Category: Uncategorized

Holly Coulis Boy and Eagle 2008 oil on linen 28″ x 28″

I love this painting. I can’t say why, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that it portrays a beautiful youth – not that I have anything against that, at least for a starter. Holly Coulis’s painting was just one work within an excellent-but-recently-closed group show, “Admirer“, at 31 Grand, curated by the artist Maureen Cavanaugh.

It’s Mulberry time, but it seems that today mostly only birds know about the delights available for the taking on these beautiful trees native to the Northeast. My first delicious Mulberry experience was in Rhode Island, where I spotted one many years ago on the street with the fitting name Benefit. It was planted directly in front of my favorite library, The Providence Athenaeum. I think it’s still there.
The branch shown above is part of a tree in Bushwick, where it dominates the little garden behind Pocket Utopia.

sign inside the window immediately adjacent to the front door of the gallery on 25th Street

They have no idea what they’re talking about. Once one of the most important galleries in the country, sadly Pace Wildenstein doesn’t seem to know the first thing about the usage of photography in the twenty-first century, or the issue of copyright.
Because of the gallery’s photo ban, Pace shows are not posted or reviewed on ArtCal, and they do not appear on this site or on Bloggy.

two images of several of Cecil Touchon’s smaller collages

Sears-Peyton was also showing some beautiful work at the Red Dot fair by the Texas-born artist Cecil Touchon who now lives in Mexico, where he assembles these collages using cutouts of typographical elements in found street posters and roadside billboard papers which had been used, among other purposes, to advertise local wrestling or other festivals and events.

Paper Rad‘s cardboard mural made up the entire western wall of the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) cubicle at the Armory show.

won’t take it anymore*

Following up on my Heathrow mess post of August 14, I’ve just seen this shocking August 15 Daily Mirror news report, via a piece in today’s NYTimes Business section. It reveals more about corporate thinking within Gate Gourmet than a complacent public might even have imagined, assuming it was interested in the first place. The Mirror on-line article begins:

EXCLUSIVE: SECRET PLOT TO SACK BA [British Air] CATERERS
-Recruit, train, check drivers -Announce to Trade Union -Provoke unofficial strike -Dismiss current workforce -Escort them from premises -Replace with new staff
Exclusive By Greig Box And Graham Brough
A CATERING firm’s cynical plot to sack its Heathrow workers so they could be replaced with cheap labour was spelt out in brutal terms.
In a secret internal briefing entitled “Mile Stones” and marked “Confidential”, BA’s caterer Gate Gourmet declared: “Recruit, train and security check drivers.
“Announce intention to trade union, provoking unofficial industrial action from staff. Dismiss current workforce. Replace with new staff.”
The shocking move was part of a 15-week timetable, first mooted a year ago, to provoke workers into striking so they could be replaced with cheap East European labour trained at secret bases.
A steering committee cited the top risk as “potential for wider Heathrow based disruption”.
But if the risks were high, so were the rewards. The dossier forecast the £2.5million sacking plan would save up to £6.5 million a year.
An industry expert estimated there could be annual pension savings of up to £7million. US-owned GG made a £26million loss last year and is forecast to lose £25million this year.
Documents seen by the Mirror also prove that catering staff were to be lied to while BA and BAA were to be tipped off weeks before the plot went ahead. It is not known if the tip-off went ahead.
An insider claimed that action like that detailed in the leaked documents culminated in last week’s crippling protests at Heathrow.

This thing is no small cheese, since Gate Gourmet is owned by a hungry multi-billion dollar buyout firm, Texas Pacific Group, interested only in short-term profit. What chance does a poor food handling employee have if the bottom line is at stake? It’s not just a Republican nostalgia fantasy anymore: We really have regressed to nineteenth-century hotshot capitalism.
But this is 2005. We’re told by modern management that labor unions present a reactionary presence in our new, post-industrial economy, and much of America seems to agree, but could there a better illustration of the necessity for an organized labor force than what has happened to these workers?

*
the Times caption reads, in part, “Laid-off employees at Heathrow Airport in London jeer a truck owned by Gate Gourmet” [date not given]

[Andrew Stuart/Associated Press image via NYTimes]

Thomas Hirschhorn, details of two panels from the series, UTOPIA UTOPIA = ONE WORLD ONE WAR ONE ARMY ONE DRESS (2003) paper, prints, plastic foil, adhesive tape, marker, ballpoint pen [each of the eight panels, 50cm x 60cm]

We’re at home tonight, our unease suspended for now by 20th-century Spanish Music (Halffter, Marco, Soler, Hidalgo, Bernaola, Barce, etc.), one of the great rewards of a large collection of recordings.
Hirschhorn’s work may seem like a particulary inappropriate context for this thought, but I’m fantasizing how in a different world art might actually be able to suspend all of the world’s monstrousness, its dis-ease, just that easily.

[image photographed in the spaces of Arndt & Partner at the Armory Show today]

Bilbao-ball in Brooklyn

More on the Brooklyn basketball boondoggle, this time from The Morning News.
But first a reminder of what this whole thing is all about.
Developer Bruce Ratner is responsible for both Brooklyn’s MetroTech Center and the Atlantic Center Mall. Neither of these ugly projects, finished in recent years and so heavily subsidized by taxpayers’ money [$300 million is the estimate for MetroTech alone], has been a real success. The Mall stands virtually empty today.
One more project, a new stadium to house the New Jersey Nets, recently purchased by Ratner, is expected to guarantee enormous rewards for both of his earlier, failed, ventures. But not only will it destroy an entire neighborhood, once again it will cost the City a bundle.
In The Morning News Pitchaya Sudbanthad outlines the stakes for those unfamiliar with the taxpayers’ role in the story.

