129 to 100

Friday evening we were at Blind Tiger Ale House on Bleecker at Jones. Elizabeth and I were trying to figure out the demographics: lots of men but not the high proportion of visibly gay men that you might have expected in the West Village. Today's paper had an article about the ratio of men to women in downtown NYC: 129 men to 100 women. So it's all of those Wall Street guys! It seems that women are looking for neighborhood amenities and men are looking for a good commute.

Our reason for being at Blind Tiger was to wish Emily a good next stage. She is leaving NYU and will be sorely missed. She has brought humanity with good management skills. She brought life to our dysfunctional work "family." And she was a fine colleague in so many ways.

It's a gorgeous day. I got up early -- arrived at Silver Spurs at 7 a.m. When I woke up, the thoughts about the introduction to my ARLIS/NA session swirling in my head. I'll throw off the slides and just talk for a while. I figured out how to work Benjamin into those introductory words; that's my private joke for Sharon. When I told her that I had found some inspiration in Benjamin, she wondered if she had time to whip out the introductory issue of Not Walter, our faux journal of critical theory dreamed up when we were at the symposium honoring Angela Giral on the occasion of her retirement at Avery Librarian. The journal issue didn't happen but then it would probably be Not Not Walter.

melancholy in the work of bosch

Just reading through email, I came across the notice for the grad student art history symposium sponsored by IFA and the Frick. One of the papers is "The Delusion of Delight: Melancholy in the Work of Bosch" by Anna Ratner, Columbia University. Both "melancholy" and "Bosch" trigger my interest. I'll have to watch for her dissertation or articles.

It's been a while since I've put anything here. My brother called a bit ago to say there's a northeaster coming this way. If I don't go to Alfred this weekend, it will be June before I could easily get there again so we'll face the weather. The bus is usually pretty stalwart.

Bill Connor visited last weekend and we went to the Met to see the Barcelona and Venice shows. The Venice and Islam show was interesting and there were some nice works; more Islam in Venice than otherwise. The Barcelona show was fantabulous! Lots of architecture, including a wonderful model of the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris 1937 expo. Robert and Andrew had both talked to me about Spanish Civil War stuff in the past week, partly the authority work for the various Spanish armies of the mid-late 1930s. So I was ready to be intrigued. And "Guernica" was in the pavilion, as well as big Miro stuff. The Barcelona show was a nice mix of painting, architecture, dec arts, objects (as Roberto said, it's strange that the Met has multiple big shows at the moment that are more material culture than fine arts).

Bill and I also went to his uncle's opening at Andre Zarre Gallery on West 20th where we ran into Carol and Bob Krinsky. Carol had been a camp counselor with Adele who is now Uncle Russell's wife. Small world. Bill spent the afternoon gallery hopping while I saw the Robert Moses show at Columbia with Francie, Liza and John, and then went for pizza at V&T on Amsterdam. The Moses show was fun with such avid New Yorkers who know intimately one or more of the neighborhoods where projects were proposed and/or built (Washington Square and Pratt, principally).

ohmygod, it's walter!

On the flight back from Kansas City, I was reading "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" by Walter Benjamin. I was struck by his comments (chapter X in the Schocken paperback edition) about how printing blurred the line between writer and reader. That set me to musing about how blogging and other social computing really blurs those edges, almost to the point of extinction. We are all writers, we are all readers!

Before I started reading the Benjamin essay, I was finishing An unquiet mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. When in a manic state, she couldn't read. My moods or racing thoughts do sometimes get in the way of reading but I haven't been debilitatingly devastated for long. If you haven't read the Jamison book, I recommend it highly.

VRA in Kansas City

VRA was a fabulous conference. Kansas City was really good to us: mostly good weather, warm with thundershowers and hard rain (but not for long). A few of my favorite things: Jonathan Furner on FRBR (I was part of that panel and my paper was misdirected but the discussion after the presentations was splendid); Megan Winget on Flickr; walking back and forth between the conference hotel and my guesthouse (about 20 minutes walk); driving about with Nancy Green and her husband Scott through the fancy suburbs old and new and then supper at Blue Koi; lots of good meals with friends old and new; Country Club Plaza; the wonderful symmetrical brick building at the foot of Baltimore Street; walking from my guesthouse to downtown and finding the city market; the Caravaggio at the Nelson-Atkins; running into Brian at the Nelson-Atkins and talking about a couple Indian sculptures and other stuff; getting into the new library reading room at NAMA, designed by Steven Holl and filled with diffuse light (the galleries open in June but you could get in to see the reading room if someone was available to guide you); the wind so strong it tried to steal my Birkenstock; LattéLand's medium latté; going dancing at Missie B's with Elaine, Lia and Pep (and, mentioning Lia, getting my own "Don't ask me about metadata ... ask Murtha" t-shirt!). Though that list is more about stuff around the meetings than about the meetings, I did hear many good papers and discussions. Once I've studied my notes, I might even do up a summary.

powers & the power of art

This month's bookclub selection is Three farmers on their way to a dance by Richard Powers, published about 20 years ago but suggested by Daniel who is reading Powers's newest novel. Three farmers has been occasionally confusing but wonderful. The section on Sarah Bernhardt, directly on Bernhardt, was especially great as have been several sections as I near the end. Here's a quote for you:

"I prefer walking to any other means of getting from A to B. It's a perversity on my part, pure and simple, but I enjoy the feeling of even the smallest, ten-cent errand taking up twenty dollars of my prorated time." (p. 261)

Talk about a different way to say "stop and smell the roses." Of course in New York City it is sometimes faster to walk but then that's just a bit more perversity that NYC spreads about.

