oft I float on bliss of is
and is not
is jocund and not margin of eye
and those yellow things out there now
what do they call them

There were no local radio broadcasts when Proust was writing Swann's Way and the phonograph was in an early stage of development, so in order to listen to music without leaving the house he subscribed to the théâtrophone service, a man holding out a phone receiver inside the concert hall.. Victor Hugo used the service as well.

You may have guessed that Dreams is my favorite Kurosawa film, and the first two vignettes are perhaps the best babysitter short films ever made - try it if you have the right audience. Sunshine Through the Rain shows the consequences for a transgression against the balance with nature:



The Peach Orchard celebrates a past that can never be returned to:




Amongst the next few films you get a Chopin video with some animation I am quite fond of and have watched many times, starring Martin Scorsese as a certain Dutch painter (tho I like Maurice Pialet's Van Gogh even better):



Then you have two films that warn Japan of the perils of nuclear power, the transgression against nature that all the other vignettes point towards symbolically and becomes the symbol for all of mankind's environmental devastation, Mount Fuji in Red and The Weeping Demon. I don't like to watch them and certainly not tonight. I just watched Fuji. As I write this, radiation has already been discharged from Fukushima Dai-chi nuclear plant and there are concerns of a meltdown. Barack Obama is asking for $58 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry, triple the previous available amount, an industry which already is kept profitable only through federal subsidies. His campaign manager and former Chief of Staff are lobbyists for the industry. A Japanese firm is contracting to lend money to a poorly regulated Texas plant.

The film ends with Village of the Watermills, one of my favorite films of the master, a funeral procession in a town without electricity:

Review no. 2, after actually seeing the stuff..

It being Friday, now the early evening, I'll get to what's there just this week, beginning with Kai Althoff who doesn't have his name anywhere on his show at Gladstone (515 W 24th), presumably to make the space seem lived in by a fictional character. What impresses me in addition to obvious painterly chops is how each work comprises a separate aesthetic conception and composition, so even as the works relate in unspecified ways to each other, repetition is kept to the minimum that is inevitable, that of days and motions. The ceiling is low, a soundtrack accompanies the two relatively small rooms, and the room has an odor. I will expand the commentary to shows with a longer running time only to say that 24th Street seems to have taken the olfactory dimension and ran with it what with Nitsch's dried blood and whatever scents are added to the effect of Terrence Koh doing what he is doing for eight hours a day in a windowless room.

Moving Image: You only need to know that it's free, located in one of the most interesting local industrial renovations, and giving out free canvas bags and ground coffee. It is amongst other things a showcase of the historical range of feminist video, set up so you see this section first, including the snappy dialogue of Melanie Bonajo and a 1983 Carolee Schneeman mop repeatedly hitting a TV with bombed out Lebanese buildings. A 1978 Hannah Wilkie video comprises a determined attempt to use Method techniques to project as much intimacy as she could for the camera, including strategic use of music, reacting to phone messages of her loved ones, and picking letters from their names off her chest. (pdf)


Two artists at Independent stood out for me: This page on Marta Riniker-Radich (above, represented by Hard Hat) from a gallery in Basel called New Jerseyy (here I live the myth) has a good selection of images. In the real place of New Jersey we had a show of the poet-artist Dmitri Prigov (below), whose metaphysical interiors have a similar layout: the square room in perspective with objects of subconscious significance. Whether she is depicting interior or exterior space she takes care to do so subversively.

Galerie Susanne Zandler offers a generous assemblage of pencil drawings, narrative tableau of military figures, by outsider artist Oskar Voll, who was repeatedly sent to psychiatric hospitals by the Nazis until 1935, after which there are no records of his life.

Dream journey: I was driving along in suburbia and thought "I need to think" pulling over by a row of Victorian homes. I didn't turn the radio on or headphones and I don't know how long I was sitting there, maybe a half hour, maybe an hour. Then I looked up and the police had cordoned off the area around a house and a SWAT team was running around. A shady guy approached a car across the street from me, returning my gaze, saying "You didn't see nothing" and I thought "he's right." I started the car and turned it around and there was a young plainclothes cop talking on a walkie talkie with a causal demeanor. I didn't feel right about just leaving so I pulled up and told him that I was there for a half hour but I didn't see or hear anything. "There were a hundred shots popping. You must be hard of hearing." I told him I had no testimony but he could take down my name and number if he wanted. "Yeah, sure." He put my name, no contact information, on a day box of a wall calendar he got from the hardware store.

Piri' Miri Muli' Art Fair Guide

If you arrive early for the Armory Show or you want to come out for air there's a collection of Allen Ginsberg's photo portraits with the captions covering 40 years at Greenberg (41 E 57th, between Madison & Park) and a Pierre Huyghe film at Goodman (24 W 57th). Further north at 980 Madison (76-77th Sts) Gagosian is giving up a lot of wall space to this Malevich kid that rips off Ryman with the white canvases. All open 10-6. I think the least Armory crowds, other than the moment it opens, are at dinner time, as the peer pressure for dining mounts. Two installments over the course of a day, picking out select works the second time. You can sit Indian-style at cubicles if done thougtfully (I said so) but it grates when people get caught up on each others lives for 20 minutes in the middle of a gallery. I make a ritual out of camping by the Daniel Richter if there's one, but then there's the other problem, no Zwirner means no Richter &co., Zwirner defected to the All-American ADAA joining Galerie Lelong and Luhring Augustine which won't be at Armory, then there's the galleries that spit between both, which is ok if you have the time and inclination to see both. 2011 Armory has a Latin America Focus which consists of 18 galleries, to go with a lot of European galleries.

Free shows: The Independent, highly recommended if you're in the area, which has co-founder Elizabeth Dee as well as Kern and Gavin Brown's defecting from Armory, White Columns and Artists' Space ++. 548 West 22nd Street. At 535 W 22nd (PPOW) you can check out the Wojnarowitz videos so promoted by right-wing Catholics and pray for your sins by Francesco Vezzoli's stained glass (below) at Gagosian (522 W 21st). Dee Gallery is two blocks away (545 w20th) with Mariam Cahn paintings. 24th Street has Ellsworth Kelly, Hermann Nitsch blood paintings, Kai Althoff figures "awakening loathsome blood" (pdf), Terrence Koh and a pile of salt, and more paintings.


Nearby is another free recommendation: the Moving Image show at the tunnel at 269 11th Avenue around 28th St, strategically located if you are seeing Los Carpinteros at Sean Kelly at 528 W 29th, for which tank can be filled, essential as hunger from not stuffing one's self leads to early Armory exits, at the Punjabi buffet at 301 10th Avenue between 27th and 28th. Verge Art Brooklyn in DUMBO is free and open til 10.

th flo
ating deer
for pur
chase pon
qua
rries
stolen, my blo
od
like-marble, ore
ste
als the deer
of air
pon
clouds of antlers

( listening to Iphigénie en Tauride now)

sky
wears

sun
in

side
out

eyes with
out the

se on
ly light

that
grieves -

our lips
again