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Saturday, August 21, 2004

Nature, not

 
I'm back from the shore today, so that's the end of my blog silence for the week. Ooops. There in my email was a bunch of blog response, including Sid Sachs defending Rothko from Rob Matthews' flippant dismissal. Sachs wrote, "I guess you have never seen a Rothko retrospective. Rothko was one of the twentieth century's greatest painters." As for me, I salute both points of view, one for iconoclasm (everyone should smack an idol every once in a while) and one for caring so deeply. Here we have Post-Modernism and Modernism (respectively) crystallized!

But down the shore, I cared not a fig for either point of view. All I wanted was more of the sea.

However, I'm so used to the interference of human structures that the view of the ocean from my deck at the shore has always seemed fabulous. It's not that I didn't notice how comically narrowed down a view it is. But for all these years summering at the same place in Ocean City, I never noticed the wires before. Honest! (top image)

So I took a picture to prove to myself how unreliable an observer I can be as well as to preserve the view in case something obstructs it even further next year.

Compared to the city, wires and all, it still looks like nature. Here's a photo of a seagull or a sea plane or a parasail--or maybe it's a UFO. Oh, what's the difference? It's something small in the sky, which, along with the sky, is dwarfed by those wires, again (right).

When you go to the beach early enough, before the fishermen give way to the serious sunbathers and families with ambitious sand architecture projects, you can get an uninterrupted view of sand and surf and sky wide enough to fit the limits of a camera lens.

Of course it's a lie. There are people left and right, but they don't encroach as tightly as the buildings and the wires, and therefore don't obstruct the camera view. (To take in this view, I had to look up from my personal obstruction--"Mating," by Norman Rush, which I'm reading for my book club, and which reminds me a little too much of Doris Lessing).

So here's the perfect view (left)--if you don't mind that the sand shows its traces of humanity (I actually like it for that reason--sand tractor tracks, children's ditches, etc.). But the sea and sky seem pretty pristine to me. Besides, I like the way the sea appears to rise up above the sand. I also like the way life on earth seems so much more important and full of activity than the air.







permanent link  libby 4:33 PM
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Friday, August 20, 2004

Reading and singing the summer away

 

Good day to ye from the Jersey Shore where Libby's family and my family are vacationing for a week. (We do this on a semi-regular basis and for Lib and moi it provides a daily walk on the beach that often generates breakthrough thoughts about what we're working on -- a nice bonus from all the oxygen and salt running through our systems.) Image is sunset from the Roberta family abode this week.



I'm not going to tell you about shore art. Here instead is a snap of a souvenir treasure I picked up. (image lef) It's the cover (a reproduction, not the original) of a piece of vintage sheet music for the anthem "Ocean City (I Love You)" words by Dr. E.S. Carson, music by Oreste Vessella. The copyright to the song says 1928 and the earnest lyric and syncopated melody makes you sigh for a calmer, less irony-clad time. Definitely a high point this week. ($1.)

Meanwhile, road rage and bad manners have made it to the shore, vacationing from their usual spot in the city and suburbs. Even the seagulls have let their etiquette slip, snatching food right out of peoples' hands.



But escape is at hand. Books! I finished Jeffrey Eugenides "Middlesex" midweek (more than middling -- excellent book!). Then hit the used bookstore and snapped up a couple things -- "Seabiscuit," which I skipped first time out the gate but seems a good shore book. My friend Bay told me it was a great book if you love animals, so I picked it up ($4. used); and, the find du jour, "Killing Critics" by Carol O'Connell, ($3.50 used) a New York crime novel in which somebody is killing the city's art critics one by one (and some artists along the way).

"Killing" is pretty well written in a snarly, irony-clad, pulpy kind of way. It's just silly enough to be readable.

Everybody's a cartoon in this book, from the cops to the waitresses to the street people. The first critic is described as having inhuman blue eyes with pupils like missiles coming at you. He also has the passive aggressive affect of a Siamese cat. ffffft. He's not dead yet but I'm waiting.

