her husband got close. They were a couple of the people that parked miles away but didn't keep going when it was clear that the mud and craziness were pretty overwhelming.

The Woodstock article continued on page 22 and the continuation was face-to-face with a profile of Milton Rogovin, optometrist turned photographer after his business was decimated for not testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. An interesting conjunction of peace, love, and justice. The words trip so easily out of the brain, and trip too on the thoughts of how the world could be better.

This weekend has been New York Green Fest 2009 here in Alfred. I didn't go, partly because the registration was $85 (not that I haven't spent $85 less wisely) and there seemed to be no session registration fee. My brother Doug, who has been involved with the planning, said I probably could just attend (aka sneak in). But I decided to do my own little green fest and picked up a bunch of cans, bottles, and trash from one of the sites on Pine Hill where people clearly go for partying. Most of the cans and bottles had been squished and broken so the can/bottle refunding opportunity was slight. But then I wasn't doing it for the money.

Maybe it's the misty air that's bringing on the contemplation too. No problem. I like thinking and musing.

opie and douglas, tooker and more

It was quite a weekend for art viewing. Friday found me going up to the Guggenheim for the Catherine Opie retrospective, and then walking up to the Schomburg Center on Malcolm X Boulevard at 135th. I've seen a decent amount of Opie's photographs in real life and in reproduction but the images from the "Freeway" series were the most surprising. I guess I've never seen one live because the size really surprised me. They're only about 2 x 7 inches, and they seem even more "vintage" in real life. In Aaron Krach's review in The advocate (Dec. 2, 2008), he describes them as melancholy and strong as her self-portraits. Melancholy, that wonderful emotion.

As I walked North, I stopped at the National Academy for the George Tooker and Ralph A. Blakelock shows. There is a beautiful Tooker of "The groping hand." Like a detail of a Flemish painting, with an abstract background. Blakelock's life trajectory is interesting as he doesn't do a classic art historical move to or away from abstraction, perhaps it was the last decades of his life when he had a series of breakdowns. The "Solos: Tulou: affordable housing for China" at the Cooper-Hewitt included a wonderful model of a circular building with an almost full-size construction of an apartment. Efficient but even small by NYC standards.

The reason for going up to the Schomburg was the Aaron Douglas show. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance crowd. There is a wonderful portrait of Zora Neale Hurston by Douglas and a fine photographic portrait of Douglas by Carl Van Vechten.

Saturday was galleryhopping in West Chelsea after seeing "Milk." In addition to finding Nina Katchadourian's "The Marfa Jingles" at Sara Meltzer Gallery, I stopped in at Mary Ryan Gallery to find a small gallery with linoblock prints by British modernists. The prints are wonderfully inspired by the same modernism that the Italian futurists found in contemporary culture. These British prints, particularly those by Sybil Andrews, display an angular vitality that is very compelling. There's also a big show at the Met of these British modernists. The Mary Ryan selection is a much better meal, size-wise.

At Claire Oliver Fine Art, I was strongly struck by the two paintings by Vitus Shell, rather like Kehinde Wiley but representing black women in domestic settings rather than Wiley's athletes.

Also at Sara Meltzer was a show by Francesca Gabbiani (love the name). The show is entitled "Be my mirror" and my favorites were the line drawings, fancy frames with blank centers, rather like elaborate bookplates.

Today (Sunday), I decided to go up to the Met to see the British modernists and the "Art and love in Renaissance Italy" show. I've already mentioned that the smaller diet of the British printmakers at Mary Ryan Gallery was more satisfying. The Italian show was quite disappointing. I decided the problem was that the works were selected for subject matter rather than aesthetics. Lots of them were just not very interesting. That isn't to say that I didn't find some interesting works. There were a couple birthing trays with naked boys romping on the verso. And the Alessandro Allori portrait has a wonderful "Michelangelo's 'The dream of modern life'" on the verso. It was a verso show for me, I guess. Draw any conclusions you wish.

Now, the Philippe de Montebello show was wonderful. It includes lots and lots of works which came into the Met's collections over his tenure as director (the last three decades). Lots of good friends, including the Thomas Anshutz lady in red dress, an incredibly beautiful 12th-century Spanish ivory scepter shaft segment. There were also many wonderful juxtapositions. One of my favorites was the Flemish boxwood Virgin and Child in a case with a pre-Columbian gold figurine. As I was admiring the contrast, a couple came up and decided the contrast was just too extreme. I thought of my sister Roberta, the seamstress, while looking at the quilt with cubes next to the Jasper Johns flag. And there was an incredible Agostino Carracci red-chalk drawing of a woman and the fabulous Parmigianino "Mercury." Just one more piece: the Fenton landscape photograph, just like a Rembrandt, though the label pointed to other precedents, photographic ones.

Gauguin's portfolio from Pont-Aven reminded me that I have to check in with Caroline Boyle-Turner to arrange a visit to her school in Pont-Aven now that I will have more time for traveling.

