Tag: art

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After Thor and I finished with taxes, and with eating the fabulous burgers he cooked, we headed into Manhattan so that I could meet up with my friend Jonathan, who wanted to se my so and also to go se the new Richard Foreman show with me.

I was a little late, but I did arrive at the gallery just in time to help a very nice couple pick which of my drawings they were going to buy. They were trying to decide between three different ones, and I helped them go with the one that was perhaps the most difficult to handle, but which was most important in terms of the development of the work. I know; the more mercenary among you would say that I should have talked them into all three, but I just can’t be that forceful. It’s amazing enough to me that anyone is willing to buy the stuff.

Anyway, being in the gallery is a good way to run into people, I connected with two more former students just while standing there. And I leafed through the guest book.

The Jonathan and I started out for the play, and decided quickly that we were too tired to do it. Instead we sat in a cafe on 10th avenue and caught up on each other’s stories. Then, slice he was parked in the East Village, we walked over to the Strand, where I celebrated not paying taxes and also the prospect of a future check from the gallery by buying Volume one of the new Phaidon History of the photobook, something I’ve been salivating over for a few weeks. After that it was Korean food at Gama, a place on St. Marks that I’ve never eaten at before, but which is fantastic.

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…and for the first time in my life, my show is basically done: the work is finished except for a couple of minor things, and I just spent the afternoon at the gallery hanging it all. There is something unnerving about that fact.

Things are not completely installed: the gallery will need to use the space for a private showing of something for a client this coming week, so they will document the position of everything, take it down and then I will go back in and do the final hanging, and there are a couple of things at the framer or in transit from other places, but we know where everything is going on the walls and it will be the matter of a couple of hours work to get it all in its final position.

But those of you who have been through this with me before (waltzingtree, girlfagpnw) know that in every other instance I am running around assembling works up until the very last minute. I’ve always used the deadline of a show as the way to bring works to completion. This time, I worked in a completely different way.

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There is no emoticon for the exasperation I am feeling!
Once again the desk top machine is on the fritz, and the second I thought I knew what to do about it, things got worse. Now windows is giving me another of those incomprehensible error messages and I’m typing this on the laptop, which is oh so cute but oh so outdated. After discussing with my shrink the way all of this was related to some of my problematic sexual boundries (don’t ask), I decided to not spend the day freaked out about it but rather to go see the Boucher drawing show at the Frick. Of course this was interesting, even though it confirmed my distaste for Boucher, who seems incapable of rendering a face that contains any emotion beyond a simpering bovine lust. This was made all the more glaring by the inclusion in the show of several drawings where he displays a crisp, lively eye in the depiction of things like chickens and courtyards. When he attempts to be serious everything devolves into mush, dough-like anatomy whipped into furious “s” shaped compsitions. The drawing show is downstairs at the Frick and upstairs, as part of the permanent collection is a Boucher room with allegories of the arts and sciences enacted by putti, and it is clearly the ideological forerunner of the muppet babies.
The rest of the Frick was a joy, the paintings hung with little or no explanitory text, which makes it much easier to treat each one as a discovery. Today I felt good about Reynolds over Gainsbourough, and Velasquez over El Greco. It was startling to see the Franz Hals portraits of anxious burghers echoed in the portrait of Washington that faces down his British contemporaries in the ajoining room.

Does sneering at a centuries old frenchman make me feel better about my technological ineptitude? Sadly no.