The next critic is described as looking like a boy until you get up close (he's 48). The guy is manic depressive and off his lithium, self-medicating with alcohol. He's also, for some unexplained reason, in thrall to some Brunhilde public art commissioner and has a personal shopper at Bloomies.

This art critic, referred to by Mr. FFFFT as a following edge kind of guy who always writes the last review and never the first, somehow stages a raid on Bloomies' finest stock and locks himself up on the roof in a kind of Ralph Lauren decorated bunker. It's not clear why. I'm waiting for his plunge off the roof.



Stella's books point to her current obsession -- food and cooking -- "Fast Food Nation" and Nigella Lawson's "Summer Forever" from which she gets inspiration for omelettes and trifles and other yum stuff.



Steve the bibliophile is reading "Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce" by Christopher Hookway and, uncharacteristically, a fiction piece, "Checkpoint" by Nicholson Baker.

Actually he read that slim volume in about an hour he said.

So that's what's on my mind this week. We'll be home tomorrow and will catch up on the fall happenings as they crash in on us.
permanent link  roberta 10:45 AM
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Thursday, August 19, 2004

Rescue at Heathrow, London 6

 
Last entry in Rob Matthews' London Journal

Saturday July 31, 2004

The next morning we tubed to Harrod's, the most over-the-top, out-of-control store in the world. "Egyptian" decorated escalators for 6 floors of shopping in a store that carried nothing but the most fashionable and most expensive goods in the world. Rumor is that no one in London buys anything at Harrod's at that the only people keeping the store open are tourists and oil tycoons. Prada shoes were low-end at this place.


We were there about 30 minutes, realized we weren't going to buy anything and then left. From there we tubed to the Victoria and Albert Museum which is a decorative arts museum that on the inside looks shockingly like Harrod's.

Tracy found a nice dishtowel with some birds on it.


We walked up to Hyde Park afterwards, got lunch, sat under a tree and fell asleep for a while. We watched guys play soccer for a while and then walked to the Serpentine Gallery, which is a non-profit contemporary art space in the park. There was a Gabriel Orozco show at the gallery. We walked in and the first thing I saw was the piece that the Philadelphia Museum of Art loaned to the show--"Black Kites" (the skull with the graphite diamonds), a piece that I've probably dusted 50 times.

We looked at the show for a while, walked back to the restaurant in the park where we had lunch, bought a beer, and then went back to the same tree and fell asleep again. Watched some more soccer, walked to an Italian place for another early dinner, tubed to the hotel, watched TV, fell asleep (image boring BBC lady), woke up, had breakfast in the basement and then headed for the airport.

Heathrow was a mess. We stood in the line for Sri Lankan Air for about 20 minutes before an airport employee went through and basically started pulling all of the white people out of line to make sure we were in the right line. Once we got in the right line, the nicest airport employee in the history of aviation helped Tracy e-check us in to avoid the mile-long line. He also managed to "involuntarily" upgrade us on our plane so we sat in two cushy seats without anyone in our aisle.

[ed.note: Matthews told us he finally found Courage, beer that is, in a beer depot in his Fishtown neighborhood in Philadelphia.]

permanent link  roberta 7:06 AM
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Doing the tourist thing, London 5

 
Rob Matthews' London Journal, penultimate entry


Friday July 30, 2004

We had to check out of the Radisson because Tracy’s business was finished. That left us checking into the Alexander Hotel B&B near Victoria Station. (image is Tracy in the Alexander)


Differences between the two hotels:

a) # of TV channels at the Radisson- 8 (10 if you count the pay-per-view "adult" ones)
# of TV channels at the Alexander- 5 (that's BBC 1, 2, ITV 3, and the cleverly named Channels 4 and 5)

b) internet access: Radisson (yes)...Alexander (no). The Alexander probably has difficultly with updating due to the age of the building since even the sewage drains were mounted to the OUTSIDE walls of the back of the building. Nothing like listening to the water from the toilet above you roll down a pipe on the outside of the building as you're trying to sleep.

