3-cent stamps

"Not that [Emily Dickinson] intended her poems to go unread -- she often sent them in letters to friends, sometimes with other enclosures: dried flowers, a three-cent stamp, a dead cricket. She also tried a form of self-publishing: from around 1858 until roughly 1864, she gathered her poems into forty handmade books, known as 'fascicles,' by folding single sheets of blank paper in half to form four consecutive pages, which she then wrote on and later, bound, one folded sheet on another, with red-and-white thread strung through crudely punched holes." (from "Out of print: the scrap poetry of Emily Dickinson," by Dan Chiasson, in The New Yorker, December 5, 2016, page 77)

What would Emily Dickinson have done if Blurb had been available? How long has it been since I thought of fascicles? The incidental drawings in this issue of The New Yorker include a tangle of red lines, rather like thread. And three-cent stamps? The second time they've come up today.

"I won't forget what happened when your Aunt Ida tried to help. It took me days to undo what she'd done! And some things I could never undo. For instance, she threw away an entire sheet of postage stamps; three-cent postage stamps. I wasn't aware of it at the time because I was out of the room, fixing her a snack. That's how it is when people try to help; they need snacks and cups of tea, and before you know it you've gone to more trouble than if they'd stayed at home." (from Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler, Ballantine Books, 2002, page 56)

Should Rebecca's mother have relaxed and let Aunt Ida help with sorting things so she could get on with her life? The theme of Back When We Were Grownups is wondering how you got into the life you're in and what would have happened if you'd made different decisions at critical points. So I'm up at the library reading The New Yorker and blogging rather than sorting things at the house so I can get on with my life, or writing Christmas letters/cards or whatever.

big hair buildings

Elbphilharmonie

Hamburg

Herzog & de Meuron

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/04/hamburg-elbphilhamonie-herzog-de-meuron-a-cathedral-for-our-time

Port House

Antwerp

Zaha Hadid Architects

https://www.dezeen.com/2016/09/22/zaha-hadid-architects-faceted-port-house-antwerp-belgium/

These aren't quite toupées but there's a certain awkwardness. Still, I'd rather look at them than most other toupées or awkward hairdos. When I was in Madrid a few years ago, I enjoyed visiting the CaixaForum, also by Herzog & de Meuron. The interior was delightful and you could see the Museo Reina Sofía from some of the windows. The renovation and expansion of the Museo Reina Sofía building are by Jean Nouvel and also pretty darn fine. 

Klimt Schiele Timberlake Wertenbaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZU4Cwrri8

The Ash Girl

by

Timberlake Wertenbaker

(a retelling of the Cinderella story)

production at Alfred University

"Klimt • Schiele: Judith en Edith"

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

12-MRT-2016 t/m 19-JUN-2016

http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/tentoonstellingen/klimt-%E2%99%A6-schiele

materials science?

One of the oft-used subject headings in the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals is "Building materials." Very handy in an architectural index but we also index lots of articles on design, including those on the materials used. Fabrics, plastics, paper, glass, substances of various sorts. The collective term in the literature is often just "Materials" so I suggested to editor Ted that we might want to add the subject heading "Materials."

First stop: AAT. There, I found "materials (matter)" which is in the Materials hierarchy of the Materials facet. My first reaction was that the qualifier "(matter)" was unnecessary but it does make it clear that we're not talking about cloth. AAT often uses qualifiers that you don't necessarily need in context.

A couple days later. I'm up at the library for Team Trivia where we three older librarians (60, 70, and 80) actually finished with the highest score. We always decline the prize (tonight, a coupon for a pizza from a local pizza parlor). I checked the McNaughton leisure reading shelves before I left the library and noticed Stuff matters: exploring the marvelous materials that shape our man-made world by Mark Miodownik (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

Obviously, I had to check to see what subject heading(s) the book had been given. The only subject heading in the CIP on the title page verso is "Materials science--Popular works." Nope. Won't do. I wonder why they didn't just use "Materials" which is in LCSH. The scope note there is somewhat restrictive: "Here are entered comprehensive works on the basic engineering and industrial materials used in the construction of devices, apparatus, structures, equipment, etc."

For your information, "Materials science" in LCSH is related to the broader term "Physical sciences." In AAT, "materials science" is in the Disciplines hierarchy of the Activities facet. That is, you can get a college degree in materials science. Materials are what you make something out of. cf http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/11/grammar-myths-prepositions/

Morse and Tiffany

A few days ago, the mail included a card for the November 16th lecture at the Cooper-Hewitt by Ben Macklowe entitled "Louis Comfort Tiffany: Artist & Innovator." It's the Enid and Lester Morse Historic Design Lecture. The Morses support a variety of arts organizations in the greater New York City area, including up to Yale. They don't seem to be related to Charles Hosmer Morse.

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, has one of the most extensive collections of Tiffany works as well as the Tiffany Chapel from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and remnants of Tiffany's house on Long Island, Laurelton Hall. The Morse Museum was founded in 1942 by his granddaughter, Jeannette Genius McKean, and her husband, Hugh F. McKean.

