high

Seen in the English Ceramics gallery at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta ... and then a couple hours later, on my plate at the VRA dinner and awards ceremony:

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Three or four times today here at the VRA conference, the thought has gone through my head that our modern world is just a faster version of yesterday's world. Or we're going back.

At the Transitions lunch in the spectacular (even on a cloudy day) revolving Sun Dial restaurant at the top of the Westin, someone was talking about how the art faculty members were all building their own collections of digital images as the university collections were being eliminated. In the old days, a professor probably collected the slides they needed and they were just kept on the shelves of their office. Then folks got the brilliant idea of building a collection and there was economy of scale. Now the collection is being dismantled, partly because of ARTstor and other image databases but also because of economics. Now we're seeing individual collections again.

Peter Brantley of the BookServer project at the Internet Archive gave the opening plenary speech. He talked about how information gathering is focused on discovery rather than content. But research has always been discovering the information you need. Social networking does bring it to you but you're really just doing the same kind of thing, just faster. I think he was trying to argue that the networking actually did change the information. Brantley talked about the redundancy of some of the paths and did pass on a wonderful quote he'd heard from someone about trying to keep up and worrying about missing something. Someone had said "if it's really important, the news will find me."

The redundancy of effort came up again in the blogs and wikis panel later in the afternoon. Not everyone will find the same path and information will fly around and you'll maybe find out what you need to know. But it's still just trying to find what you need to know. And I really can't buy Brantley's contention that content isn't the most important thing. Even when he said that sharing is more important than content, it's not worth sharing if it's not meaningful. Or, maybe, the receiver of the content will make something valuable of it even if it isn't inherently valuable. (This is probably all bunk ... as he changed his Facebook status to something else that didn't matter.)

Brantley started out by talking about everyone as publishers and communicators. I couldn't help but think of Benjamin and his writing on authorship (not that I really understand it). Maybe I should have just kept thinking about the modern architecture that we'd seen on the morning walking tour rather than trying to process what they'd said at the sessions. When I saw Dustin Wees, I said I really should do up some SAHARA cataloging, like the First Presbyterian Church in Bath.

J. Wrey Mould and Caravaggio

A week or so ago, I went over to the nearby town of Bath, New York, because I thought I remembered seeing a bookstore on the main street. I didn't find a bookstore but I did find a nice church -- the First Presbyterian Church on the village square. I took the picture above and a couple others. When I got home, I googled the church to see if their website identified the architect. The website said the architect was John Wrey Mould (aka Jacob Wrey Mould) and that the new building was done in 1977. That didn't seem right so I did some more investigating. Mould (1825-1886) worked with Olmsted and Vaux on Central Park and he designed the Belvedere Castle and other monuments. Discovering that was pretty exciting because I'm very fond of the Belvedere Castle which sits high above the Turtle Pond. The church, by the way, was done in 1874-1877 and there's a Tiffany rose window done in 1895. They are doing church tours on Wednesdays in July and August so there will clearly be another expedition to Bath this summer.

Not sure why the variation in first forename. At other points in history, folks have Americanized their names to make them less foreign-sounding. John seems more "normal" than Jacob but I don't know if folks were trying to be less German in the middle of the 19th century.

Completely unrelated (I think) is a small note in the Week in Review section of last Sunday's New York times. The note said that art historian Philip Sohm has determined that Caravaggio has overtaken Michelangelo as a subject for academic study. When I googled that, I found that Michael Kimmelman had written about it on March 9th.

reading historical novels seems to run in the family

My current book is In the company of the courtesan by Sarah Dunant. It's set in Italy in the 16th century. The courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, were in Rome for the sack of 1527 and ran off to Venice and are working at restoring their dignity and fortune. Fiammetta had her hair cut off by the invaders and both she and Bucino are rather the worse for wear.

A few books ago it was Roma by Steven Saylor, not that I liked it very much. But it was historical fiction. Sometimes I'd rather read just plain old history, like the history of Habsburg Spain that I read after Bill and I got back from Spain and I had felt pretty ignorant of those guys in the Prado portraits that lived at the Escorial. And then one of those Habsburgers goes and sacks Rome.

