income inequality

Sitting in the Collegiate, reading the Sunday New York Times. One of the front page articles is on Donna's Diner in Elyria, Ohio. It's a small operation, just barely making it. The Collegiate seems to thrive but it's through a lot of hard work on the part of John and Chelly, the owners, and their staff. I couldn't help but think of Alfred's diner and Donna's in Elyria, and how the hard work pays so little relative to that of the hedge fund managers and Romneys of the world.

And then, a few pages in, there was an article about young boys in Mahi Par Pass who used crushed Pepsi bottles as signals to heavy trucks and cars as the traffic navigates the hairpin turns of the mountain pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the boys does this work, as the only employed person in his family, so his brothers can go to school. What if all of the money for war materiel was spent on schools and other services?

These thoughts seem to come naturally, and vigorously, to me and all of us during the election season.

yes is more

I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't really familiar with the work of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). I have indexed a couple things for the Avery Index but I'm in love after reading "High rise" by Ian Parker in the New Yorker for September 10th. BIG has just opened an office in New York City and Bjarke Ingels has moved from Denmark to New York, partly so he can oversee the work on the "giant white wedge of an apartment building that will fill most of an empty block on West Fifty-seventh Street" (seen above in an image from the Architectural Digest website, courtesy there of BIG & Glessner).

Ingels published Yes is More: an Archicomic on Architectural Evolution in 2009, closest copy to Alfred is at Cornell, according to Worldcat but it's not too expensive. What else I learned from the article is that Ingels is pleased that his Danish web address is big.dk.

reading and hopping

The tag "books and reading" has overtaken "galleryhopping." It's not that I don't have any galleries to hop through in the Southern Tier of western New York State. As a matter of fact, yesterday's post about Gregory Battcock was written between an opening of Josef Schützenhöfer's works on paper at the Cohen Center and that for "Reading through Beuys" at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery. I stopped in the ceramics library to read Artforum while I waited for the later opening to open. But I do have more time for reading and less art to hop.

And I just finished reading City boy by Edmund White, his memoir of his "life in New York during the 1960s and '70s." I really enjoyed parts of it and found it all interesting, partly because I didn't come out until 1980 and have some regrets that I didn't come out during the high times of gay liberation. White is six years older than I am, not enough older that I couldn't imagine having lived through the times as he did ... if I'd lived in New York City. White is a great believer in the special glory of NYC which I understand.

And back to Schützenhöfer who lives in a small town in eastern Austria (when he's not being the Randall Professor at Alfred University) and who extolled the value of living on the periphery last night in his gallery talk. He also talked about how his Liberation Monument was vandalized and was then displayed in Graz, a much larger city, after being repaired.

The Beuys show, curated by Andrew Deutsch, includes a lot of books and other publications, not too surprising for a "Reading through Beuys" exhibition. A few of the pictures reminded me of seeing the Beuys show at the Guggenheim, oh, maybe fifteen years ago. But I generally can't think of Beuys without being reminded of the riff on Beuys and the coyote, wherein Dennis Bellone in his "Beuys" spends some very scary time with a domestic pussycat in a similar setting. I was lucky enough to actually meet that work in Ghent when it was on display in the inaugural show at the new contemporary space.

Before I "go," I want to pass on a wonderful characterization of an anarchist from the closing pages of City boy (p. 293): During the 1970s I moved away from seeing myself as a socialist and even a fellow traveler to recognizing communism for the sustained international nightmare it was and myself as an anarchist (not the bomb-throwing sort but an extreme individualist).

The illustration is a watercolor by Josef Schützenhöfer of a North Carolina hillside, 1980, from the Werkstadt Graz website. It wasn't in the exhibition at Cohen but there were some truly beautiful watercolors done in Istria as well as the more political works. Not that there wasn't some political undercurrent in some of the Istrian scenes.

... rather arid semiotic scholasticism ...

"For [Gregory Battcock], Conceptual art had not yet devolved into the rather arid semiotic scholasticism so common today, which, whether descriptive or more ambitiously deconstructive, tends to focus either on Conceptualism's creation of new kinds of objects (albeit 'dematerialized' ones) or on its philosophical demonstration of the artwork's unstable discursive foundations." -- from "Transformer: David Joselit on Gregory Battcock" in Artforum international, v. 51, no. 1, September 2012, p. 508. I remember buying the Battcock anthologies on new tendencies in art, way back in the 1960s and early 1970s.

wang shu: ningbo

Today's arts section in The New York Times has an article about Wang Shu who won this year's Pritzker Prize. His architecture uses rough and sustainable materials and the shapes are sometimes simple, sometimes sculptural and complex like the Ningbo History Museum (pictured above, image from the About.com: Architecture site). Though I like this building for itself, I also like its evocation of new brutalism.

The Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/arts/design/wang-shu-of-china-advocates-sustainable-architecture.html?_r=1&hpw

There has been critical press about the selection of Wang Shu as an individual even though his work is done in collaboration with his wife Lu Wenyu. Marcia Thorne, the Pritzker Prize's executive director, is quoted in the April 2012 issue of Architectural Record as saying that the prize committee looked at the individual as well as the team and decided that Wang Shu was "exceptional and worthy of the prize."

