all that i will ever be

Yesterday the marathon but not the Oscars. Before I went out to breakfast, I finished reading Tania Katan's My one-night stand with cancer. It's a compelling story of a woman who had mastectomies at the age of 21 and 31. The part about the cold of the surgery room was one of the most compelling moments for me -- the very live memories of that feeling -- but there were lots of resonations throughout. She ran one 10K topless, evoking my sister's getting arrested for topless behavior. I talked to Tania after the CAA panel she was on. She checked the law in California before she ran topless and the state law about topless women involved exposing the areola. Since her mastectomies took those away, she was within the law.

Breakfast was the normal paper and pancakes at Silver Spurs. Actually, not the normal since I had to eat and read pretty promptly in order to go to the Jože Plečnik lecture at the church of Saint Cyril on St Mark's Place. I arrived about ten minutes before eleven and there was still a service going on. I stood out front. A woman walked up, finishing her cigarette. I asked if she was here for the Plečnik lecture and she said yes. She was a Slovene, here to do a short-term job at the U.N. We talked a bit about Slovenia and being in the U.S., currency. She mentioned that getting used to U.S. coins is made more difficulty because there are no numerals on the coins. I hadn't thought about that but it's true: one cent, five cents, one dime, quarter dollar. Those words are cognate with other romance or germanic words but it's not as easy as 1, 5, 10, and 25 for a non-anglophone.

As 11 neared, others arrived that appeared to be lecture types. Then some musicians arrived. Eventually we went into the sanctuary after the church service seemed to be over. The musicians finished setting up, no screen for an architectural lecture. The musical group started to play Slovenian jazzy music. Annice, Jay and I were getting a little nervous that perhaps the lecture was not happening or happening in some other room in the rowhouse church building. I tried to relax and enjoy the music, chalking it up to chance. The group stepped aside, a guy read a poem in Slovenian and English, a lady sang three traditional songs, the group came back and did another number or two, the poet returned for another poem. Then there was a bit more of the M.C. The Slovene woman that I talked to beforehand was sitting in front of me. She turned to say that the lecture would begin soon downstairs in the social hall. Phew. I told Annice and Jay, they phewed.

The lecture by William Singer (Fulbright in Ljubljana in the early 1990s) was wonderful, just right for the group. Not much talk, lots of pictures. I fell in love with Ljubljana. It had been on my radar but it looks really wonderful. Plečnik lived from 1872 to 1957 and was a student of Otto Wagner in Vienna. He started out as a Wagnerian late Jugenstil architect and drifted through various modernisms and revivalisms. One church is like a stretched Semper opera house but the ramp up the bell tower was trying to out Corbusier Corbusier, according to Singer.

After the lecture, I went down to Fourth Street to join Mac at New York Theatre Workshop. Actually first I stopped at St Mark's Books to get something on Plečnik but ended up with the Lonely Planet guide to Ljubljana. Also stopped at Pageant which reminded me of grad student trips to print shops. In those days, Pageant was huge and dusty; now it's a small shop but still with some worthwhile prints and pages from books, Harper's, etc. (yes, it's sad that the books have been taken apart). Then Mac appears in the window and we head off to NYTW. The play was "All that I will ever be" by Alan Ball. It was really fine overall and there were some passages about facing life and living that were really wonderful. Perhaps the strongest scene was Raymond and Omar. Raymond is an older gay man who hires the hustler. We don't see them doing whatever they did but they are talking about life, truth, fear, fearlessness, growing old, falling in love/lust. You know, the great themes but well-written and -delivered.

After the play, we ran a couple errands and dropped stuff off at Mac's before going off to the Rawhide, aka the "Palais du danse" as we call it. Imagine our delight that the dancers were our two favorites: Michele and Craig. It was really special. The bartenders had the red carpet programs and Oscars on the TV but the competition was not very serious ... well, wasn't until the Oscars really started but even then Craig and Michele beat out Ellen DeGeneres ten to one. Craig joined us for dinner again and even gave us a ride home since the snow had fallen and it had gotten rather slushy underfoot.