This afternoon, I decided to try to make some order of the boxes and detritus in the front upper bedroom. There is a box of books that belonged to my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. There's a Lew Wallace novel in two volumes -- The prince of India, or, Why Constantinople fell (1893) -- and also Darkness and dawn, or, Scenes in the days of Nero by Frederic W. Farrar (1891). Why, gosh, I'm tempted to try one or both of them ... not that there aren't also many other books on the waiting list.

if a disco ball whirled in the woods, would anyone dance?

When I was in Chicago for the College Art Association conference last week, I stopped in at the Museum of Contemporary Art. There were a number of things that interested me but I was stopped in my tracks by thought on seeing "A disco ball in the woods" by Adam Ekberg (photo above from his website). In the woods behind my sister and her partner's farmhouse at the North end of Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, there is a tree with a rotted portion at the base. The tree is out near Carol and Barb's ritual circle and the hole in the tree is called the Fairy Ballroom. When I was up in Maine in January, we saw some fallen trees in the Sunset area on the Blue Hill Peninsula. One of them was a ripe candidate for a faerie ballroom: (You'll please forgive my lack of vocabulary control in using both "fairy" and "faerie." The latter may be used by some of the New Age community but it is also used by the Radical Faeries.) The discovery of the faerie ballroom in Maine has circulated around my brain every time I see the picture in my Flickr photostream or think about that part of our Maine trip.

And it keeps coming back to me. Yesterday, I went on an expedition to Meadville, Pennsylvania to see the "In Between: (re)Negotiating Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality" show at the Penelee~Megahan~Bowman Art Galleries at Allegheny College. The show was curated by gallery director Darren Lee Miller with two non-art colleagues Emily Chivers Yochim and Vika Gardner. I had met Darren at CAA and he had left some tempting brochures in the back of the room during the Queer Caucus panel session. The brochure squawked at me even though there was only one more day of the show (yesterday) after my return from Chicago. There's a nice little catalog but most of the content can currently be seen on the gallery website (linked above). I particularly liked the "Climbing rope" drawings by Cobi Moules, the drawings of nude men by Jacob Kincheloe, and Melissa Boyajian's "Grand odalisque (for Saïd)." Jesse Jagtiani did a video animation called "Paradise" which screamed Bosch to me (I'm partial to Bosch) but in the interview in the catalog, he said he was more influenced by Paul Chan. Whatever. The video seemed to be just sitting there and I don't know if I wasn't patient enough or the video was having a last day of show sit-down strike. I'd seen Mary Ellen Strom's video "Nude no. 5, Ellen Dubinsky and Melanie Marr" somewhere before but can't remember where. It's a takeoff on Courbet but it also evokes Giorgione's recumbent nude women. All in all, lots to think about.

Darren and I had lunch and our conversation drifted all over the place. I'd checked out his website so I had some idea of his work. I was struck by a couple of his pieces that involved getting one's hair cut in patches. My hair has now gotten pretty long (as long as it's ever been) and I've been getting a little tired of it. So the pieces caught my attention when I cruised the website. In our conversing about that, Darren talked about his use of hair cutting and other simple tasks as ritual, especially homosensual erotic. So back we go to the faerie ballroom and perhaps do a little dancing.

There's more to say about College Art. I just love that conference. While I don't know as many people in the CAA circles as VRA, ARLIS/NA or ALA, or haven't known some as well or as long, the content of the conference is probably my favorite. I ran into Chris Sundt and she and I concurred that coming to CAA was practically a necessity for our lives. Lucky Chris gets to go back to Chicago in a couple months for the SAH conference.

Before the conference, Roberto Ferrari had summarized some of the panels he would have gone to, or which raised questions in his mind. I read his summary before going which prompted my going to the "Moguls, mansions, and museums" panel, chaired by Sally Webster from the CUNY Grad Center where Roberto is studying. The paper by Petra ten Doesschate Chu was on the collecting of European art by late 19th-century American robber barons. She talked about the networks of dealers and collectors and showed some slides of George Eastman's collection, with his paintings mostly now in the Memorial Art Gallery. Sounds like another expedition: the Memorial Art Gallery is only a little more than an hour from Alfred. In that session, I also really enjoyed the paper by Kirsten Jensen on the Interstate Industrial Exhibitions in Chicago which led up to the World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893. She talked about the taste for Parisian works which was criticized as not American enough. This was the time of the Haymarket Riots and concern about immigration and trade unions. We still hear complaints about immigration but the art world has become mostly international.

