honey in the landscape

So here it is: Honey House at Bard College. The lovely cube building that I passed as I meandered from the Center for Curatorial Studies over toward the student union. There's something about the geometric balance of the building that really attracts me. If I could have one of these for my library, out on the back forty of my brother's property up on the hill, why I'd be in seventh heaven. A nice little hermitage, hopefully with a pond view someday. I'd like to know who designed it. When I googled likely words, I found a link to a slide database at Syracuse University but the link was dead so I'm checking with Barbara Opar to see if there's some ghost of the files that identified their architecture images.

Honey is one of those resonant words for me. My dad raised bees off and on, so there's memory there. My brother and I are both trying to figure out how you live close to a sibling.

All that culture at CCS drew to a close as Ann and I drove to the house she shares with Moira Kelly in Amenia, near the Connecticut border, about 40 minutes from Bard. The house is very comfortable and feels remote even though the grocery store is within walking distance. On Saturday, Moira and I went to her quarry and found some wonderful miniature landscapes in the treads of the abandoned steam shovel:

So I didn't make it to Storm King or New Paltz because we spent time at the quarry looking at miniature landscapes and libraries of rocks ... but we did stop at Wassaic Project. It's an abandoned seven-story flour mill that opened recently as an art space. The art on display could almost as easily have been shown in white-walled galleries and one longed for something that responded to the building. The renovators did a fine job filling in the gaps between the old lumber with new. And the progression through the building is fun; you don't feel like you're going up seven flights of stairs and there's plenty of mill equipment to look at as you meander.

the week at bard

I cannot believe my week at Bard College is drawing to a close. I've been doing backlog cataloging at the Center for Curatorial Studies where Ann Butler, formerly archivist in the Fales Library at NYU, is now the librarian. The CCS collection is wonderful: great books in the backlog, Millennium has proved pretty easy to get a handle on, the setting is lovely (mid Hudson River Valley), great burritos at the truck just a mile or so down the road. If this itinerant cataloging can keep going, I'll be delighted.

I also cannot believe that it's been almost a month since my last posting here. That "hommage à Martín" was written just before I left the city to take the last of my stuff up to Alfred. It's now been almost a month and it's been busy. After a few days in Alfred, my family went on a camping trip for the week of July 4th. We were in a couple cabins, a campsite, and RV at Fillmore Glen State Park in the eastern Finger Lakes. The gorge was beautiful, thick with greenery, loving the wet spring and summer we've had so far. After Saturday through Wednesday there, I left for Chicago and the annual conference of the American Library Association. I love Chicago and being at ALA is generally a treat. Daniel, Scott and I stayed at the Palmer House which has a wonderful old-style lobby. We were on the 13th floor and the halls were lined with celebrity photos.

Then back in Alfred for a few days before leaving for Bard. I have been pleasantly surprised by the comfort that I've found in Alfred even though the bulk of my stuff is in a storage unit a short drive away. Since the house is full of six generations of stuff, there wasn't a lot of room to move in wholesale. I have begun to get my study in order and to blend in some of my dishes and similar things. Fortunately, the upstairs kitchen isn't too full and I can move some of the things I don't need up there. Perhaps we'll have trade-out every once in a while, or maybe I'll have summer and winter dishes. I never did that with my wardrobe but ....

Tomorrow night, I'll stay at Ann's because there's no room at the inn. I've been staying at the Grand Dutchess B&B in Red Hook. On Saturday, I hope to get to Storm King Art Center to see Maya Lin's new wave field and to New Paltz to see the Hudson River landscape paintings that are on view. The latter are from the collection of the New-York Historical Society so may be familiar. It will be good to see them in context, however. I had supper with a woman who works at New Paltz State and she says there's a very interesting side show that has panoramas from then and now. Those repeat photography images can be very compelling.