Quite a Sunday and that had followed a pleasant Saturday evening at Andy and Garth's on East 50th Street. Mark and Charlie were up from Houston. Roberto was there with his friends Matt and Gerry. Gerry is Gerald Mocarsky who did the wonderful b&w photos in Reed Massengill's Self-exposure. Gerry's are the guy in the wet pajamas and in the alcove with all the pictures. http://www.geraldmocarsky.com/

And that had followed a lovely Thursday evening with Sharon, Nancy and Lee. Sharon was in the City for the week between caring for her mother in L.A. and going to Venice for classes in Italian (poor thing). It was great to spend the evening with them (but between Andy and Garth's on 50th and Nancy and Lee's on 52nd, it was quite a bit of Sutton/Beekman Place).

college art

Most of the last few days has been consumed by the annual conference of the College Art Association, held this year in NYC. Consumption is, of course, one of those words one hears at the conference, usually combined with culture or cultural.

I was googling "allen frame" to find a picture of the photo he had in the "Mother, May I?" show sponsored by the Queer Caucus for Art but didn't find that. What I did find was a mention of the "Blow Both of Us" show at Participant, Inc. Damn, I missed it, closed in January. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, how will I find all of the shows in the vast pile of New York art?

The "Mother, May I?" is very good, probably the best installation I've seen in the Campbell Soady Gallery at the Center. Sheila Pepe did a fine job of laying out a curatorial question and hanging the show. Another pair I really liked was Blaine Anderson's drawing and Ernesto Pujol's photo. It didn't hurt, of course, that Blaine Anderson (that's handsome B.A.) was standing there live, in front of the drawing and Ernesto's photo is from the shower series I saw years ago at Priska Juschka Gallery when it was on Driggs in Williamsburg. Allen Frame's photo too was good. The pairing of Laurie Toby Edison's photo of the naked and regal Tee Corinne (like Paolina Borghese) with a Tee self-portrait with Beverly from the cancer series. Sad and beautiful. I'm not sure but the Tee photo may have been "The saddest picture I ever saw."

The "Mother" reception on Thursday evening was lively and crowded. When I arrived, the crowd was mostly male. As the evening progressed, the crowd became mostly female. Strange. I noted that to Sheila and we just kinda did a "hmmm, curious, that." When I went back to the Center on Friday night to pick up the HX, Next, etc., the gallery had returned to its normal meeting-room style: table in the middle, three people chatting on one side. A queerart list conversation circulated a bit around the idea of having our caucus exhibitions in community centers. Clearly, it has its ups and downs.

Bloomingdale's [heart] Gertrude Stein

Bloomingdale's is using a Gertrude Stein quote in their ads for Valentine's Day:

Very fine is my
Valentine.
Very mine and very fine.

I love Gertrude Stein too. And, so far, the performances this weekend have been marvelous. "Marat/Sade" on Friday night at Classical Theatre of Harlem (reviewed in The New York Times in the Arts & Leisure section today) and "Death in Venice" (Hamburg Ballet, at BAM) on Saturday night (after a fabulous supper with Christie at Scopello). Cruising along, as it were.

reexamining appropriation

College Art starts next Wednesday and this session looks really interesting:

SATURDAY, FEB. 17, 2:30 - 5:00 PM:
"Reexamining Appropriation: The Copy, the Law, and Beyond, Part II"
Beekman Parlor, 2nd floor, Hilton New York
Chairs: Martha Buskirk, Montserrat College of Art; Virginia Rutledge, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP
With:
"Stopped Making Sense: Appropriation as a 1970s Social Phenomenon," Sarah Evans, Cornell University
"The Problematic of the Signature: Reexamining Appropriation in Contemporary Indigenous Art and Cultural Heritage," Tressa Berman, San Francisco Art Institute
"Art Appropriation and Identity," Sharon Matt Atkins, Currier Museum of Art
"Art and Activism: The Xingwei of Wang Hai and Zhao Bandi," Winnie Wong, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDiscussant: Arindam Dutta

cf http://collegeart.org/

georgia rockabilly & pecorino

I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from working at the Morgan last night. A Georgia rockabilly song was on the muzak as I approached the cashier and it was just fine. A guy at the end of the cashout slot was moving and groovin'. He was getting ready to go back into the cold night and the cashier said to me: whenever people come by with this cheese (pecorino romano), I can smell it from the far end of the roller belt. And she wondered what I did with it. I said "pasta" and the groovin' guy asked if that was all. Well, these pieces of pecorino all of a sudden looked pretty exciting. It was probably the music.

aitken from the street

On Monday night, art librarians gathered in the MoMA Library to see the Doug Aitken video installation over the garden. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/aitken/ And to chat of course. The installation was pretty interesting but the chatter was even more so. Our daily lives, I guess. It was pretty cold so one didn't want to be out on the balcony for long. It was definitely worth being out there for a bit though as the screens on the older parts of the building were only partly visible from inside the reading room on the sixth floor.