It used to be that I would try to figure out how to hear the greatest number of papers that stood out in the program. And then you'd mostly end up missing the beginning or ending of a paper, and arrived in a crowded room without any seats, as you darted from room to room. Now I decide at the panel level unless there should happen to be a couple papers that seem really significant. So this year I heard about medieval costume, "How is "queer art" relational?" (Roberto wondered what that meant and I hope he doesn't ask me what the answer to the question is), design and democratization (all pretty interesting but I particularly liked the paper on Ikea by Jeff Werner), building and managing artist book collections (the ARLIS/NA session), "Desire is queer!" (not what I expected: more the art and spectator than the artist and model), a session on Michael Camille (1958-2002) and the "shifting contours of art history," and a panel on alternative publishing and distributing models in art and curatorial practice (sponsored by the Art Spaces Archives Projects, based at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College). The abstracts are supposedly available on the CAA website but I don't see a link and don't know if you have to login to see them.

Anyway, it was great to go to all of those sessions and hear about stuff I didn't or did know something about. Never hurts to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art or other art venues. I didn't get into the Art Institute but had been there to see the new Renzo Piano wing last summer during the ALA conference. Anne Champagne reminded me it was "Free February" but I still didn't even get in for a brief visit to see my "Mater Doloroso" by Dirk Bouts. Enough of this. I think I'll go dancing or engage in some ritual.

thinking about bumper stickers

When I hear a pithy statement, I think of bumper stickers or sig files. And Fanny the Forester needs a bumper sticker. When I got my Isuzu pickup in Texas, I had a series of bumper stickers. The first one I remember was "I brake for Greek Revival." Bob took my pickup to work one day and someone wondered why he would want to brake for Geek Revival. Well, gosh, those westerners didn't get to live through Greek Revival so they might have been happier if I braked for Arts and Crafts or American Vernacular.

And then there was the bumper sticker from the Art Guys: "I [heart] the art guise." I was disappointed when it wore out.

Not having a car from 1995 to 2009 when I lived in New York City meant that I had to live my bumper sticker life vicariously. I guess I could have gone the sig file route but instead I added those pithy statements to my commonplace (e)book. A few bumper stickers came my way but none of them had a bumper to stick on. Now I can go there.

Aaron Krach is an artist who lives in New York City and works at Condé Nast or did the last time we checked in. He has done a series of "Indestructible Artifacts" and a couple of them are bumper stickers. The one that just knocks me out is "Art makes me horny." For me, art is indeed a sensual experience, thrilling from head to toe. I found the bumper sticker and will attach it to Fanny as soon as the weather permits. Yesterday was 58 degrees when I left Oneonta, melting snow, flash floods, gusty winds. Today is more like 30 degrees with a dusting of snow overnight and occasional snow in the air. Now, that's more like it ... but probably not bumper sticking time.

more Maine

I meant to use the lower photograph above in the blog entry a couple days ago but the one I did use did show the way the water was different colors because the sky was blue and gray. Very civil. But neither of the clouds and water pictures grasped the intense silvery brilliance of the day so you probably weren't ready to see Maine as the Sunshine State. The skies and landscape, and waterscape, were incredible.

