WEMI schmeemy

Why is it that I cannot get more excited about the FRBR Group 1 entities? The most recent moment of ennui (or more) came after reading an email exchange in a working group I'm supposedly working on. The discussion of whether subjects could apply to Expressions, Manifestations, and Items, or only Works, just saddened me. Isn't the ultimate model that you have an entity and relationships? Probably doesn't map well, or play well with others.

The WEMI model does have some strengths for collocating editions. It's hard for me to think outside the MARC box (aka catalog cards). The manifestation model that we've been using since way back (to the earliest library catalogs, I think; just go look at the old British Museum printed catalog) does a satisfactory job. If you had fields that would do more than simply index things the same way, you could get from a Manifestation or Expression up to a Work. I used to dream at Cornell of a way we could just add copies of Hamlet and other classic works rather than have individual records. The online environment should allow you to appropriate all of the common elements of the Work and add whatever is individual about the resource in hand; the user would get a cluster of editions.

And then there's real life. Today was the memorial service for Lois Smith who probably was my first model in life, that is, the first non-family, non-parent-selected, non-neighbor person who taught me how to get on in life. She was a librarian (naturally) and pacifist (also not surprising). I've done library and pacifist too but, even more, it was her way of living with enthusiasm, acceptance, and modesty that I credit as a good model for living. This would have been Mrs Smith's 101st birthday (she died during the summer and Alfred lives on an academic calendar).

Tonight they're doing a reading of "9/10" by Richard Willett, addressing the terror of 9/11, ten years later. As much as I feel for us Americans, perhaps especially those with first-hand connections, I cannot get over the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan people who have been slaughtered in revenge. Your terrorist is my freedom fighter.

This was rather a ramble over a variety of territory. I recently was cruising the blogs of a couple friends and was struck by the thoughtfulness of their postings. And I was touched that a cousin of mine mentioned that she enjoyed my Facebook postings, particularly a rather dry and wry appreciation of Robert Ryman's "The Elliott Room" at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Donald Charles Seibert, 1929-2010

Today was the memorial service for Don Seibert, music librarian at Syracuse for upwards of thirty years until his retirement in the 1990s. One of the wonderful remembrances, by Dick Bough, was of Don as older brother and younger brother, mentor and joy-filled friend. Dick told a story of an Adirondack hike up some mountain. As they got to the top of the mountain, it started to rain. Don stripped and danced in the rain. I tried to find a picture of a man dancing naked in the rain but had no success. You have to do a brain picture of the joy.

Someone else mentioned that Don's name authority record had been updated for his death and included "Tchaikovsky scholar" as part of his accomplishments. Don would have loved that.

So here's to music, name authorities, and dancing in the rain, and to Don and his life well lived.

Alan Sonfist, land artist

The summer 2011 issue of Art news has an article by Ann Landi on Alan Sonfist. I loved walking by his garden of native plants not far from my apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City. Sonfist grew up in the Bronx and contemplated a life as a farmer but discovered that modern farming was more real estate and finance than working with the earth. He discovered, during his student days at the University of Illinois, a book by Hoyt L. Sherman, a professor of fine arts at Ohio State. Sonfist "went on to study under Sherman at Ohio State before returning to New York with a changed perspective on his calling."

nature and art, before and after

We went on some expeditions to seaside places when I visited CDS in Maine. After exploring some neighborhoods in Portland, we went down to see the Portland Head Light and then on to Two Lights Head. It was pretty exciting as the tide was coming in and the waves crashed ever higher. We went out to Georgetown Island the next day. It's one of the finger points along the coast between Portland and Rockland, South of Bath. The landscape is lovely. The water wasn't too rough either day but the waves are relentless.


I went to the Portland Museum of Art on my last day to see the Marin and Maine modernists shows, along with the permanent collection. Marin really paints the spirit of the ocean and I could feel the ocean as well as see it when I looked at the works. It was wonderful to have the natural and painted worlds so close in time and space.


The Maine modernists show was, however, the reverse. The show included considerable documentary material about the various artists who had worked in Seguinland. That term was then used for several communities South of Bath, including Georgetown and named after Seguin Island which is at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Artists in the show included several that I am fond of, such as F. Holland Day and Marsden Hartley, as well as others with whom I am familiar. I wished that I'd been to that show beforehand. I took a picture near where Day had his house and studio, and where he took some of his romantic pictures of naked young men. Another picture was of a cove, more or less across the road from the Lachaise house.

Hartley used to visit Gaston Lachaise and his wife at their house in Georgetown Center and moved permanently back to Maine soon after visiting Mrs Lachaise after Gaston died in 1935. If we'd seen the show and had the catalog in hand, perhaps we could have wasted a lot of time to find the actual locations and poked our noses into someone's private space. We just got the aura.