That quote is from a section entitled "The cheap and accessible print" which is really a post-Walter essay on the photograph and whether it is more or less real than life. I might just have to take Illuminations with me to Kansas City so I can finally read the "mechanical reproduction" essay by Benjamin. Peter's trip to the catacombs with the bums of Paris is also extraordinarily good.

It wasn't the day I thought I'd have. After an expensive grocery shopping trip in the Bronx (the answer to the unasked question is "yes"), I decided I needed some art and went to the Guggenheim to see the Spanish show. It closes before I get back from Kansas City. It really had some wonderful paintings and not as many dogs as I'd been warned about. There were at least three still life paintings by Juan van der Hamen (signature: Banderamen), a couple of which had "sweets." In one, the cubic sweets looked suspiciously like Rice Krispie Treats. Who knew that RKTs were around in the early 17th century? Great portraits by El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán (St Isabel of Portugal), Sánchez Coello (is that Meryl Streep?), Goya. Some of the formulaic portraits had a strangely surrealist look, e.g., the Pantoja de la Cruz portrait of Don Felipe and Doña Ana. I remember having discussions in high school art class about what was Spanish in Spanish art. One of the Sánchez Cotán vegetable still lifes had little wings on the cardoon that Bosch could have painted. And a really wonderful early Picasso "Green bowl and black bottle" (1908, in the Hermitage) that was painted as the shapes were beginning to break up in the cubist melée. The last (or first) painting was the wonderful "Agnus Dei" by Zurbarán from the Prado. The painting was as alone on its wall as the shackled lamb is in the painting.

jankowski, opton, levy, harris, morell

Lots of good art out there. After a few hours in the office working on various things and not finetuning my VRA paper, I went out to do the galleries. One of the emails I got was from Lynda Bunting about a Terence Koh article and the footer mentioned that Maccarone was now at 630 Greenwich Street and that they had a Christian Jankowski show. Since that was the destination furthest South, I went there first. They've been in their new space for less than four weeks. After a grubby (but groovy) Canal Street space, they are now in a swanky and quite fine southern West Village space. The Jankowski pieces didn't move as many I've seen but the paintings in back were good. The female sculpture in the front was special too, lovely drapery.

Next up were several galleries at 511 West 25th, probably my current favorite building. The Suzanne Opton photos at Peter Hay Halpert are extraordinary. I'd seen pictures and read about them, most compellingly by Thomas Micchelli in The Brooklyn rail. The photos on display were the larger size. The faces are like wax or plastic at that dimension. I hadn't expected that transformation. The serenity is such a contrast with their soldiering, I guess. On to A.I.R. with its 7th Biennial. There was Mary Ann Ramer, friend of Charles and Don who, as it happens, said she, are about to arrive in NYC for a bit of opera. Since I'm leaving on Monday for VRA, it's not likely that I'll see them. Sigh. The last time Don was down I was just leaving for somewhere. They're pretty intense with their opera viewing but I did run into them once at the Whitney.

Then the Carrie Levy photos at Daniel Cooney Fine Art. Wow. One of her bigger projects, including a book, was 51 months about her father and his prison term. Since prison is too hot a term with me, that made the photos which were from other series even more compelling. The subjects of the photos are always facing away or have their head buried in something. When I went to find you the reader something about Levy's show, I happened on Cooney's blog which is quite fine and has a lovely list of art and other blogs that look pretty interesting.

Next up, photos of mudcaked Bibles by Terri Garland at Klotz. Also some of the Bibles found in waterlogged churches in New Orleans. Mitchell Algus had a show of op art paintings by Roy Colmer (horizontal stripes with hazy vertical color fields adding to the OPtical effect), described as TV interference in the press release. Downstairs, George Billis was showing Richard Orient beach scapes: lovely. In the back room was the muddy-colored painting of a room with the corner of a bed and a red-striped pillow by Kenny Harris. Only $1250. Seeing something like that, and I've seen it before and dreamed of owning it, almost makes me cry since I stupidly have been back in Sonny's grip and probably spent almost that much as his ATM in the past 5 or 6 weeks. No painting by Harris, no new laptop. Just tears and regret. The Sonny saga does, of course, however intensify the relevance of Levy's 51 months.