It has been great over the past few months to be doing my latest gig: indexing for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. There too, I sometimes debate with myself about individual versus firm access points. As Weinberger said: both/and; it doesn't need to be either/or ... except perhaps for the Pritzker. Christie and I were talking the other day on the phone about the irreplaceable delight of working (being) in a good architecture or art library and having the periodicals at the ready for perusing. It's nice to have Architectural Record, Old-house Journal, Metropolis, others on the "to do" stack rather than the "when I've got time" stack.

solo

Yesterday, my older sister asked me if I'd recommended the movie "The soloist" (no, it was my younger sister that recommended it to me). Today, I am reading Modern painters, July/August 2012 issue and come across the work of Alexander Seton in an article by Jeremy Eccles. The work illustrated above is entitled "Soloist" and is carved of Bianco Carrara marble, about three feet high. Seton's "own values can be discerned in his acknowledged influences: the craftsmanship of Bernini, the wit of Claes Oldenburg and the Swiss artist Not Vital, and the provocations of Christo. In 2006, Seton placed a sculpted marble figure of a man in a sleeping bag right outside the hotel where the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award was being presented, prompting at least one guest to ask a guard, 'What are you going to do about that poor man sleeping on the lawn?'"

The 35-year-old Seton grew up, by the way, "with tree-changing (an Australian term meaning they retired to the bush) parents in rural Australia, surviving without electricity in an area close to the Wombeyan marble quarry and first taking hammer and chisel to stone at age 8."

The photo is appropriated from the Devid Sketchbook website and there are lots of views of the sculpture from various angles if you google "alexander seton soloist" images.

Charlotte Buell Coman

It was frustrating not to remember the woman artist I mentioned in the most recent blog entry so I wrote the Arnot Art Museum and got the answer from Laura Wetmore of collections. The information on the painting is:

CHARLOTTE BUELL COMAN (American,1833-1925)
Barnyard
Oil on canvas, 14 x 24 inches
Gift of Alexander D. Falck, Jr., 1969
6915

I don't have a picture of it (and the Arnot doesn't have one on its website) but googling got a decent response of other paintings by Coman. The estimated price on one painting that was up for auction not too long ago was $1000-1500 so maybe I should just go get me one.

A nice side benefit of seeing the Coman was that the name reminded me of Charles Caryl Coleman who did wonderful American Renaissance decorative paintings. The Met has one with "Apple Blossoms" in a majolica jug captioned "Fiore." Is it the Italian that attracts?

a little "Dahesh" in Elmira

The postcard from the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira said that the "Pasture perfect: the domestic animal in paintings & sculpture" exhibition would close on Saturday, the 14th. It also said that one might be able to see real animals on the lawn on Friday afternoon. So off I went to Elmira. There were indeed some Highland cattle on the lawn and the show was very enjoyable. Most of the works in the show were from the Arnot permanent collection with some additions from a private collection.

Mr Arnot collected lots of Barbizon-infused works and his bequest established the museum in the early 20th century. "Paature perfect" included a fine painting by Auguste Bonheur (Rosa's brother), a couple by Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven, a lovely one by a woman artist whose surname started with C (should have written it down and it's not in the book on the collection: A collector's vision), "The red cow" by Constant Troyon, and others. The painting by the woman artist reminded me a bit of Andrew Wyeth since she included some chickens in an area of almost white (figure-ground study).

After spending time with the animals and the exhibition of regional artists, I hung out in the permanent collection salon with my punch and popcorn: a couple fine paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a cardinal painting by Jehan-Georges Vibert, etc. etc. As I was soaking in the art, it occurred to me that these few galleries were very satisfying at the same time that they were a relative pittance compared to the Metropolitan where I used to escape when I needed to soak up some art.

It's been a fairly rich couple weeks of museum-going since I got to the Albright-Knox on the 3rd of July when I was in Buffalo to pick Bill Connor up at the airport. He came out to western New York for my family's July 4th gathering. Since he'd never been so far West in New York State, we also went a bit further to see Niagara Falls but just from the American side. No problem, it was great fun.

mmm, yummy, give me a barbarian

From the Wikipedia article on the artist Joseph Noël Sylvestre: his painting The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410 (1890)

Mali and Modena

Thinking about Chris Huemer today based on two place-related articles in today's New York Times. She was on her way to Timbuktu for Christmas one year when I visited: she had always wanted to see it, she didn't have other Christmas plans, she did it. Now it would be difficult (read: impossible) to go to Timbuktu because Islamist rebels and Tuaregs are in power in Northern Mali and have instituted Shariah. Chris may have wanted to visit Timbuktu but her favorite cathedral was that of Modena in Emilia-Romagna. Recent quakes have caused significant damage in Emilia-Romagna. Many treasures from smaller towns and the countryside are being taken to the ducal palace in Sassuolo for safe-keeping (fingers crossed). That palace is where Tim Litzmann had an installation when Christie and I were in Emilia-Romagna in 2001. The palace was closed but I've peeked through the window.

Info:
"Quakes deal irreparable blow to an Italian region's cultural heritage"

"In Timbuktu, harsh change under Islamists"

(image from Art in Embassies page of the U.S. Department of State:
Carrie Mae Weems, House from Africa Series, 1993, Silver print)