c) approximate age of mattress: Radisson (one year)...Alexander (I'm guessing that Tracy and I were not the oldest thing in the room) The Alexander mattress had that nice "spring" feeling to it. Not the season, the coil itself.

d) breakfast: Radisson (free in the restaurant)....Alexander (free in the basement)

e) doorknobs on the door to the room: Radisson (yes)...Alexander (no, the lock is good enough for keeping the door shut thank you very much)

f) convenience to Underground: Radisson (3 minute walk)...Alexander (6 minutes but did include walking by a bar called the Elusive Camel which is my second favorite bar name of all time next to one here in Philly called Atlantis The Lost Bar- thank you Fishtown)

g) price: as always, you get what you paid for...although of course we didn't technically pay for the Radisson

All that aside, the Alexander was fine and given our real budget for a trip like this, I thought it was perfectly acceptable. Tracy probably would have preferred the reliability of the Hampton Inns that have served her so well all over the country for the past three years.

We dropped our bags and headed to the British Library. The BL holds original (or somewhat original) copies of the Magna Carta, an original Gutenberg Bible, the Lindsfarne Gospels (illuminated manuscripts), some Leonardo da Vinci journal pages, Handel's handworked copy of Messiah, and a bunch of other impressive scraps of paper including The Beatles' handwritten lyrics to "She Said" ironically located 6 FEET from the Magna Carta.

Pop tunes and documents that eventually led to the protection of personal freedoms. Same thing.

The US Archives does the same thing. We have in one room: Cary Grant's citizenship application, a copy of MAD magazine, the Monroe Doctrine, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and our gift copy of the Magna Carta, so who am I as an American to judge the odd pairings of British museums?



After the Library, we tubed to the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. (image is Matthews in front of Bridge) The Bridge looked good enough from a distance and so we didn't get too close to it.

The Tower was pretty interesting despite my lack of interest in armor and basic medieval squalor. If I didn't clean armor every week of my life at the museum, I might get into it more, but probably not. Anyway, we saw some replicas of torture instruments, replica thrones, replica stonework, replica woodcuts, replica grass, replica cages, but the real Crown Jewels which only peaked my interest slightly more than the armor.

Still, the Tower fort is an impressive structure and seeing its adaptations over the centuries was more interesting to me than anything else.



Plus you got a really great view of City Hall (image) from the top of the wall looking across the river and I find that building to be one of London's most interesting contemporary designs.
Once we finished at the Tower, Tracy and I decided we missed the neighborhood that the Radisson was in so we tubed back to Covent Garden for an early evening beer.
Around 6:00 we tubed to the Mayfair area of town which is sort of northwest of Buckingham Palace, I think.

There was an Indian restaurant recommended to us there so we decided to splurge on one really good meal. We were two of about 6 people in the entire place that had a waitstaff of, oh...60. At least it felt like that. We had 5 people hovering over our table the whole time. People pushed in our chairs. Three people together directed me to the restroom and luckily did not follow me in. Apparently I looked incapable of serving myself rice so they did that. I also am not capable of pouring water from a bottle that is already on my table into my glass so that was done for me, etc. You get the point.



From dinner we walked home past Buckingham Palace so I could say that I'd seen it and we went back to the hotel. After 5 days in London, I have to admit, I started getting that "check this off the list of things to see feeling" and the Palace was at the top of that list. But still, I saw it.

We watched the Weakest Link and a documentary about the shield and its use in warfare over 8 centuries followed by some weird celebrity game show where quiz questions are asked merely as a jumping off point for the guests to be “witty”.


permanent link  roberta 7:13 AM
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Lambchop and architecture, London 4

 
Rob Matthews' London journal continues


Thursday July 29, 2004

Another English breakfast of Rice Krispies and coffee. This time I had a hard-boiled egg. Tubed to St. Paul’s cathedral, walked up about 450 steps to the top of the dome, looked at the city, walked back down, bought a refrigerator magnet since they didn’t have any “I climbed St. Paul’s” t-shirts and then headed to Westminster Abbey. (image of St. Paul’s under construction)

At the Abbey, The Da Vinci Code sprung to life. Just kidding. Really what it did was confirm my belief in my eventual cremation and not take up any space after I’m gone. Why all the dead royalty are taking up valuable church space is beyond me. Nice to see both of the churches though. Standing in a solid building that’s 1,000 years old is humbling considering my house is about 120 years old and was about to fall apart until we paid a ton of money to hold it all together.