Sybil Andrews, Skaters, 1953, Linocut, 8 x 15 inches, edition of 60 (from Mary Ryan Gallery website)

melancholia

Since reading Lincoln's melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk this summer, my brother and I have been discussing melancholia and its role in contemplation and thought. Melancholy (melanchol*) and utopia are both words that jump out of writings and art work titles for me. And fill my mental commonplace book. It happened again last week when I was reading a backlogged issue of The New York times (Dec. 19). The article was about rappers in Marseille (yes, the one in France). One of them -- Soprano (M'Roumbaba Saïd) -- has a track called "Melancholic anonymous" about which he said "I can't help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy in my lyrics. I can laugh at my sadness. It helps."

greenery will triumph

Maybe my other new year's resolution will be to put something here more often. In the meantime a couple paragraphs from the "March" chapter of Truck by Michael Perry of Population: 485 fame:

The snow will fall again before the frost is out, but we are gaining momentum for that time of year when everything reappears. The ugly stuff first, as it happens: neglected lawnmowers, weed-wrapped tires, waterlogged copies of the Early Bird Shopper. But most days there is a flavor to the air that suggests greenery will triumph.

Last thing before I turn off the lights and head for bed, I inspect the sprouting tray. Each cell cradles a cube of peat, and at the center of each cube is a seed, quietly pursuing the sun. Thomas Moore said [in Lalla Rookh] tears are a luxury only to the happy. When I am forced to cast my eyes beyond my own navel, I realize that a dip in sweet melancholy is every bit as indulgent as a bubble bath. Be joyful, says Wendell Berry, though you have considered all the facts.

melancholy in the work of bosch

Just reading through email, I came across the notice for the grad student art history symposium sponsored by IFA and the Frick. One of the papers is "The Delusion of Delight: Melancholy in the Work of Bosch" by Anna Ratner, Columbia University. Both "melancholy" and "Bosch" trigger my interest. I'll have to watch for her dissertation or articles.

It's been a while since I've put anything here. My brother called a bit ago to say there's a northeaster coming this way. If I don't go to Alfred this weekend, it will be June before I could easily get there again so we'll face the weather. The bus is usually pretty stalwart.

Bill Connor visited last weekend and we went to the Met to see the Barcelona and Venice shows. The Venice and Islam show was interesting and there were some nice works; more Islam in Venice than otherwise. The Barcelona show was fantabulous! Lots of architecture, including a wonderful model of the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris 1937 expo. Robert and Andrew had both talked to me about Spanish Civil War stuff in the past week, partly the authority work for the various Spanish armies of the mid-late 1930s. So I was ready to be intrigued. And "Guernica" was in the pavilion, as well as big Miro stuff. The Barcelona show was a nice mix of painting, architecture, dec arts, objects (as Roberto said, it's strange that the Met has multiple big shows at the moment that are more material culture than fine arts).

Bill and I also went to his uncle's opening at Andre Zarre Gallery on West 20th where we ran into Carol and Bob Krinsky. Carol had been a camp counselor with Adele who is now Uncle Russell's wife. Small world. Bill spent the afternoon gallery hopping while I saw the Robert Moses show at Columbia with Francie, Liza and John, and then went for pizza at V&T on Amsterdam. The Moses show was fun with such avid New Yorkers who know intimately one or more of the neighborhoods where projects were proposed and/or built (Washington Square and Pratt, principally).

melancholia continues and disappears

Yesterday I added an entry here with the subject line "melancholia continues" which included some text from Strauss's "Four last songs" which I had heard sung at Carnegie Hall by Karita Mattila the night before. The words:

O broad, contented peace!
So deep in the sunset glow,
How exhausted we are with our wanderings --
can this then be death?

(copied from http://jsundram.freeshell.org/ProgramNotes/Strauss_Leider.html)

When I copied/pasted the words yesterday, there was some "bad" character that caused the posting to not take on the first saving. I then retyped the text and it seemed to take. I happened to look today and it wasn't included so I republished the blog and, alas, the whole entry disappeared. Sigh. The miracles of the e-environment.

Ever onward ..... whatever, exactly.

melancholia

I was having a conversation with someone recently about melancholy and we had both had experiences close to that time that caused reflection on the beauty and value of melancholy. My intrigue with melancholy probably goes back to first seeing Dürer's "Anatomy of melancholy." Now, this morning I get to catalog Grey hope: the persistence of melancholy (Atopia Projects, 2006) for Parsons. A wonderful little book, but of course tinged with sadness or aloneness. (Avvaiyar has always given me more credit than is due for nascent hermitness.)

The Atopia Project website says:
"Atopia Projects is an arts organization that initiates curatorial and publishing projects. Co-founded and directed by Gavin Morrison (Scottish writer/curator, based in Provence, France) and Fraser Stables (Scottish Artist, based in Northampton, MA, USA), past projects include exhibitions, panel discussions, interventions, and multi-disciplinary publications investigating such ideas as placelessness [my emphasis] and physical versus psychological space. Atopia Projects is interested in generating projects that reorient the integrity, limitations, and potential of existing systems of cultural production."
http://www.atopiaprojects.org/
It intrigues me that there is no place or tangible address given on the Atopia website other than the bases of the founders.

... and, then, an hour later, I get a message from my brother with a sig-file quote from Mark Twain:

It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind. -- Mark Twain