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)

at swim, two boys

Down in western Kentucky, helping my sister fetch her RV from its snowbird perch. We went exploring in Paducah yesterday and came home via Wickliffe which is on the Mississippi River. We found the town boat launch and two boys swimming after playing basketball. All very romantic.

knee-jerk preservationist

There was a time when I was quite the knee-jerk preservationist but now I'm more of a both-and kind of person (you CAN have it all). That is, you can have historic buildings but the built environment can be enlivened by a mix of good buildings. I was taken by a description of the Kirkland Oil Field Office in Hennessey, Oklahoma. It was designed by Elliott + Associates Architects and was written up in the May 2012 issue of Architectural Record as part of a section on The Short and the Tall of It. Here's what the author, Beth Brooke, had to say of the building: "Elliott + Associates principal Rand Elliott, an Oklahoma native with a long list of renovation and adaptive reuse projects under his belt, understood that filling the gaping hole [left by a disastrous fire] did not lie in a historicist approach. Instead, he created a bold, 21st-century building that relies on proportion and scale to fit into its historic context. The building is sensitive to the 25-foot-wide lots and the height of adjacent buildings as well as other details of the surrounding vernacular." We had a disastrous fire in Alfred two and a half years ago and I can only hope that the gaping hole will get filled so deliciously. The picture is from the Architectural Record website.

Packard Plant color scheme redux

At the old Packard Plant in Detroit. It looks like paint but it was "just" pigment, all dusty and ready to cling to your shoes. Megan, Matt and I clambered about in the Packard Plant when I was in Detroit last week. It was glorious fun. A couple people told us there was a scavenger hunt going on and we should look for pink balloons. Matt noticed one down in the subterranean tunnels and climbed down in to get the balloon and attached envelope. Inside the envelope were several UPS labels with images added and a one-dollar bill with a rubber stamp. Matt gave me the label with some old cars driving into the background.

It's end-of-year time for the art students at Alfred University and there have been a bunch of shows in various buildings in Alfred and Hornell and outside too. One of the Freshman Foundations student memory boxes reminded me of the Packard Plant spilled pigment. My time in Detroit for the Society of Architectural Historians conference was absolutely fantastic for a variety of reasons: staying at the Hostel Detroit with several others from SAH and several Brits, a German, and a Tatar; discovering that a pottery graduate from AU last year was renovating a rowhouse next door to the hostel; meandering the city, on foot and in my car; supper with Megan and Les and Matt and Michel in a Mies van der Rohe rowhouse; the conference; visiting Michigan's largest used bookstore, John K. King Used and Rare Books. I might get another blog entry done about Detroit and perhaps Cleveland where I spent a couple days on the way back to Alfred. Meanwhile, there are pictures on my Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/

small world all o'er the place

Someone said in their Facebook feed that the world is small, based on some coincidence. I've been having those too recently ... as if it wasn't always the case. I just started reading Hadrian the Seventh about a peculiar Englishman who gets selected pope in the most peculiar way. I'm less than 200 pages into the book and discovered there's a new movie called "We have a Pope" that was just reviewed by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. The review is entitled "A reluctant pontiff escapes to the streets." Hadrian isn't reluctant, he's got an agenda, and he takes to the streets.

I mentioned in a recent blog post that I was going to Detroit and staying at the Hostel Detroit that had been mentioned by my artist-friend Vagner Whitehead. It turns out that my step cousin who lives in Detroit happens to know the guy that manages the hostel and that his partner is a librarian AND that she's inviting us all over the supper on Saturday night AND that four of the six people in that crowd have forenames beginning with M.

My next cataloging gig is based at Columbia and I'm going down to the City for some training later this week. I just got back from an artist talk here in Alfred and get a pretty good diet of it. Still, I was excited to see that there was a panel on the "queer piers" show at Leslie/Lohman on Thursday night. I thought: OK. And then I read that there's a talk on Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights on Wednesday night.

Small world, full of coincidences, indeed.

New Palladians: Checkerboard House, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2008

New Palladians: Checkerboard House, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2008: www.alriti.com

tender, immediate, and rich with pathos

Hate to be predictable but there always seems to be something in my Sunday reading that invites a blog post. I work from 2-10 pm at Scholes Library, at the reference desk, usually with some cataloging to do along with whatever comes up. I've cataloged several books, done "add printer" with several people, changed the toner, and decided to look at a few art magazines before supper. The January/February 2012 issue of Art papers has a review by Kate Green of Donald Moffett's recent show at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

"One of the show's revelations is Mr. Gay in the U.S.A., 2001, a suite of eighteen pencil drawings installed in a small room of their own. A gentle touch is at play in this project, which is based on a court case against Ronald Gay, who was convicted of murder after he walked into a gay bar and fired shots. Gay was apparently tired of receiving flack for his last name. In the work, Moffett presents his visual and linguistic observations of the proceedings on heavy, framed sheets of paper. One page features a sketch of a man's arm accompanied by the words 'turquoise tattoo.' Another includes a set of scales and the phrase 'Lady Justice.' The images are tender, immediate, and rich with pathos for the complicated circumstances that brought Gay to this point.

The most sensual element of the exhibition is Comfort Hole, 2010, a series of eight small monochromatic paintings. In many of these works, blades of white paint stand out three-dimensionally from wooden panels, like hanging patches of heavenly grass. After you tire of trying to figure out the artist's technique, you will marvel at his skill. You might also be amused by the title. The circles that Moffett has punched through these sublime, otherwise pristine paintings are coded references to the holes used in gay clubs for anonymous pleasure. You will walk away from this suite of paintings as you will from the exhibition -- impressed by Moffett's sustained ability to make art that is, in equal measure, visually and socially significant."

I am intrigued by her description of the Mr. Gay series and am dumbfounded by her description of glory holes in the Comfort Hole description.

labyrinths and mazes: amazing

In yesterday's cataloging, I was looking at subject headings for labyrinths and mazes, particularly gardens. The headings are:

Labyrinths [preferred heading]
Mazes [variant, UF]

Maze gardens [preferred heading]
Labyrinth gardens [variant, UF]

It was interesting to me that the overall term used labyrinth as its base while the garden heading used maze. And, then, in today's crossword puzzle in the New York Times, the clue for 10 across is labyrinth and the answer is, ta da, maze. I'm not sure I've thought of the terms as synonymous but I couldn't tell you what distinguishes one from the other without looking it up. And you may have read that the Encyclopedia Britannica is going totally electronic after the current print edition. It's hard to imagine my youth without volumes of the encyclopedia for drifting through.

The image is of the maze at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, from the Peak District Information page. I did get to Chatsworth once in the 1980s but read Deborah Mitford's memoir recently and would love to go visit again.

Detroit, here we come

Elisabeth Sussman is asked in the March 2012 issue of Modern painters "Which international city gives you the greatest hope for contemporary art's future?" She responds: "Detroit. It exists at degree zero now, but it has an incredible past: early industrial architecture, Diego Rivera murals, a history of radical politics. It's a haunted and a haunting place."

Can I tell you that my dream to see more of Detroit will come true in April when I go to the annual conference of the Society for Architectural Historians? I'm so excited and I plan on turning it into a real adventure by staying at the Hostel Detroit in North Corktown, thanks to Vagner for mentioning the Hostel. Some of the pictures of the hostel show a plain facade and the one below shows it gaily painted. The aerial view on Google Maps is full of vacancies and greens. Haunted and haunting.