The proposed plan for the stadium not only will involve the city’s giving up land to Ratner that could be worth hundreds of million of dollars but could also include hundreds of millions more to expand streets and utilities and to help pay off bonds for the complex’s construction.

But it’s all for such genuinely good Brooklyn causes: pleasure for passive sports enthusiasts, and reward for a millionaire contractor who has been so wrong about the Borough at least twice already.
Still, Sudbanthad’s piece is mostly concerned with what will be lost. He talks to longtime Brooklynite Joe Pastore, who lives in the neighborhood targeted for “improvement”.

The Spalding building, a red brick, four-story factory, has been converted into co-ops. [Pastore] slaps the building with his gloved hand. ‘It’s a beautiful, solid building,’ Joe continues. ‘This building should be a landmark. How can he tear this down? How could you say this building’s no good?’
Joe, I love this building, too. I think it’s beautiful. I love the Pechter Bakery buildings down the block even better, with the clean towering white walls and Greek Revival touches. They would make great places to live. I can see the soaring ceilings inside. But these buildings aren’t made of audacious metallic curves and pop architectural whiz-bangs. Ratner has dangled Frank Gehry over Brooklyn, and almost everyone’s mesmerized. I remember being dazzled by Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao when it was first built. And after Bilbao made its splash, every city wanted a Gehry of its own. The architect complied with the demand, producing made-to-order variations of his titanium-sheathed design. It became a symbol of arrival for cities into the new millennium, an easy investment that endowed an image of artful taste to insecure politicians and businessmen. Gehry buildings became the corporate builder’s equivalent of Lladró and Hummel figurines, but where those figurines lend an air of harmless luxury and preciousness, Gehry buildings are Trojan horses for more sinister intentions: By design, Gehry’s recent buildings declare war against everything that surrounds them. They are places that spurn any notion of history and any idea of people. They look, simply, like silver alien fortresses.

[image from DANDA]

we own it


but there’s a big problem

I know it’s been pretty quiet on this site for a while, but both Barry and I have been down with bad colds. I can say for myself that I haven’t felt like posting any war/political items, since they’re inevitably even more depressing than a sinus infection, and my joy in art postings is equally compromised by my indisposition.
Thank the gods for an apartment filled with books, music – and food and wine.
Ah, the eve and the first day of the new year have always been my favorite holidays, largely because they are what you make them and because they are so totally secular in origin and celebration. No one seems to own New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. (Even the Catholic Church can’t get its votaries excited about thinking of January 1st as the anniversary of Jesus’s brist rather than the lustful and immemorial celebration of time and hope that it truly is.)
Until last night.
We had finished a light celebratory supper when we headed for the television cabinet to check out the madness in Times Square. We sat down just in time to hear a few live corporate commerical plugs (not paid advertising, but as part of the programming!), short interviews with a uniformed marine corporal and a navy chief, and then a truly heartwarming rendition of “God Bless the U.S.A.” – the entire piece, every word – broadcast to the checkpointed multitudes gathered in the police pens below the sharpshooters and the armed helicopters.

‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.
And I’m proud to be an American where as least I know I’m free.

I was watching a fascist rally.
Regardless of the mindset of at least some of the people standing in the street last night, the real point of the program viewed all across the world didn’t have anything to do with a happy new year. What was really being screamed went something like, aren’t we Americans just so uniquely worthy – and truly holy?
Next year the television stays behind closed doors – unless they resurrect Guy Lombardo.

[two images from Times Square at approximately 12:00:01 this morning (both AP, the first credited to Diane Bondareff) from Yahoo! News]

The rules don’t apply to the guy at the top.
It’s all so absurd, from top to bottom, but there’s a reason we’re so attracted to the details.
Let’s see, Roman Catholic Church rules require bishops to retire at the age of 75. The pope is historically and essentially the chief bishop, by virtue of his office as Bishop of Rome. That’s the last position held by the disciple in whose charge it’s reputed founder, Jesus, is said to have placed the organization before, or after, his early death. The current Bishop of Rome is 83.
Church rules also forbid cardinals (an honorific title given certain bishops) who are above 79 years of age from participating in the centuries-old tradition of electing one of their number to the office of pope. The current occupant of that office is himself 83 years old.
Wojtyla would have had to retire by now were he still only a bishop, and he would be ineligible to vote were he still only a cardinal, but in spite of very obvious deterioration he has not submitted his resignation, shows no inclination of doing so, and since reaching the age of 80 he (or perhaps others using his authority) has appointed a total of 74 cardinals on two occasions.
We are encouraged to believe that this pope is not like other mortals, not even like (his) bishops and (his) cardinals, who in truth actually function only as lackies and decorative tassels for an absolute, super-national monarch, not to say a fanatical cultist and tyrant.
Incidently, the current pope has exceeded rules promulgated by his predecessor, and which he himself has reaffirmed, that limit the size of the electoral conclave to 120. Wojtyla has increased the number of eligible voters in the College of Cardinals to 135, but has not changed the conclave voting rules, suggesting there may be charges [“cardinal” or secondary] of voting irregularities should he die soon. Even if he has personally picked all but 5 of the 135 electors, largely on the basis of their conservative or reactionary politics, the next election might be more exciting than Florida or california.
Except as entertainment or as a regular and delicious treat for a history buff, none of this would be of any interest to me or most of the world if what happens to Catholics did not impact us all. Unfortunately it very much does. The disaster that is the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and in fact the entire business model, is also a disaster for the world.