just don't call it critical theory

Critical race theory is getting bashed these days so I don't want to say this post is about critical feminist theory. Nonetheless, I just listened to most of the keynote address by Lauren Klein at the 2021 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. I was thoroughly heartened by her statement that working to change a system is worth it if it has a long history and is widely used. This was said in the context of a question about whether it's worth it to fix outdated and offensive terminology in LCSH and other vocabularies or should you just start over. She applied her theoretical work based on intersectional feminism to say that we should topple the hierarchy, smash the binary, and embrace pluralism. Use LCSH, try to fix it, supplement it in the short term by other vocabulary. Both/and, not either/or.

separated at birth: Boullée and Bourgeois

 

  Étienne-Louis Boullée,

cenotaph for Isaac Newton after plans by Boullée,

model by Bernd Grimm, photo by Jan Kraege

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Bourgeois,

Untitled, 1991-2000, white marble

MASS MoCA, photo taken 13 July 2021

armchair traveler: Edmunds, Washington/Maine

 

At today's virtual meeting of the VRA Cataloging & Metadata Standards Committee (CaMS), someone mentioned Story Maps software in connection with our discussion of coding the geographic coordinates of a building depicted in an image. I googled "story maps" after the meeting and went for a visit at the Library of Congress. I picked the Roadside America story map from photos by John Margolies who could easily be called the father of roadside Americana. Touring about the story map, I settled on various places I've visited. I clicked on the furthest east pin in far eastern Maine, near the bridge over to Campobello Island (New Brunswick) which I memorably visited with Christie. The pin led to the picture above and the metadata said the sign was located in Edmunds, Washington. Wrong side of the continental United States. My first thought was that the pin had slipped off the West Coast and ended up on the East Coast.

Appropriately enough, I ended up going into a rabbit hole to figure out why the pin got in the wrong place. Did the coordinates get entered wrong? But the coordinates were not in the LC bib record for the image. Then I zoomed into the part of Maine where the pin was stuck. Ah, Edmunds, Maine. The authorized heading for the town in Washington is Edmonds but there's a reference from Edmunds.

The image metadata indicated that the Harvey's Tavern sign was on Route 99. No Route 99 in that part of Maine but there it was in Washington. Got the little yellow man in Google Maps to take me on a tour of Route 99. There was the sign though it now says Harvey's Lounge. The picture of the rabbit appears to be the same. That stretch of Route 99 looks pretty busy nowadays.

at the corner of Delancey and Chrystie

 

I was walking around the Lower East Side in New York City after a visit to the New Museum to see the "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America" exhibition. I noticed a building at the corner of Delancey and Chrystie streets that had a facade decorated with squashed soda or beer cans that reminded me of the work of El Anatsui.

A while later, I was having a mid-afternoon meal at Loreley, a longtime favorite since the days when one could smoke in the beer garden out back. I asked the waiter if she knew the building and what the name of the current occupant was. She said that it was some fancy boutique that she wouldn't shop at. Same here. But I was curious about the logo on the facade that looked almost like the Masonic symbol. I decided to see if I could get the name by asking the little yellow man on Google Maps to zoom in and find the name in Street View. Well, he found the old version of the building. Metadata indicates August 2019. It doesn't answer my question about the logo but it's interesting to see what's beneath the new incarnation.

P.S, I walked by the store again a couple days later on the way to the subway. It's the Daily Paper Clothing NYC flagship store. Getting the daily paper, of the Times variety, on Sundays in Ridgewood is nigh impossible.

P.P.S. This is what the building looked like on 27 May 2021.

separated at birth = elective affinities

I was looking at the September-December 2019 issue of Visual resources, a special theme issue on "Art and the periphery: in memoriam Foteini Vlachou." Vlachou died in 2017 at the age of 42. The obituary essay in the issue included a mention of her blog - https://iknowwhereimgoing.wordpress.com/ - which is still available, without new entries. I went to look at it and was intrigued by her series called "Elective affinities" in which she did about three dozen posts with a pictorial comparison or reflection. The last one, done two months before she died and marked "hors série," was a book cover for Estrela solitária by Ruy Castro compared to the Barberini Faun.

"Separated at birth" just seems so mundane relative to "elective affinities" and "hors série" is pretty esoteric too. Still, I really enjoy doing my "separated at birth" posts and won't appropriate "elective affinities" though I'm really glad I found Vlachou's posts. She credits the comparison to Arthur Valle who used the juxtaposition on his Facebook page.

separated at birth: ladder to the river, ladder to the sky

 

"ladder to the river"

posted to Flickr by Alberta Mayo, copied here with permission

https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamuseum/50885119208

Martin Puryear

"Ladder for Booker T. Washington" (1996)

(installation at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2015)

separated at birth: firehose or is it art?

The Allentown Volunteer Fire Company

offered 700 feet of four-inch hose, free to a good home.

Tammy suggested it would make for a good stretch of walkway ...

but all I could think of was "Civil tapestry 5" (2012) by Theaster Gates.

