All I have to bring today

It’s all I have to bring today,
This, and my heart besides,
This, and my heart, and all the fields,
And all the meadows wide….

(Emily Dickinson)

Melancholy loves company

I pinched this from Blind Pony Books.

Review: One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This

“This May [2007], we’re marking NYC’s creative history by installing plaques at 33 sites that inspired us over the past three decades” …

New York is a truly electric city. There’s a real feeling of flux in every neighborhood, excitement along every neon vista and surprise in the most unlikely places. It lights up at night, freezes in the winter, sweats underground and buzzes in the summer. It’s a city you love; visiting it countless times – the peaks and gullies, side streets and diners – through pop culture and art, high and low.

And this is now – in the decade of globalization, mass communication and over-consumption. Thanks to harsh mayoral ‘street clearances’, New York is cleaner than ever, it’s property market booming thanks to the commercial midas touch of gentrification and it’s art market ripe and fit to burst. – so different to thirty, twenty, even ten years ago! How are we to get into this writhing mass, reaching ever higher, further, faster? How are we to get a sense of a moment in this flux, to hear the thoughts of its inhabitants, to reassess and review? Who better to turn to than the artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians – woven into the fabric of the city, yet producing work to speak across time, signposts towards a better understanding of these experiences …

Artists grapple intimately with the heart of the zeitgeist, yet at the same time are required to exist on the periphery. This is a near impossible demand, hard to reconcile in any environment, and especially so in New York – a behemoth of a city; disjointed, fidgeting, fighting, chattering and howling day and night, for it never sleeps. A collective of artists that have worked in New York over the last thirty years is Creative Time. They’ve produced a series of entries explaining their struggles to read and relate their experiences throughout their history in the city, accessible day and night via a cell phone at a number of locations across the city.

It’s a wonderful idea; a guide to an incarnation of New York that no longer exists. The ghosts of passionate pasts, living in neighborhoods a world away then from those we know today (when the MeatPacking District was simply the meatpacking district), revealing memories lost in empty spaces; boarded up, painted over, raised or re-used. Harnessing the technologies which simultaneously separate and bridge the gap between people in contemporary society, Creative Time intend to create a sense of place within these barren spaces through the tradition of storytelling and the relatable intimacy of the human voice.

The recorded entries catalogue a vast variety of sites and the events hosted within them, through the words of the artists and reactionaries who produced or experienced them directly at the time. Many facets of the city experience are covered, and some do justice to their subject. In one instance Anne Pasternak effectively demonstrates the use of discussing art in its absence by asking listeners to close their eyes and concentrate on the sounds of footsteps around them when describing the once ‘vegas-esque carpet’ lining Grand Central’s ticket hall. In doing so the listener is able to recreate something of the wonder of experiencing the (absent) art work. In another, John Waters walks us through a 70s sex club, recounting his experiences, as well as describing the social state of the surrounding neighborhood. The accuracy of these descriptions are assured by the presence of Waters (whose controversial filmmaking always manages to steer well clear of the mainstream); if he says the neighborhood was dangerous it was most definitely best avoided (especially as he’s recently been quoted as saying that, ‘alas’ (!), New York no longer has any dangerous parts of town).

Unfortunately, the overall experience of listening to the entries is a mixed one. The scripts deal with periods of upheaval, passion and strife in the city’s history. Evocative descriptions are given of the minutiae of atmospheric conditions created by an installation, and an artist effectively recreates the experience of looking at a building through his eyes. However, what should set an audio guide apart from a simple written description on a wall is often lacking – from the ‘self-help’ soundtrack intro to the uncharismatic, monotony of the principle narrator and the poor editing of phrases. The narrator speaks of ‘crisis, culture and heat’ but you’d never know it from his inflection, and DJ Spooky talks of the crowd ‘moving in the rhythm of the movement’, though this is far from mirrored in his delivery. The project is unbalanced; some of the artists’ views would clearly be better aired by more engaging speakers and often the script writers should have exchanged their microphones for voice actors. New York is a myth for many, yet it suits this myth. Talk of the city is best presented in a manner akin to the introductions to the impassioned works of Spike Lee, one of the principle proponents of the New York myth – a local addressing us with the charisma of the vernacular. Creative Time get close with the Waters sound-bites, but often fall short of the mark.

Ultimately, the idea behind the project is so good that it gains more favor than is warranted by its patchy execution.

Something to TO

I don’t think the new incarnation (of the interior) of the ROM works.

The outside resembles an (often touted) ‘crystal’ of corrugated steel, splintered by shards of window. This causes problems on the inside. A spaghetti of angles, the interior spaces jar and crack; partitions are relied on to hang works and alongside the tight, narrow corners waste much of the remaining space. Worst of all, the exterior invades the interior at times to distract from the viewing of exhibits: try viewing dinosaur skeletons, one in front of the other, when behind them is a lattice of windows flashing strips of facade from across the street. At times too you notice windows hastily bandaged with scrim and paper in an attempt to shield some of the light-and-heat-sensitive exhibits post-build (a fairly large oversight by the architect, no?). It’s design for design’s sake, without any thought for function or harmony.