After lunch today, I went to the student union to find some coffee and some postcards. As I walked back to CCS, I passed a cube building of concrete blocks that was idyllic. Loved the geometry and simplicity. I'll have to take a picture tomorrow to add to the dream pavilions folder.

hommage à martín

I love the way NYC works. It has been written about. For example, there was an article a few years ago about how you know the newsstand and deli people but not the details of their life. You're both familiar, in both senses.

This morning, I told Martín at Silver Spurs that I was moving from NYC tomorrow. He looked like he wanted to hug me and he did wish me well. We don't usually say much beyond "the usual?" and "more coffee?" but when I went to the cash register, the guy there said "I hear this is your last Sunday with us" and shook my hand and wished me well. It's that friendly anonymity that is so satisfactory.

In the fall of 1997 when I had my nose reconstruction, I'd been going to the same newsstand for a couple years, buying the Times, and saying "Have a nice day" (trite, perhaps, but well meant). As the bandages lessened in size, the woman at the newsstand said "better?" and I nodded and said thanks. She didn't have much English but it didn't matter.

Leaving Silver Spurs this morning, the usual Sunday morning routine, I was overcome by the feeling of loss. Not bad loss, but sentimental for that friendly anonymity. I'll find my way in Alfred but I'll live there, at least in the short term, as an urban person: friendly but not needing to know every detail of your life. Generally, I'd just as soon talk about art, architecture, queer stuff, politics, sustainability, even religion.

Yinka shown a rainbow

Though I could have stayed home consolidating the remains for Monday's drive to Alfred, I had to see the Yinka Shonibare show at the Brooklyn Museum. It opened on Friday, like, yesterday. It is wonderful but mostly not too surprising for me since I know his work pretty well. There are a couple videos on the first floor. I didn't give the first one its due and the gallery between the videos has a wonderful sculpture of 14 figures around a table with a map of the world. If you read the Times coverage, you know it's a map of the world and it's like they're dividing up the space. The video in the back gallery is wonderful: "Odile and Odette" or a black ballerina and a white one dancing in mirror image. Upstairs for the rest of the show: mostly the great figure sculptures but also the Victorian Dandy series and "The Victorian philanthropist's parlour." The parlour was new to me and I preferred the Studio Museum installation of the Fragonard lady in a swing.

After leaving the main exhibition galleries, I thought I'd stop in for a visit to the Moorish Room which I dearly love. Well, gosh, there was a Shonibare kid in the room, jumping rope. And in the Civil War dressing room, a child playing with a puppet. In the library from Saratoga Springs, a Shonibare boy was playing with marbles under the table. Love the intervention.

As I left the museum, I was overcome with thoughts of how it will not be as easy from Alfred to visit a show at the Brooklyn Museum so I'll just have to get my finances (moving is expensive!) in order and get down here "all the time."

Janet Linde lives across Eastern Parkway and we'd made plans to meet for coffee after I was done at the museum and she was done with duty at the food coop. We were sitting in the garden at Cheryl's when it started raining enough for the tree umbrella to not keep us dryish. We went inside to finish. Then as we left the restaurant, it was rainbow light and indeed there was a rainbow.

Over to the subway. When I was walking back to the apartment from the Christopher Street exit, there was another rainbow and a lot of Pride business in Washington Square. Even the goddess had on her Pride rainbow!

the day the movers came

Before the movers came (a few days earlier):

After the movers took most of the stuff away:

Now, all I have to do is finish consolidating the stuff that I'll take in a carload of precious things. Then, it's off to Alfred on Monday.

do not cut bait, fairies in the garden

A couple weeks ago, a woman stopped to talk to me as I stood in front of Trader Joe's on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I was waiting for Diana Mitrano, the woman was amused by my site-specific installation t-shirt that I got at the Whitney some years ago. She (Maitreya Levanchild) was to be in a performance of "What we can see from here" on the 69th Street Pier in Bay Ridge on June 14th. Today. The day started gloomy but brightened considerably. The performance was pleasant, colorful, appropriate.