Maine: the Sunshine State

Our days in Maine have been delightful in a variety of ways. The weather has been incredible: bright and sunny, low winter sunshine, crisp and clear air. JL and I drove up from Boston to CDS's in Orland, Maine on Wednesday. The drive was pretty as the amount of snow along the road increased slightly. Supper was prepared at home: pork loin, wilted spinach, potatoes. On Thursday, we drove around on Blue Hill Peninsula: the village of Blue Hill, Sargentville, and Castine; nice mix of dry roads and snowy bits; lots of coves and other views of the water (fresh and salt); a interesting tidal waterfall near Castine. Friday we went off to Deer Isle. The bridge between the Blue Hill Peninsula and Little Deer Isle is one of those skinny and scary suspension bridges with narrow lanes and a curvy causeway between Little Deer Isle and Deer Isle. Stonington is down at the bottom of Deer Isle and we stopped for lunch at the Harbor Restaurant, with great clam chowder. We drove out to the Sunset area a bit North of the village center and the landscape was delightfully snowy. We also meandered over to Sunshine where the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is located. I drove on Friday and really loved the narrow roads with lots of snow still left on the trees and a bit on the road. Today (Saturday), we went over to the Schoodic Peninsula, the point of which is part of Acadia National Park. The day, yet again, was bright. After breakfast at the Seabreeze Restaurant in Bucksport, we drove through Ellsworth out on the Schoodic Peninsula to Winter Harbor. We drove down Grindstone Neck before heading off to Schoodic Point. The views were sometimes quite similar to earlier days but the main reason we picked Schoodic was the chance to see the open ocean as well as the closed coves and snowy interior roads. The ocean was pretty calm and the low winter sun landed with a blinding silvery glow. As we drove out the island, I noticed that the Hancock Grocery had "fresh scallops" and we stopped for some on the way back toward Bucksport. We got home and supper was divine: scallops, collards, and squash. It might be hard to go back to peanut butter.

We got glorious sunsets both last night (red!!) and tonight (more golden). The curvy roads and snow-covered trees along them were delightful. The conversations were a wild mix of catch-up and landscape. Tomorrow, it's back to Boston and then turn West toward Alfred.

More pictures from the Flickr photostream link at the bottom of the page.

words to look at, seeing songs

Before I went off the Museum of Fine Arts, I stopped at a favorite neighborhood bookstore here in Cambridge: the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue. When I got in the store, I was thinking about the book on words in conceptual art and thought I remembered "art words 1970s." The clerks didn't find anything in their database. It was the old trick that librarians get all the time, of course. I want the green book that used to be over there on that shelf by the window. When I got home and searched worldcat.org, I found it was Words to be looked at: language in 1960s art by Liz Kotz and that the paper edition is coming out in April 2010.

After getting a bit of food and talking to Darin Murphy (librarian at the School of the MFA) who also happened to be in the MFA cafeteria, I went into the "Contemporary outlook: seeing songs" show. Again, rather a twist on the senses: looking at words, seeing sounds. One of the prominent pieces in the show is a 30-monitor video installation by Candice Breitz, each monitor with someone singing along to a Queen song or some other number. The variety of movement, animation, devotion is really great and very cheery.

And lest you think I wasn't keeping buildings in mind (see previous post), I noticed Moving rooms: the trade in architectural salvage by John Harris (Yale, 2007) in the bookshop. Watch those geographic coordinates or declarations of unmovable objects. They did have a copy of Words to be looked at in hardback but I knew I could be a bit patient and get the paperback soon. Joseph Miller (Sears SH editor at Wilson) was also in the bookshop and we were both ogling Roberto Calasso's new book entitled Pink Tiepolo.

buildings moments at ALA

I've been in Boston for ALA Midwinter and now have a day of whatever before Janet and I go up to Maine. One day we were seeing sailboats out on the harbor and, two days later, I was nearly being blown off my feet by gusts of wind coming off the Hancock tower. Those gusts were accompanied by pellets of ice. It wasn't especially cold so it was strange to be in a blizzard but not particularly uncomfortable. It WAS sloppy underfoot!

In addition to looking at various interesting buildings, I did have a couple cataloging moments that showed me the "buildings" issue will always be with us. It is our friend. Diane Hillmann said she'd been in a CC:DA conversation about whether buildings were places or not. I need to look up the CCO chapter and verse for her. I would argue that not all things with geographic coordinates are places though you might want your fancy linking software to treat them that way. At the Subject Analysis Committee meeting, we talked about whether memo H1095 of the Subject heading manual could be effectively divided so that widely free-floating subdivisions could be coded distinctively from those that are free-floating under persons, classes of persons, ethnic groups, nationalities, corporate bodies, and other categories. It made me realize that one might do subject-oriented subdivision lists such as -- ta da -- buildings.

OK, enough of this. I'm going out in the light snow to see the Dürers at the MFA and maybe stop at Calamus Book Store to see if they have a copy of Steven Riel's The spirit can crest. We were talking about the Radical Faeries and his poem "My invisible dress." We're men, we don't want to be women, but still we're interested in the transitory and ambiguous nature of gender and dress.