Found a London Eye snowglobe in the gift shop. The collection grows. As always, with each new snowglobe purchase I said a little prayer in remembrance of my Fargo “wood chipper” snowglobe (complete with bloody snowflakes) that threw itself off my bathroom shelves last year.

Ate a prawn/mayo sandwich at the Abbey on top of some dead guy’s grave.



In the afternoon, I braved South London to see the Tom Friedman show at the South London Gallery. It appeared to be a non-profit that puts on nice shows.

The Friedman work was all 2004 and most of it was really great. The poop made out of paper was convincing (image).

It even attracted a fly to land on it as I was looking at it.

You can check out the South London website for info on the sculpture show that was in the garden. (image below is sign explaining an audio piece in the garden)


[ed note: we wondered if this could be a Dave Allen piece, he of the singing birds at Arcadia last year. But indeed there is another bird and music obsessed Brit artist, Hannah Rickards, who sang bird songs in her own voice and you hear them in the garden. Words explain her process.]

It was confusing while I was there and I don’t do well with art that involves real plants.



On the bus and subway rides back to the city, I talked to a sculptor/postal worker from Bristol named Ian. He was in town for the Friedman show and to see Gillian Welch. We also shared a mutual love of Lambchop. (lampchop poster)

It was great to know that someone in Bristol knew about the 14-piece country/soul group from Nashville. Ian managed to almost get me lost. Word of advice- just because someone is from the country you are visiting doesn’t mean they have a good sense of direction.

Tracy and I went to the British Museum that night because they were open late and she wanted to see it. She hit the highlights and bought a bookmark (because that’s what librarians do). If I’m not mistaken we had Subway for dinner because most non-restaurant food was closed.



I think we watched the news, the Weakest Link, and highlights from a cricket game before going to sleep. Not knowing anything about cricket, my curiosity was stirred. Games last for days? I must learn more.
permanent link  roberta 6:42 AM
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Monday, August 16, 2004

A failure of Courage again: London 3

 
Rob Matthews reports on art and more in London

Wednesday July 28, 2004

Another English breakfast of Rice Krispies and coffee.

I spent the morning at the British Museum with about 30,000 of my closest friends from around the planet. I think someone spread a rumor that the Rosetta Stone was getting ready to be put away because there were about 5,000 people circled around that in a shoving match to get up front.

I always dig seeing Assyrian wall carvings. The British Museum has a long narrative carving of a lion hunt that kept me occupied for a while.

After that I saw some Greek mausoleum “wonder of the world” stuff and way too many Greek vases that were all great but good grief, put some in storage already. Show some restraint with your collection.

Then of course, there were Egyptian mummy displays and every other culture from the planet in some form or the other. The drawing gallery had a group print show in it of which I really only liked the Freud etchings.

The Elgin marbles were of course on display but I grew up in Nashville. Nashville for some reason a long time ago earned the nickname “Athens of the South”, even though Athens, GA, exists. We are also fortunate enough to have a 1:1 copy of the Parthenon in Centennial Park with casts made from the Elgin marbles as well as a 41’ sculpture of some guy’s version of what the Athena statue would have looked like.

The re-creation of the Parthenon in TN has always been a stranger idea than the Parthenon itself so seeing the real marbles lacked that goofiness that the Nashville Parthenon enjoys. Plus, the end of Robert Altman’s "Nashville" would never have been filmed outside the British Museum.

Ate my first of many prawn/mayo sandwiches for lunch.

After lunch I tried to find some London galleries, which proved to be a chore even with a map. For the first time in my trip, I became frustrated that London is not designed on a grid, but instead an endless labyrinth of short curving streets.