The exterior, however, shouts for attention – something Toronto sorely lacks on the world stage. It has a similar feel to Gehry’s other-worldly (and organic) Guggenheim in Bilbao, whose facade is often credited with Bilbao’s economic rebirth. The appearance of the ROM’s ‘crystal’ is something to make even the jaded folks down in NYC look up and say, “wow, I guess there is something to TO after all!” It’s just a shame they won’t hang around once they get inside.

As Dianne Dale put it so fittingly, “The Titanic meets the iceberg and loses once again.”

“… and the Romans sacked Carthage!”

This is a response to an article in The Guardian Newspaper, about 80% of culural objects in British public collections not seeing the light of day, and questioning whether it would be better for these works to lie in private hands where, “ … they would at least be seen and enjoyed …”, as well as the relevance of ‘national’ claims of ownership.

I’ve encountered this discussion before. It is somewhat of a conundrum. I’m on the side of the public collections for the most part (and public-spirited philanthropists!). Points to consider:

• Work held in public collections provides open access (albeit sometimes at the end of a long waiting list) for research purposes as well as individual appreciation. It also guarantees (as much as is humanly possible) a level of preservation and ‘quality control’ in the care and handling of the works held.

• A percentage of the work held publically was bequethed, with stipulation that it may not be sold on.

• Where do you draw the line? If you open up the 80% that is ‘hidden’ work to private collectors, at which point do you stop?

• I imagine it’s conceivable that 80% of work held by private collectors suffers from the same problem of being hidden from view (think Saatchi’s warehouse that burnt down, or ‘art banks’, attics, public storage facilities, multiple properties, etc).

• There are moves to compile the lot into a database – and with it a guaranteed benchmark of cataloging if in public ownership.

• To switch from public to private (or increase the relative percentages) is to go back to the time before public collections – the vast majority of public collections were previously privately held, and we’d all agree the current situation is better now, no?

Two stories:

I once worked with a fairly racist/fascist/conservative Italian, who took any opportunity to claim Italy’s (and specifically Milan’s) cultural/religious/social/racial superiority on the world stage. Her husband is from New Zealand (no one knows why she didn’t marry a guy from Milan) and isn’t a fan of the UK (which is where they both reside). I asked why he wasn’t enjoying his time here and she made a passing reference to an event a few hundred (?) years ago in which the British screwed over the Kiwis. I bit my tongue, but I wanted to blurt out, “and the Romans sacked Carthage!”.

An old man catches a wild horse and ties it to the fence on his farm, the villagers come and praise him, “this is a good thing, now you have a strong worker and breeder”. The old man says, “wait and see”. That night the horse runs away, taking part of the fence with him, letting some of his cows escape. The villagers tell him “oh, it was a terrible thing, catching that wild horse – look at the misfortune he has brought!”. The old man says, “wait and see”. A week later the horse returns with another, and they mate. The villagers say “this is a good thing, now you have a breeding couple and a new horse to trade”. The old man says “wait and see”. The young foul grows up and the old man’s son rides him one morning, falling off and breaking his leg. The villagers tell him “this is a terrible thing to have happened”. The old man says, “wait and see”. Soon, there is a terrible war, far away and with heavy casualties. The draft comes to the old man’s village and they do not take his son, as his leg is broken. The villagers tell the old man, “you are lucky they did not take your son as they did ours”. The old man says, “wait and see” (see the end of Charlie Wilson’s War). 

No Perchloroethylene on Queen Street East

Thank God for that.

Bad design explained

I recently went to a talk by New York-based landscape architect Ken Smith in the architecture faculty at the University of Toronto. Ken’s produced some great work. Lately it’s environmentally-aware, sustainable, healthy and community-driven. This is all good. However, it felt a little self-congratulatory. There was no sense of struggle, no need to consider alternative options, no compromises. There was also a distinct lack of audience Qs in the Q&A that followed. It felt like everything had been answered. It lacked, well, life.

Why could his projects not have been even better, more useful and accomplished?

What I want to know is, why do we not hear from the people behind the projects that fail, or, at least, aren’t completely satisfactory? The seating in the lecture hall (of the Architecture faculty, no less) in which we sat for the talk was barely adequate. Nearby, at OCAD (a well known and highly regarded art college), the newly built structure provides little of the space and light that is required to provide the optimum environment in which to draw and paint, whilst the ceiling of its Grand Hall features a recessed, red cross shape of (misplaced?) aesthetic value yet no apparent utility.

I had an art history teacher at school who told us how he gave up being an Architect when the projects he was planning had to be so functionally dumbed down (due mostly to a lack of funding) that they started to create rather than solve problems. This grey area between intention and completion is a key ingredient in learning about both projects and people. We can learn as much from failure as we can from triumph. Why is it that people are either unwilling to stand up and enter into discourse with people about their failures and/or stuggles, or to organise these events as they believe no one would care to listen?

Pac Man

If you win the lottery, please give me twenty grand.

That should just about cover everything.

Thanks!

Up against a wall