There's a wonderful small Hartley in the show that has splotches of rock and water. That was great to see after having stood on the rocks, watching waves.

I'm not sure why Seguinland is so named but I couldn't help but wonder if it was related to Seguin, Texas. Wikipedia tells me that the city in Texas was named after Juan Seguín, veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto and later a senator. I didn't check the Moderns catalog but the web hasn't yet told me the source of Seguinland in Maine.

Make It Right in New Orleans

A couple of the Make It Right houses in New Orleans. When I was there last week for ALA, I walked from the French Quarter through the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater to the Lower Ninth Ward which was the neighborhood hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The up-top porch of the house on the left looked like a splendid place to spend a warm breezy evening, perhaps with a mint julep. More pictures from the walk and New Orleans at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/sets/72157627071715064/

metaphorically speaking

Some of you may remember my musings in early 2010 on the right bumper sticker to stick on my then new used car. Fanny and I have been together now for about 18 months and I only just stuck the bumper stickers on the car .... but I couldn't quite apply the "Art makes me horny" one created by Aaron Krach. It's in a series of "Indestructible artifacts," after all.

The thought behind the bumper sticker came around again in the book I read as I flew home from New Orleans: The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The hero of the book is Arnold "Junior" Spirit who decides he has to leave the reservation in order to avoid alcohol and/or an early death. He transfers to a new school just off the rez. He and his new friend Gordy are discussing the size of the library and how long it would take to read all of the books, even though it's a pretty small library. Arnold says "Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you just keep on learning there is so much more you need to learn." Gordy replies "Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now doesn't that give you a boner?" Being 14-year old boys, you can imagine the discussion that ensues as Gordy tries to explain to Arnold what he means: metaphorical boner, joy, boner is funnier, reading freak, joyous freak.

Thinking about metaphorical boners from reading is like art that makes you horny. The true aesthetic, spiritual, orgiastic feeling of delight that comes from an enjoyed work of literary or visual art.

True diary has illustrations by Ellen Forney, done as if being done by Arnold who draws cartoons. I thought there was one is which "metaphorical" was replaced by "metaphysical," resulting in a metaphysical boner. I can't find the illustration at the moment but the metaphorical/metaphysical dyad can continue to bounce around in my brain as much as it wants to.

There is much to like in True diary. A ways into the book, I noticed that it is branded by Little, Brown as young adult fiction. Alexie doesn't talk down to us and he deals with adult concerns, or at least growing-to-adulthood concerns.

But, you ask, what bumper stickers DID I stick on Fanny? "War is not the answer" from the Friends Council on National Legislation and the blue and yellow equals sign of the Human Rights Fund. "Art makes me horny" remains on the bulletin board in front of my desk.

Francis Alÿs in NYC

What is it about Francis Alÿs that makes his work so intriguing? The retrospective organized by the Tate Modern and now at MoMA and P.S. 1 was top of the to-do list on my trip last week to New York City. The videos are compelling, simple but compelling. The paintings are quirky, quaint and just grab you. The Peter Schjeldahl essay in The New Yorker for May 23rd grabs the essence way better than I could. He talks about the simple pleasure in Alÿs's works: chasing tornadoes, dropping his camera when the angry dogs bark and bark, driving repeatedly up a dusty hill (set to a band rehearsal: forward when playing, backward between bits of rehearsing), primitive paintings, walking with a gun in the street, the Coldstream Guards moving from random to ordered and dispersing.

I've been intrigued by the work of Francis Alÿs for some years. Is it the quixotic diaeresis? Whatever, when I read recently that his birth name was Francis de Smedt, I had to check his NACO record and the birth name was indeed missing. So I added it to the record. In all of the MoMA documentation, I never did see it mentioned.

The image is from the Tate page for the exhibition (no longer on the web). Link for the press release on the Tate exhibition:

https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/francis-alys-story-deception

miller & shellabarger

Another good artist talk at AU: Miller & Shellabarger, from Chicago. When a student asked about seeing Cai Guo-qiang, Ai Weiwei, and Kara Walker in their gunpowder, black sunflower seed, and cutout works, they wisely responded that materials can be similar but the intent and context are different. An artist that uses oil paint is not accused of ripping off Caravaggio. The point of Ai's seeds is the crafting of the seeds; Miller & Shellabarger use it as a transitory material. Kara Walker uses her cutout to talk about racial stereotypes; M & S use it to talk about their relationship. Any material influence is more an homage than plagiarism. They were also asked about their daily life and Shellabarger responded that he tries to work on his art every day, discipline like going to the gym which he doesn't do ... but I understand. This freelance life needs some discipline too. You get out of practice.