I've been reading The language of landscape by Anne Whiston Spirn and it keeps reverberating. After the performance, I continued walking through the waterfront parks of Bay Ridge and came upon the rose garden. My third rose garden in a week! It is the season. Yesterday, Mac and I went to Jackson Heights for the annual Garden Tour. The gardens were mostly on the inside of blocks, surrounded by apartment buildings, mostly built in the decade before the Great Depression. We saw four of them and the gardens were quite different: one was quite overgrown and very pleasant on a summer afternoon, another quite formal with a baldaquino supported by Doric columns, another a simple center lawn with great trees (only one Dutch elm left). And of course there were some roses.

I had only just gotten back from Boston and the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management on Friday night. When I was in Boston, Bill Connor and I went to lunch on Thursday with Darin Murphy (School of the MFA) and Rachel Resnik (MassArt). On the way through the Fens to Thaitation, we stopped in the ... ta da ... Rose Garden! It was extraordinarily beautiful. The scent of the garden today in Brooklyn was stronger however; it must have been the breeze off the bay, blowing the rosy scent right at me. The Fens Rose Garden takes us back to the Spirn book wherein she talked about how one Boston neighborhood was asked for favorite places as they were planning their community garden. Yup, the Fens Rose Garden was at the top of everybody's list and became the inspiration for a public space within the neighborhood garden.


SEI went pretty well. I presented thrice on Tuesday and Wednesday, along with several others. I thought the flow was quite fine. On Thursday, Bill and I went to see the "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese" show at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was extraordinary. The room of "Mythological Nudes" was dumb-striking, jaw-dropping, almost too overdressed but lovely. The Tintoretto "Baptism" was amazing and was installed next to a Baptism by Veronese, just one of the good comparisons in the exhibition. The comparisons were perhaps obvious but the installation really worked. After the Venice show, Fens walk, and lunch, Bill and I went home to make vegetarian chili for supper. It came out very nicely. Bill was the haut chef, I the sous.

Before catching a late afternoon bus on Friday, I went to see the Shepard Fairey show at the Institute of Contemporary Art. I really enjoyed the images and the words included therein. I was also very taken by the "Acting out: social experiments in video" show which included the wonderful Javier Téllez video of six blind people touching an elephant in McCarren Pool which I'd seen at the Whitney Biennial, along with four other interesting videos. After the ICA, I walked over to the gallery district on Harrison Avenue to see the Joe Fig show at Carroll and Sons.

So it all comes back to plants, e.g., figs. Part of the interest in all of these rose gardens has been that I have been thinking a good deal about what I'm going to do with the yard in Alfred. And if I were to win the lottery right now, I'd want to appropriate Ross Bleckner's studio building as created in miniature form by Joe Fig.

rest on the flight to Alfred

Though I could (or probably should) have stayed home and packed some more books, I wanted to see the newly reopened American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Roberto Ferrari had blogged about the reopening a few days ago and that made me even more curious. He mentioned that it was good to be able to walk around the sculpture in the round but I must admit I think I preferred the Victorian patches of ivy. He also liked the touch screen information panels in the period rooms. Again, I guess I'm a fuddy duddy and prefer the old-fashioned text panels.

Meandering up through the various period rooms, I did stop to look at the wonderful Paris wallpaper that I'd love to find so I could make a frieze of buildings, inspired by it, around my library up in Alfred. Better check out the wallpaper catalogs.

I also went up to the roof garden to see the Roxy Paine installation. It's pretty stupendous, lots of snarled branches with reflections and views through the real vines:

A trip to the Met isn't complete without stopping in to see my favorite ivory of Mary and Joseph resting on the flight to Egypt, described on the label as one of the finest bits of Romanesque ivory carving.

Lisa Ross at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

This evening, I went to Daneyal Mahmood Gallery to hear Lisa Ross in conversation with Nan Goldin. It was an incredible artist talk. The gallery was crowded and many of us were sitting on the floor, perhaps appropriately ascetic. The YouTube video embedded here is from Daylight Multimedia and includes still pictures set to Uyghur music and Lisa Ross talking about prayer and spirituality. There are also some evocative pictures on the gallery website. When I looked at the list of her exhibitions, I realized that I had seen her work before, two years ago at Nelson Hancock Gallery in Dumbo.