Last night (Tuesday) however I was working at MoMA and as I left the cataloging area, Tilda Swinton was "sleepwalking" right at me as I walked through the reading room. I stood down on 54th Street for a while and then meandered in the garden. The Aitken screens are way more interesting from the street. It's probably the flâneurability mostly (credit to Jenny Tobias for mentioning the flâneur part). From the 6th floor, it is diminished somehow; from the street, you must turn your head, look up, look across, be in the space. Cold or no, I'll take it from the street. Aesthetics beats body comfort almost every time.

darkness and light

The February 2007 exhibition from Visual AIDS and The Body is especially good. All of the exhibits are available at http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/web_gallery/index.html. Maybe it's the darkness in general or from the Rilke quotation in the curator's statement. I am a fan of Sunil Gupta and enjoyed the Tim Greathouse photos in this portfolio ... though they're pretty bleak. It's my melancholy side -- being Gemini, I have sides you know. As a kid, I was moody and probably relish the melancholy at the same time a coworker asked for some of my speed the other day. You know, the speed (aka adrenalin) that usually keeps me running too fast, accepting too many assignments, wanting to see and do too much. But hey, as someone said: I can sleep when I die.

Christie had asked me to find the negatives of the photos from our 1999 trip to the gardens North of Rome. I was somewhat horrified to see that a couple of the photos (one shot of Orvieto cathedral and one of the Pozzo di San Patrizio) had started to deteriorate. The photos are in sheets in an album I got from one of the archival suppliers but of course the container cannot compensate for endangered objects. Still, it was wonderful to see the photos and think again of that trip. Christie and I are probably doing birthday dinner tonight with Janet so we'll dream and try to scheme.

I knew I shouldn't have picked up the phone when Sonny called to ask for help with his résumé. Even though I said "no money," that means "not cash for my pocket" in Sonny-speak. No wonder I'm in a bleak mood. And he knows how to work the weak side: he asked if I didn't want to go see the new show at the Bronx Museum of Art when more importantly he wanted me to get the camera and violin out of the pawn shop on 149th Street. And art does make me weak: the new building of the Bronx Museum of Art, by Arquitectonica, is quite fine. The outside is more distinctive than the inside but it's pretty good and they integrated the older spaces rather well with the new part.

There's been a really interesting conversation on the MARC and arlis-cpdg lists about buildings as names. More precisely, buildings as something other than subjects. I started the conversation when I was thinking about the German/Austrian proposal for an added entry for place of conference/event, publication/distribution, or thesis conferral. When we use place in 710 in MARC, it is usually the place as a stand-in for the jurisdiction. The German/Austrian proposal is for place as venue. This was parallel to the art cataloger's desire to use a building as venue. The conversation has veered over relationships (bibliographical and beyond), FRBR objects, comparisons of AACR/RDA/MARC and other schema, parks as venues, and CPSO's ruling on parks and agencies.

So I'm trying to look for the light ... but someone recently reminded me about the joke that the light at the end of tunnel may be the train coming your way.

you pick a few and there's always more

Gallery hopping in West Chelsea used to be easy. Ten years ago, there were a handful of galleries on the far West Side in the 20s and you could reasonably visit most of them on a Saturday. Now there are several hundred galleries in the area. Instead of just going now, I usually have a handful of shows of interest and then fill in the gaps as I find them or go to the galleries where I usually find something worth seeing. Saturday, I had a couple shows on the list: Bidgood at ClampArt, Brent Green at Bellwether, Michael Petry at Sundaram Tagore.

The day started in Soho with "Boy bordello" at Leslie/Lohman. The drawings were sexy and the cardboard frames were, um, fabulous. Then "Womanizer" at Deitch Projects. You probably shouldn't miss that one. The Vaginal Davis room was rather amusing as were several other pieces. On to "Elephant cemetery" at Artists Space, curated by Christian Rattemeyer. His shows are always interesting and my favorite one at this show may have been the "New monuments for new neighborhoods" by Pedro Reyes and Terence Gower or the film by Mario Garcia Torres. The show included several slide installations and no video. Hmm.