Dream categories

In Soho, I was able to locate the Riflemaker Gallery which is boutique-sized and kind of a mess (image top). Shabby chic or something like that.

The show was work of Christopher Bucklow that he had during a stay at the British Museum. It's a mixture of responses to William Blake and his own dreams. Being that I've made about 60 sleepwalk drawings in the past year, it was nice to see someone else's interpretation of sleep.

Bucklow has kept a journal of every dream he has had since he was 10 years old. He mapped them into a drawing sort of like tree rings-indicate years. He also subdivided these concentric circles into seasons to further catgorize his dreams not only by year but by season as well. The drawings were engaging but the paintings seemed too much like a deKooning fan trying to figure out how deKooning painted. I think I'm anti-canvas these days and am responding more to works on paper and panel. From what I can tell, Riflemaker has generted a lot of buzz in a short time. The Bucklow show appears to have been their third show. The second show was already completely shipped to the Saatchi Gallery on display there. Look up the Jamie Sovlin link on Riflemaker's site for more info on that show. It was a conceptual show in which the work was supposed to be that of a 13-year-old girl that had gone missing. There really was no girl. Instead her name was the letters of Jamie Sovlin refigured into a new name. Or maybe "Jamie Sovlin" was the new name. I don't know. It's hard to remember. The exhibition at Saatchi was an impressive undertaking.

Gagosian had a photography show on exhibition (image) . Photography…in summer? Surely you jest. Taryn Simon’s "The Innocents" showed wrongly convicted men and women that had since been cleared of their crimes. Simon photographed them in places important to the crime they were accused of-- the crime scene, the place of their alibi, the place they were caught, etc. They were a little dry but still interesting-- like "The Thin Blue Line" but not moving and minus a Phillip Glass score. There was little passion in them. Everything was very posed and proper. Sucked the life out of them for me. I wandered around Soho for a while looking for more galleries, but most of the ones I found didn’t have anything I was interested in: blurry landscapes, etc.


I headed to East London where the newer spaces are supposed to be located. Either I was lost a lot or the galleries are all 20 blocks from one another. Somewhere in between the two is the truth. I found a Tennessee Fried Chicken place (image) but didn’t go in. Took a photo instead. [ed. note: Matthews is a native of Tennessee]



The only art that I found that I liked was at the Rhodes Mann gallery. Layla Curtis made collages of maps cut-up and reconfigured into new “land masses”. (image)

The maps, when re-combined, try to put together cities with common names. So if one city has a gun in the name and another city has a gun in the name then they get put together to form a new land. Sounds stupid but it was well-executed and these days it’s really hard to do interesting map art.

Tracy was stuck with her co-workers for dinner so I had yet another prawn/mayo sandwich from Pret a Manger- a sandwich-coffee shop that competes with the three other chains in the city: Starbucks, Café Nero, and Costa. For a society supposedly structured on tea, this city is hopped up on coffee. One block contained all four of these places.

I returned to the hotel to watch a BBC documentary called "Sleeping with the Au Pair." The title speaks for itself.

To sum up one hour of TV: Russian girls don’t know what they have coming to them if they move to England. Once this was over, I watch the "Weakest Link." Although it did not fare well in the US, this game show seems to be on 24 hours a day here. The TV schedule goes something like this: news, "Weakest Link," interior design show, "Weakest Link," news, other game show, "Weakest Link," news, interior design show, "Will and Grace." (image, boring BBC lady) After that I joined Tracy and her coworkers for a beer at a pub across the street. Once again, no Courage but Stella.
permanent link  roberta 6:36 AM
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Sunday, August 15, 2004

The search for Courage continues, London 2

 

Rob Matthews continues his London report

Tuesday July 27, 2004

The Radisson provides a “traditional English breakfast” which I interpreted as Rice Krispies and coffee. I wasn’t in the mood for soggy meat and beans at 7:45.