Down the street a ways to Clamp Art. The show in front didn't do much for me but there were some lovely photos by George Daniell and others in the back space. Florence Lynch had works by Carol Ferraris, including an interesting video "Osamu." Cuningham had Joan Snyder; the drawings and other works on paper at Alexandre Gallery in late 2004 is still my favorite Snyder show.

The Dotty Attie show at P.P.O.W. was delightful.

Getting sated but the Abelardo Morell show was still on the list. His camera obscura works at Danziger Projects are extraordinary. The camera obscura image is superimposed on an interior so you get a sort of double exposure with the interior right side up and the camera obscura image upside down ... though of course right side and upside down are relative terms. When I talked to Rachel a couple hours later, she mentioned that "Abe" had done a work at the Eastman House: an installation from the garden into a darkened room with the people walking around in the garden upside down. I figured it was worth going on to the 600 block of West 27th and I was rewarded by the Althea Thauberger show at John Connelly Presents. It's pictures of young men, not totally sexy but going there. Each photo is accompanied by a story about how the young man is having trouble with life and either is or isn't getting it together. The video, in glorious black-and-white, was a melancholy exploration of suicide and stopping it, reaching consensus and not. The characters in the video are called protagonists which increases the drama.

With the Sonny crap at a peak, the getting together of life is especially poignant. So here I am at the office, trying to avoid being home so that I can't hear the phone ring with "pick up, pick up, I know you're there." So my Gemini life continues: part delightful, part not so. Friday night was a magical concert of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 musicians" and "Music for pieces of wood" at Columbia's Miller Theatre by So Percussion and guests. Wow. Wonderful.

And I didn't even mention -- yet -- that last weekend was spent in Los Angeles. I went for a meeting on Monday at the Getty about Cataloging cultural objects. The meeting was good, appropriately mountaintop-ish. I stayed with Steve Ong (Ed Armstrong's "widow") in Silver Lake. We had a good visit and it was good to speak of Ed who died about a couple months ago. We also had fish tacos at Sharky's in Redondo Beach and drove through Culver City though the galleries were closed on Sunday. I did meander a bit around the gallery district in Chinatown and went to the American West show at LACMA. Unfortunately, the "Wack!" show at the Geffen was closed on Tuesday.

And Steve took me to Disney Concert Hall for a Paul Jacobs concert. The hall is fantastic. Jacobs is pretty wonderful, flashy. And I got to sit in "Ed's" seat which would have made Ed happy according to Steve. And Monday morning I leave for Kansas City for VRA.

3rd & 3rd

Another of "my" buildings has been sighted. Some years ago in one of my early wanderings of the territory between Park Slope and Red Hook, I happened across a wonderful building standing rather solo in a sea of lower industrial buildings. It stands at the corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street in (what?) Gowanus. It is almost like a pattern book for neoclassical ornament. Now, Laura Raskin explains it in "Birth of the concrete jungle" in the March 2007 issue of The Brooklyn rail. The building was the headquarters of the New York and Long Island Coignet Stone Company and may represent the earliest extant example of concrete construction in the U.S. The concrete has been faced with brick but there is talk of restoring it. Unfortunately (or not), the rest of the block is owned by Whole Foods Market which tells you something about the neighborhood. Raskin starts her article in a wonderful way: To love New York City is to fall for concrete and steel.

The same issue of The Brooklyn rail had a review of Suzanne Opton's "Soldier" show at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art. I have seen other stuff about the show or her work but haven't seen the show. The illustrations are very compelling though: head shots of young soldiers, with the head resting on a plain hard surface. Yes, rather like on the guillotine or scene of martyrdom. The expression on the face of "Claxton, 120 days in Afghanistan" is still. As Thomas Micchelli says in his review: These are the same soft, warm cheeks that are shredded into bloody rags, the same eyes and skulls that are pierced by snipers' bullets and lacerated by shrapnel day after hellish day of Bush's criminal war. Add context, and this exhibition is stomach churning. http://brooklynrail.org/ (current issue not yet on site)

booklovers unite!

Booklovers unite! You have nothing to (ab)use but your books! Today's essay at the back of the New York times book review is "Confessions of a book abuser" by Ben Schott. He talks about how he (ab)uses his own modern books. The illustration is eight stages in laundering Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence. He talks about marginalia and how valuable it is when it is. He doesn't however condone highlighting and tells an amusing story of someone who used a toxic highlighter and lost the important sentences, leaving only the irrelevant stuff.

Page 98 bookclub -- http://artcataloging.net/page98/page98cover.html -- is getting back together next week. We've not been meeting since last March because .... well, we just ran out of steam. Now we're regathering because we like each other and we like talking about books, sometimes the same one, sometimes not. Strangely, it was last March 5th when we last met. No assignment this time: we'll just talk about the book we most enjoyed in the last few months. We'll meet on the first Mondays of the month until it gets back into our thought-streams. My most memorable book was probably The story of the night by Colm Toibin. It's set in Buenos Aires and has a real sense of place.

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.