Then Carrie Moyer's show at Canada and a group show at the Educational Alliance with Carrie as one of the artists. I preferred the pieces at the Education Alliance but Canada is one of those galleries that just makes you feel good.

On the way North, I stopped at the Polish socialist conceptualism show at Orchard. The Pawel Althamer video was a real upper; he worked with the residents of a socialist apartment block to get "2000" in window lights for New Year's. He said he just thought people needed some happiness in their lives. It was a tad corny but the faces of the participants were bright. At the B/D Grand Street station, there were musicians on both sides of the tracks, both playing Asian instruments. There had been a piece on NPR about duelling banjos and that came to mind.

On to West Chelsea. I ran into Mike Gaffney of Bobst on the way West and he recommended the African show at Sean Kelly. I started my Chelsea swing at the Santi Moix travel drawings at the Kasmin annex. They were nice and the installation was very beneficial. Sundaram Tagore is in 547 West 27th, a whole new building for me. I rediscovered Priska Juschka (I'd lost them after they left 9th Street in Williamsburg) and the Tim Doud show was quite fine. The Michael Petry show was pretty interesting though the picture in HX was deceptive. I continued on down 27th Street and found a good Joe Ovelman show at Oliver Kamm 5BE. Time was running out, it was about 6 pm but White Box was still letting people in. Their show was "Nuevo arte: colección Tequila Don Julio." It included a couple pieces by Franco Mondini Ruiz from San Antonio whose quattrocento show and pink book were delightful.

So, I had three things on the West Chelsea list and only got to one of them, and it was some of the interstices that made it such a good romp in galleryland.

On Saturday evening, I was reading the Friday Times and noticed the erasure show at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs listed in the "last chance" section. I hadn't been there and decided I could fit in a visit before going to the Carrère & Hastings lecture at Woodlawn Cemetery. When I got to the Dorsky space in Long Island City, they were setting up for an afternoon panel. I really enjoyed the show: Bidlo, Yoko Ono, Christian Holstad, Robin Clark's erased dollars, Oscar Muñoz's fabulous water drawing on hot stone (the drawing disappears as he draws and he keeps repeating on the looped video), Joanne Stamerra Hendricks's "Erase sexism at MoMA" Pink Pearl, and even Rose Mary Woods and her tape from Time.

Since it was two hours until the panel, I went over to P.S. 1. I'd been there two weeks ago so it was a revisit to most of the stuff. One of the big shows was "Altered, stitched & gathered" which was good after erased at Dorsky. Favorite moments at P.S. 1: Vija Celmins's stones, Guillermo Kuitca's "Everything" map (the Oregon portion stopped just North of Sunny Valley where Tee lived and the map included Kansas City, Fort Worth, Topeka, Calgary and lots of other places of relevance in one way or another). Still an hour and a half so I went over to Fisher Landau Center for Art where I found a good James Brown show -- the whole 2nd floor. His titles are not unique so I couldn't help but think about the trouble one would have inventing uniform titles for them. Oh, I did LOOK at them but the five entitled "Mexico," done the same year, same size, same collection. One would presumably end up with "Mexico [teal and red]. 1982" as the uniform title. This is when you need universal identifiers; let's hope the Fisher Landau uses accession numbers. And it also reinforces that little adage (thanks, Linda Barnhart) that a thumbnail is part of the descriptive metadata for a work of art, to confirm that you are indeed talking about the same thing. The "erasure" panel was interesting and included a performance piece by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters. The dichotomies: permanence / impermanence; ephemeral / durability; conserve / not conserve (the play of conservation and conservative); fragility. As Lorriane O'Grady said "I don't know many performance artists who have allowed their work to disappear."

gerome, raidpere ... et al.

It's been a while. Yesterday afternoon, I went to a lecture on Jean-Léon Gérôme by Marc Gotlieb at the Institute of Fine Arts. He talked about how we viewers are looking at the narrative from a space outside the picture and how the moment of highest emotion has passed. For example, the line of people are returning to Jerusalem in "Golgotha" (Musée d'Orsay) and the shadows of the crosses are underplayed in the right foreground. We probably read the background and come forward to the shadows.