Tiffany Chapel

Bomarzo

So I was in the stacks and noticed that a book on mannerist architecture was classified in NA350 and its neighbors were medieval.

I decided to peruse the book which was published in 1966. When I got to the pictures of the gardens at Bomarzo, I was struck by how the monsters were out in the open. We visited in 1999 and the monsters were hiding in the bushes.

And then I returned the book to the shelf, debating on whether anyone would notice or care if Tafuri's book on mannerist architecture -- L'architettura del manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo -- was misclassified. What a jungle we live in.

corrugated metal

After seeing Rachel Whiteread's cabin on Governors Island on Saturday, with its corrugated metal bits of wall covering, it was fun to see Cornelia Parker's "Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)" with its corrugated metal roofing shingles on Sunday in the Met Roof Garden:

Buffalo for the day

It had been too long since I'd been to Buffalo and one of the shows at the Albright-Knox was closing this coming weekend: "Shade: Clyfford Still and Mark Bradford." Bradford (born 1961) selected a couple dozen paintings by Still (1904-1980) from the Albright-Knox collection. He then did several paintings in response. The works played off each other in interesting ways. Well, Bradford played off the abstract expressionism of Still. I perused the catalog and, in the interview with Michael Auping, Bradford said he saw his first Still in Europe. The show will go to Denver after closing in Buffalo. There, the Stills will be at the Clyfford Still Museum and the Bradfords at the Denver Art Museum. Too bad they won't be in the same building. The two museums are close to each other. I was delighted to visit the Still Museum in the spring of 2015 when VRA met in Denver. It's a great neo-brutalist building designed by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture.

The reading room in the "Shade" show included iPads with the Art21 video of "Mark Bradford in Paradox" where I learned that he considers his beginnings not as an artist but as a maker in his mother's beauty shop where he did the signage. Also, "endpapers" aren't just in books; that term is also used to refer to the papers used when doing a perm.

Another show at the Albright-Knox was entitled "Defining Sculpture" and included works from the collection, from Pop Art by Marisol to a floor piece by Polly Apfelbaum, and a piece by Janet Cargill and George Bures Miller with a recording on a phone at a desk. A couple of the guards were doing a re-creation of "Imponderabilia" by Marina Abramovic and Ulay ...

... but I'm not sure it is very convincing.

In the funky underground gallery that also serves as a passageway from the main building to Clifton Hall was "Joan Linder: Operation Sunshine" which addressed waste sites in the Buffalo area, including Love Canal. Wonderful sketchbooks with long accordion-fold drawings, and hand-lettered recreations of brochures, reports, posters, and ephemera about the sites.

 (image from the Albright-Knox website, courtesy of the artist)

exquisite corps(e)

Ten years ago, Sharon, Carol, Eric, and I did an exquisite corpse drawing during an ARLIS/NY meeting. Ten minutes ago, I watched an exquisite dance-film by Mitchell Rose: Exquisite Corps (42 choreographers, 1 dance). I've seen performances by a number of the dancing choreographers and the video is fine. Here's Meredith Monk:

Walden on the harbor

How would Thoreau have dealt with a grand view of New York harbor from his cottage?

A group of us art librarians (and a few hangers on) went on a tour of Governors Island today. The Hills opened this year and the southern end of the island is taking shape as a park looking out into the harbor and back at the skylines of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. The Hills are part of the landscape plan by West 8, a Dutch urban design and landscape architecture firm, who have also done proposals for helping NYC handle the rise of sea level.

Hiding in the Hills, well, not really hiding, is the Cabin by Rachel Whiteread. It's similar to some of her other ghost, inside-out, memorial projects. A conglomeration of bits and pieces from several buildings, including some corrugated metal bits.

So I'm thinking how different Thoreau's writings might have been if he had walked out of the front door of his cottage and looked out over the expansive view of New York harbor. Or maybe it's just that I went over to the NY Art Book Fair after our tour of Governors Island. There, I ran into a couple books by Elisabeth Tonnard which played with biographical re-creation. One was a collection of events from the lives of American Renaissance writers called Song of Myself and another was a collection of sentences on death and dying from different books printed on successive pages of a book, turning into a new narrative. The dealing with death reminded me of my current book -- Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope. It took the dean about 200 pages after his apoplexy to finally die. And when I was looking for a link to Elisabeth Tonnard's work, I mistakenly typed "elizabeth tunnard" into Google and got obituary notices for a person of that similar name.

After the tour and lunch, and before we returned to Manhattan on the ferry, we visited the "Michael Richards: Winged" show, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Richards had a studio in vacant space in the World Trade Center in September 2001 and was working all night on his upcoming show. He died in the morning's attack. A good friend of mine at NYU was a dear friend of his and that made his death especially poignant. His work dealt with the Tuskegee airmen, and airplanes and flight were recurring themes. Eerie and moving.