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.

relics and desire

February disappeared. I meant to write up some of my thoughts from the College Art Association annual conference in New York City. It hasn't happened. Daniel and Gary very kindly let me stay several extra days so I could do a bunch of gallery hopping and see friends and whatnot.

One of the shows I saw was "Objects of Devotion and Desire" at the Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College. It's on until April 30th and the catalog is available in PDF from the exhibition website. The show was put together by medievalist Cynthia Hahn and the students in a contemporary art class. It included a few reliquaries from the Metropolitan as well as recent works of art that played off the theme.

I read Hahn's catalog essay on the bus ride back upstate. She traces the history of relics and uses the neologism re-licing "in order to put the focus on a verb or action rather than a noun or object" (p. 9). My first thought was that this was a lost opportunity to turn a "c" word into a "ck" word when you use the "ing" ending of the present participle, e.g., picnicking, frolicking. Then, it occurred to me that "re-licing" would be "relicking." This had potential for seeming naughty ... but perhaps is wonderfully appropriate for relics.

The picture is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the work is: Arm reliquary. 13th cent. (with 15th cent. additions). French. Silver, silver-gilt, glass and rock crystal cabochons over wood core. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Accession number 17.190.353. For more information, click on the name of the work.

mud pies!??!!

In an article on the return of "Baby Doc" Duvalier to Haiti, the New York Times says that women are selling mud pies out front of Fort Dimanche which once held political prisoners. Mud pies!?! When we were kids and made mud pies, we didn't HAVE to eat them because there was nothing else to eat. Just imagine.

Elsewhere in the paper, there's a review of The haves and have-nots: a brief and idiosyncratic history of global inequality by Branko Milanovic. The reviewer, Catherine Rampell, states that the richest 5% in India makes the same as or less than the poorest 5% in the U.S. That's even counting the Mumbai McMansions. No wonder folks risk their lives to get to the rich countries.

I did find it heartening that Mexico was making progress on universal health care but the overwhelming feeling of social global helplessness in the face of world problems made it a little hard, and very guilt-ridden, to finish my simple breakfast of pancakes and one egg ... especially in light of getting excited about the airfares from Aer Lingus for late spring.

once more: the comma

Barbery and Byatt fans will remember earlier posts on the comma and good, long sentences. As I work my way through Babel Tower, I encountered this sentence. The last comma would probably have sent the Barbery concierge into a tizzy:

"He is not ready, and may never be, and she may not want him to be, now, or yet, or ever, how can she tell, but the law and Nigel will make it be solid, be cut and dried -- cut, and dried -- gone ..." [closing ellipsis in text]

And you might find the essay on the long sentence by Ed Park in the December 24th New York Times Book Review interesting.

brutalism

Hmm. I wonder which is more brutal: the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier's brutalist masterpiece (top), or what they've done to the old building of the Fogg Art Museum (bottom).

Polish cabin fever

New Year's Day 2011 in Boston, and the weather is pretty close to perfect. It's in the 50s (at least) and the snow from the Blizzard of 2010 is disappearing except the stacks. What you need after the Eve's drunken excess is a quiet walk around the neighborhood. I'm at Bill's in Cambridge, Massachusetts and he suggested that I might want to see how the Fogg looks as it is being deconstructed and reconstructed to Renzo Piano's grand plan. They've taken down the back wall, lots of the guts, and Werner Otto Hall from the 1990s. The Fogg is next to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts done by Le Corbusier in the early 1960s, his only building in North America (not including the U.N. building) and a grand brutalist building. You can see a lot more of Carpenter without Werner Otto and Fogg back in the way.

After I got home to Bill's, he was almost done with preparations for folks coming over at 4 and I insisted that he go get some fresh air rather than my going to get a bottle of wine. WGBH was playing a Rimsky-Korsakov work and it ended. The announcer started telling us what she would play next and I thought I'd like to hear the "Warsaw Concerto" ... so she announced she was about to play the "Warsaw Concerto." Magic. It must be a sign that the coming year will be fine.

For the curious, the picture is of the Lazienski Palace in Warsaw, taken by Andrew Ward, Getty Images, and picked at "random" from the Google Image results from "warsaw poland." The picture with snow was from a war game so not appropriate for me. And the fact that I picked a picture of a neoclassical (Palladian) building is totally coincidental.

over the river and through the woods

I'm on a Christmas-New Year's trip to Queensbury, Portland, and Boston. My older sister Roberta lives in Queensbury, in the exurbs of Albany. We had a nice evening and breakfast. I had it in my mind that I could do a bunch of art hopping on the way to Portland: the Tang Museum at Skidmore College for the "Jewel Thief" group show which looks interesting, on to Troy for an exhibition at EMPAC (Experimental Media Performing Arts Center) at RPI (and maybe to pick up the new book The architecture of EMPAC which includes a picture of three of us art librarians in the blackbox theater), and then some Dürer at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Well, the Tang wasn't open yet, EMPAC was closed this week even though their website hadn't indicated it, but the Dürer print show at the Clark was wonderful. Since I hadn't had my contemporary fix, I stopped in at MASS MoCA and was delighted to find a Petah Coyne show entitled "Everything that rises must converge" (thoughts of Deb Kruse who also uses Flannery O'Connor for inspiration) and another visit to the Sol LeWitt installation, as well as Michael Oatman's work "All utopias fell" which includes a football field-sized photovoltaic cell installation on the roof.



At about this time, the weather reports on the radio were talking about a coastal winter storm. I didn't see snow right away but it was pretty thick and windy as I approached Boston and the drive up to Portland was pretty dramatic. I didn't have any trouble (keep knocking on wood) and enjoyed my evening with Christie and Janet. The morning included considerable worry about Janet's return to NYC via bus and train but she seems to be getting there.

Oh, the picture at the top. When I'm doing the drive from Queensbury to Boston, I like to take the blue highway, Route 2, across Massachusetts. Just after you climb the mountain out of North Adams, you get to the town of Florida, Massachusetts. It is especially fun to see the "Entering Florida" sign in the winter, and I've done that more than seeing the sign in the balmy weather.

commas and just one semi-colon

Back in September, I blogged about Muriel Barbery's use of the comma in her novel The elegance of the hedgehog. I'm now reading Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt and there's a wonderful sentence that uses commas in quite an extraordinary way: series within series with just commas and only one semi-colon. The passage appears on page 202 in the Vintage International paperback edition and it reads:

"The children themselves, of whom there were perhaps fifty or sixty in the Tower, were not present at this oration, for various ladies had voluntarily taken upon themselves to teach the little creatures the skills of the old civilisation, to wit, reading, writing, figuring, languages, dead and alive, sewing, plain and ornamental, drawing and painting, singing, dancing, playing on flutes, fiddles, tambourines and glockenspiel, making paper carnations, cooking little cakes, observing such humble creatures as spiders, lizards, flies, cockroaches, earthworms and mice; also the growth of beans and mustard seeds."

That single semi-colon is wonderful as a sort of delicacy.

The novel includes two narratives: one set in the present day about a woman rediscovering herself after escaping an abusive marriage and another set in undetermined time, rather medieval or post-apocalyptic. The two stories have some parallels and not. The book was recommended by an artist friend, Moira Kelly, who gave me a little evangelical pamphlet which I decided became an artist's book even though Moira's intervention in the creation of the book was merely the act of giving it to me, with enthusiasm and spontaneity during the NY Art Book Fair which, again this year, blew my socks off at P.S. 1.

(The image is Pieter Brueghel's "Tower of Babel" which is in the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Vienna. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)