 (now in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery)

https://www.albrightknox.org/artworks/20143a-b-civil-tapestry-5

I do not mean to make light of Gates's allusion in this work to the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and the use of fire hoses to spray protestors during demonstrations. The collection entry linked above gives a brief description of the history of the works that Gates did with decommissioned fire hoses.

armchair traveler: biking to Terlingua or Antwerp

Sherry Volk does an amusing column in the local paper, The Alfred Sun, called "Scene about Alfred." She does one or more pictures from around town with a story or theme. She and Bob go down to Big Bend for a while during the winter and they're down there now so the "scene ABOUT Alfred" is not a scene IN Alfred. This week's paper had some pictures of bikers on the Big Bend Run, stopped in Terlingua at the Alon gas station on Route 118, at the intersection with 170.

Sherry and Bob stay in an RV camp near the intersection. There's a motel there too and Arno and Marvin and I spent a few days at the motel in 1995, very happily, while we hiked (aka walked) in the beautiful arid mountains, drank margaritas, and ate yummy Tex-Mex food.

Sherry's pictures took me to Antwerp as well. When I was there in 2014, there were a bunch of bikers in the Old Market Square.

It may be sacrilegious but there was a hymn this morning in church that had the words "'till traveling days are done." Nope, I'm not done yet.

thinking about my carbon footprint

There's a panel discussion on resilient communities this afternoon based on the 2018 NOVA documentary about "Decoding the Weather Machine." The discussants are an Alfred University environmental science professor (Frederic Beaudry), a sustainable food systems undergrad (Dale Mott Slater), and an MFA graduate student in ceramics (Marianne Chénard). The scientists in the film laid the groundwork for resiliency in the face of climate change and then spent the last portion talking about what we humans can do: we can do nothing; we can adapt; we can act to mitigate the circumstances. The more you mitigate, the less you have to adapt to, say, flood waters, wildfires and smoke-filled skies, and extreme storms.

I was feeling pretty good about my overgrown lawn which captures carbon and stores it. And then I remembered my leaky old house in which I have ten rooms to myself and my stuff (and the heritage stuff that comes with serving as "trustee" for the family homestead). All that space needing heat, presently provided by natural gas. There's plenty I could do to mitigate my carbon footprint beyond my reliance on walking as much as I can to do things around town and letting the plants go wild with capturing carbon. I did establish "Embedded carbon" for the Avery Index as part of my indexing. That doesn't mitigate my carbon use but I could consolidate my winter residing to a few rooms. But then I'd have to decide if I wanted to be upstairs or downstairs.

When I moved to Alfred in 2009 after retiring from New York University, I pretty much lived in the whole house but mostly used the kitchen and bath downstairs, sleeping upstairs. I consolidated downstairs when I rented most of the upstairs to a student friend of my brother's. I spread out again after he graduated and moved to a different space. Then I consolidated upstairs when my ex sister-in-law needed a place to stay after separating from my brother. The upstairs is less encumbered with heritage materials since my parents had rented it quite consistently for several years in the 1990s. I have felt more like I was in "my" space. After Jeanette moved to her new house in Almond (she likes to own a house which I see more as a noose), I spread out some but kept most of my living needs upstairs. That is, my study as well as the kitchen and bath stuff. It works well and I get exercise using the stairs much more. BUT ...

It isn't very smart for energy consumption. It's difficult to close off space when it gets really cold or hot. Upstairs is generally colder in winter and warmer in summer. Alfred rarely gets hot for longer than a few days and generally gets cool overnight so summer works pretty well. I do feel silly that I have to heat the downstairs air in order to have heat upstairs.

With all of this in mind, I took off with enthusiasm to walk downtown to do a bank errand, thinking I'd come home and start pushing and shoving some of that heritage stuff before the panel discussion this afternoon. By "pushing and shoving some heritage stuff," there are some simple tasks like sorting through my dad's and my mom's desks and consolidating all of the paper clips, pencils, pens, paper pads, and other office supplies, keeping what is useful and sharing the surplus. That might make one of those desks usable again as more than a storage cabinet. There are more significant and difficult tasks but it's difficult to get to them with the stacks of unnecessary and generic materials in the way. You see, the house is overgrown too.

cataloger tools & reference questions

Meredith Hale, metadata librarian at the University of Tennessee, asked on ARLIS-L if anyone could provide an authoritative source for the birth and death dates of the photographer who signed his photos Wasow. She needed the information for rights clearance and authority record creation. She noted that there are several images on Wikimedia Commons, including this portrait of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin from 1924.

Spyros Koulouris, archivist at I Tatti in Florence, responded with the link to Wasow's record in the Deutsches National Bibliothek authority file. The DNB records, as well as those of the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Getty Union List of Artist Names and several dozen other organizations, can be searched together in the Virtual International Authority File or VIAF. This is a really useful tool in name authority work.

Reflecting on this exchange on ARLIS-L, I was reminded of a little reference question I helped a fellow graduate student with, way back going on fifty years ago (early 1970s). Caroline Boyle-Turner (then Caroline Rachlis) was studying the French symbolists and was trying to verify some book by one of them. Paul Gauguin, I think. It had been elusive and she mentioned it to me. I had done plenty of searching in the book catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale when I worked on the reclassification project at Cornell University. She told me the title and we went to look in the BN catalog. I don't remember the details of the book but she was very happy to find that the book did actually exist. Catalogers can be successful reference librarians. Cataloging tools can be good sources of information. Of course, the BN book catalog, which has been supplanted at least for newer items by an online version, was not just a cataloger's resource but it wasn't on Caroline's radar. Fast forward some fifteen years or more, Caroline and I were delighted to coincide at a reception at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

[my photo of the Van Gogh Museum from a later trip, 2016]