The video at Daneyal Mahmood has a very different feel from the YouTube video from Daylight. The video on view at the gallery is very quiet. The gallery text indicated that you could only hear the natural sounds of the holy site in the desert. With quite a few people in the gallery, you couldn't even hear that and the silent flapping of the flags was mesmerizing.

Seeing the Uyghur scenery was especially evocative since I cataloged some ARTstor images from the Silk Routes recently. Lisa Ross first went to Xinjiang to see the ancient cities but found them disappointingly touristic. Wandering off, she discovered these holy sites.

LibraryThing beats worldcat.org?

As I was sorting books to put in boxes today, I came across the library copy of Cruising: Architektur, Psychoanalyse and Queer Cultures by Helge Mooshammer (Böhlau, 2005) which I have checked out. I couldn't remember if I'd put in the bibliography for the Queer Caucus for Art Newsletter or not. I thought I'd google it to see whether it showed up that way. I was surprised to see that the LibraryThing work record showed up as the first hit. The second hit is from the author's webpage and the OCLC WorldCat record doesn't show up until the third entry on the second page, not far above the listing from the new books list at Berkeley. While I'm quite a fan of LibraryThing, as you know, I'm sort of disappointed that the WorldCat entry doesn't show up first. After all, if someone wants access to the book, they'd have more luck with the public collections in OCLC than with the mostly private libraries in LibraryThing.

Carrie Moyer at CANADA and more

There's much to like in Carrie Moyer's current show of new paintings at CANADA gallery at 55 Chrystie on the Lower East Side (just North of Canal Street). Before I read the press release, I scribbled down a few of my favorite things:
- pigment: thick and thin, sometimes a glaze or inhabited with glitter, sometimes almost like a stain painting by Helen Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, other times so thickly applied that it has cracked
- color
- sometimes just raw canvas among the colors
- red string lines, mostly free form among the more precise edges of color areas, is this the influence of her partner Sheila Pepe?
- shapes that evoke: breasts but "First instance" reads to me like a thrusting male member
- a bit of Miró, a Target, puppets and calligraphy

And then I read the press release which talked about "Arcana" (the show's title) referring to the Tarot deck. I don't know much about Tarot so I'll have to take their word for it. There's also a list of what we might see and what it means. No mention of male parts so it must be me. The picture above is appropriated from the CANADA website; not "First instance" (and not identified by title on the website) but fairly representative.

My next stop was going to be Leslie/Lohman to see the Marco Silombria show so I started meandering North and West. I stopped at Jane Kim/Thrust Projects and found the Momoyo Torimitsu show. The gallery is full of small resin sculptures imitating melted chocolate Easter bunnies, supposedly critiquing consumerism. I don't really get it, or it doesn't move me.

Next. I vaguely remembered that Storefront's current show was on an interesting topic so I aimed there, forgetting that it was too far North for Leslie/Lohman.

The show now at Storefront for Art and Architecture is "49 cities" put together by WORK Architecture Company (WORKac): plans and statistics about 49 plans for better cities, whether that be denser or sparser, higher or over water, green or aerial. Included were the Royal Salt Works at Arc-et-Senans, a Roman town, a colonial Latin American town, some of the megastructures of the 1960s and 1970s, Levittown, garden cities, Broadacre City, Radiant City. The catalog is wonderful and reproduces most of the stuff in the exhibition. I find it an amusing coincidence that Storefront's show of photos from early last year was called "49 state capitols." The gallery guy said the 49s were just coincidental.

As I left the gallery, someone called my name and there was Jim Bergesen leading a group of young women galleryhoppers from Connecticut. We talked a bit about the joys and sorrows of galleryhopping amid the shoppers and lunch takers. And then I realized I was too far North for Leslie/Lohman so went to the grocery store and home. There's a lecture by Nina Katchadourian at Hunter College tonight: more evidence of the value of Facebook where I saw a notice for the artist talk.