After the lecture, I went up and looked at magazines before meeting Christie at the Josef Hoffmann show at the Neue Galerie. While perusing the magazines, I came across a review/notice of a recent exhibition by Mark Raidpere. I don't know why he wasn't in my consciousness but he is now. He has been doing art photography for about 10 years after working as a fashion photographer. He was the Estonian entry at the Biennale di Venezia in 2005. He mixes traumatic self-portraits, prisoners, family, social rejection, and other rather bleak themes, with a "guarded gay-identity."

"The guarded gay-identity in his oeuvre is simply the reality that he shapes into art as direct experience, into works that are not aggressive or political but instead make you feel and think at the same time." -- Maria-Kristiina Soomre
http://www.kontakt.erstebankgroup.net/events/2006-11_CAC+Mark+Reidpere/en

I also liked this quote [this is for my sister Carol]:
For many, nakedness is humiliating and intimidating (--). For some this satisfies their need for exposure (E. Cooper). To remain clothed means to stay in safety, to keep the anonymous shields of social agreement around yourself.
Hanno Soans and Elo-Liis Parmas: Raidpere's Self-Image
http://www.einst.ee/Ea/2/TEXT/raidp.htm

Anyway, I've been enjoying traversing the net (aka googling) on Raidpere and reading about his work. The prison theme is especially poignant because of my own guarded personal business, but also because I just put Fish: a memoir of a boy in a man's prison by T.J. Parsell in my bag as my next book. It's too close, it's too foreign. We are all guarded in some of the business of our life though ...

I just finished reading The intimate life of Abraham Lincoln by C.A. Tripp and he speaks of Lincoln as a guileless truth-speaking pragmatist.

Now, the Hoffmann show was an unqualified delight. The show reconstructs four rooms by Hoffmann with supporting documentation and objects. The rooms are beautifully set in the beaux-arts galleries of the Neue Galerie. Seeing it with Christie was especially right since we both respond vigorously to the Vienna 1900 style but have varying personal preferences. There were a couple boxes of galuchat and neither of us recognized that material. (AAT: Leather made from the skin of a ray fish and characterized by a covering of pearl-like papillae usually ground flat leaving a pattern of tiny contiguous circles which are further emphasized by dyeing.) On one of the galuchat boxes, the tiny circles were darkened for emphasis. Alas, the top was on a high shelf and I hesitated to hoist Christie up so that she could see the emphasis.

After the Hoffmann show, we went to Serafina at 79th and Madison and had a very nice arugula salad and napolitana pizza, with Montepulciano d'Abruzzo house red.

Last week was ALA Midwinter in Seattle. The conference was good and I'll eventually get my report done on http://artcataloging.net/alagen.html. Lots of good discussions at MARBI and I attended most of CC:DA this time. While I am somewhat discouraged by the "progress" on RDA, the CC:DA discussions were mostly interesting. FAST is also moving forward, not with as much revolution as I might like but it is promising. There was also the usual complement of talking with friends over food and not. I got to Seattle about mid-day on Thursday and meandered through the new Seattle Public Library building by Rem Koolhaas. It is really wonderful to walk about in but one has read of staff dissatisfaction. There was a man in a green shirt on the green-lit escalator and he positively glowed. http://www.arcspace.com/architects/koolhaas/Seattle/

antagonism & victimization

"The next day, though, [Jane] Addams and [John] Dewey got into an argument. It was an argument about argument. Addams said she believed that antagonism was always unnecessary. It never arose from real, objective differences, she told Dewey, 'but from a person's mixing in his own personal reactions -- the extra emphasis he gave the truth, the enjoyment he took in doing a thing because it was unpalatable to others, or the feeling that one must show his own colors.' If Christ drove the moneychangers out of the temple, she said, so much the worse for Christianity. The Civil War, too, showed the futulity of antagonism: 'we freed the slaves by war & and [sic] had now to free them all over again individually, & pay the costs of the war & reckon with the added bitterness of the Southerner beside'." -- The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, p. 313.

Thoughts of Iraq and how the antagonism there just worsens life for everyone, or at least for those that aren't dead yet.

And how desire to avoid antagonism can lead to exploitation ... and, here, it gets personal, way too personal.