The illustration is taken from the images on their artist page at the Western Exhibitions.

pepper, silva & goriunova

It's been an especially rich bouquet of art talks the last few days. Today was a gallery talk by Jen Pepper in her show entitled "A glimpse, spark & flash" at the Llewellyn Gallery at Alfred State College. It's a reinstallation of work that was part of a show at the Everson in Syracuse, with changes because of the tsunami in Japan and the Pacific. In the Everson, the blanket of woven wire (1000 feet, in honor of Rauschenberg) was suspended likes waves or medical instrument readings. Here, it was splashed against the wall and spilling onto the floor. The rubber-coated and white-painted silk poppies were strewn on the wall rather than planted in a "pizza box." It reminded me of Petah Coyne but much more approachable (and Pepper, as she calls herself, let me touch one of the buds).

Pepper is a dictionary reader and words are important to her and her art, e.g., liminal space (because of its potency), "soy" which in Dogon means both woven material and the spoken word as it does in Hebrew.

Another exhibition at Cazenovia used engineering student notebooks from 1927-1932, discarded when Kanakadea Hall at Alfred University was renovated (other stuff went to the archives so it wasn't mass destruction). The notebooks included instructions like "Measure a line in which one end is inaccessible." Sounds like Sol LeWitt.

She and her partner did a piece entitled "I'm only number 2 ..." at the Spoleto festival in Charleston some years ago. They "hid" pencils around the city and folks were supposed to let them know if they found one. The results can be seen at http://cracksinthepavement.com/. Paula Stewart and I started exchanging museum pencils from our travels during the time I was at the Amon Carter Museum. I still buy the pencils but they don't get sent Paula-ward very often. I use them.

Olga Goriunova spoke on Wednesday about "Aesthetic emergence: brilliance, repetition & organizational tendencies on the Internet." She is one of the founders of runme.org which "says it with software art!" She spoke of runme.org as an art platform or locus, a catalyst, with creative energy to make brilliant aesthetic work. The talk was quite philosophical and I felt rather like I was drowning some of the time. One of her interesting observations was that new devices are closing down some of the creativity that was possible. The devices have more closed systems and applications. And they do things for you. She showed a wonderful piece of software that took what you're typing and turned it into banners and streams of letters, moving around the screen. Now, there's probably an app so you can just do it. Toward the end of the question-and-answer period, she said "software is fundamental" and I misheard it as "software is temperamental." Also true.

Bisi Silva spoke on Monday and the title of her talk was "Curating in Africa." She put emphasis on the "in." For a long time, western art curators have done shows of contemporary African art, or African art curators have done shows in Europe and America. She is the founder and director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. Silva is a graduate of the curatorial program at Bard College (home of one of my freelance gigs).

The library at CCA Lagos has 3500 volumes and it's quite an accomplishment to build up an art library in Nigeria. 3500 seems like a small number of volumes but I assume it's quite focused. It made me wonder if we couldn't start a gift program from the art libraries of the U.S.

And I just can't avoid thinking about cataloging as I listen to things. Silva used "lens-based art" to describe artists who use photography, video, and film. We could use a term (subject heading) that covers the waterfront. Pepper likes installation art because you are in the work. File that in the "relational aesthetics" pile for consideration of that LCSH proposal.

Woven through those art talks were presentations by the Alfred State architectural students on their projects for Main Street in Alfred and a talk on "How right was Einstein? or, Stringent tests of the theory of general relativity" by Dipankar Maitra. New jargon: GR.

I must stop now. The Alfred University theater department is presenting "A streetcar named Desire" ... preparation for my June visit to New Orleans for ALA?

Foster Lake

Bryan Daly read his Phi Beta Kappa "Wit and Wisdom" prize-winning poem "The artist on his shores" at today's Bergren Forum. He introduced the poem by talking about Eddy Foster who created Foster Lake in the middle 20th century. Some of the words I scribbled down as he was reading: the tarp of the sky, it's only irony (about the Segway inventor trying to fly in his Segway), how can I float so long?, eulogy (for Mr Foster) or elegy (for the lake). For Daly who grew up near a reservoir that serves as water supply for Boston, a lake is a deep body of water in which towns have been buried. Alfred's little Foster Lake is not deeper than twenty feet and resides at the top of a hill with two outlets that run to different watersheds. It "miraculously" filled the summer it was built (1950) ... with a bit of help from heavy rains associated with a hurricane. Daly's elegy to the lake was beautiful and thoughtful, and evocative.

His thoughts about Eddy Foster were tangled up with thoughts of his grandfathers. My first trips to Foster Lake were as a child when my family would visit my maternal grandmother and great aunt. And today would have been my father's 92nd birthday. The lakeside trees were small then, and now it's a forest. My mother was a legendary floater too.

We're still buried in snow here and Daly had lovely wintry photographs to "illustrate" his poem. The picture above is one I took last summer during a bird walk around the lake. The walk around the lake was one of my mother's favorite times. So today is for parents and grandparents and hope for spring.