An hour later, Tracy was roped into her conference room. “LIVE FOR ME!” she screamed as the door slammed shut.

I decided to walk to the Tate Modern (image) rather than take the subway so I can see more of the city. 45 minutes later I arrive at the Tate having seen a river bank, the ever-present Eye and a homeless guy with a bongo drum. It seems I flew around the planet only to find Edward Hopper waiting for me. The Tate had a retrospective for him on display as well as a Luc Tuymans show.

The Hopper show was great and thorough--pieces from his rather crappy period when he was trying to emulate Manet in Paris and all the hotel pieces and interiors that Hitchcock showed me how to love. Even though biographies suggest he was a prick, I obviously get into Hopper’s work- his examination of his marriage, isolation of the figure etc. I just prefer to show isolated figures all burned up or something like that- minor difference. I check “see Office at Night in person” off my list of things to do before I die.

I went through the Luc Tuymans show faster than Hopper. Even a retrospective of his work remains fragmented and dry. Hits and misses are present more so than Hopper but he also takes more chances than Hopper. His “laser tag arena” painting from a couple of years ago satisfies me. I’ve only seen two Tuymans shows in my life. They both had "The Diagnostic View IV" in them.

I breezed the rest of the museum. No offense to Larry Becker but if you’ve seen one Rothko or Olitski you have seen them all.

My friend Sarah and I were cleaning the modern section of the PMA one day [ed note. Matthews’ day job is as an art duster at the PMA] and noticed that most of the Cubist and early AbEx work looks older and in worse condition than the medieval work. Not “older” in an outdated way, but older in a “falling apart because they used crappy materials” way. The Tate’s collection proved to suffer under the same problems.

The Beuys installation is large and interesting and I wish I had a photo of it, but alas I forgot to take one. I took a few shots of the entryway to get the Louise Bourgeois “spider”. (spider shown)

After this I walked back another 40 minutes to the National Gallery. Lunched on some sort of pita sandwich along the way. I sat in front of Holbein’s "The Ambassadors" painting for about 20-25 minutes until I felt my actions bordered on idolatry, sat in the darkened room that holds Leonardo’s cartoon for 15-20 minutes, studied some Chardins, van Eycks, Poussins, Velazquezs, Titians… you get the point, it’s a good museum. I also was able to confirm my suspicions that I don’t like the way Pissarro paints figures but love his landscapes and cityscapes.

After walking in a panicked circle for about 30 minutes I finally found Titian’s "Bacchus and Ariadne." By “circle” I mean I literally walked around every gallery that surrounded the gallery that held Titian. Somehow I kept missing it over and over again.

I hit the gift shop and bought what I think amounts to $40 worth of postcards. It took me a day or two to remember how weak the dollar is compared to the pound.


With the short time remaining in the afternoon, I walked to the Saatchi Gallery. I knew it would be Sensations Redux but decided to go anyway. Hirst, Mueck, Emin, Turk, Chapman, etc. YBA to the extreme.

The highlight was Richard Wilson’s "20:50" (the room filled with motor oil). Smelled awful, looked beautiful.

There was also a “meteorite” made out of “rats” by David Falconer called "Vermin Death Star" that stood out from the work I had not seen before.

Marc Quinn’s self-portrait in blood, recast after Saatchi’s girlfriend unplugged it last year, is suffering from freezer burn (or “protective ice” as Debbie Reynolds says in the Albert Brooks movie, "Mother"). Not as nice as it used to be.

Hirst’s shark looks like it did not survive all of its travels well. The skin is not long for this world.

I left and watched people jump on trampolines outside the gallery (image above) while hooked up to harnesses to allow them to safely bounce up and down without flying off into the Thames. It seemed a fitting departure from the Saatchi Collection.

Tracy’s boss took us out to dinner to a different fish-n-chips place. This one had a “master fryer”. I’m not sure I tasted the difference but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe my palette is not sensitive enough to pick up on the subtleties of fried cod. Once again, no Courage beer so I had a Stella Artois instead.
permanent link  roberta 10:33 AM
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