large detail of one of the four walls of artist-donated art installed at Momenta last week
Tonight is the night of the Momenta Art annual benefit party, and we’ve just learned that there are still a few tickets left. The event, which includes a raffle and a live auction, will be held at the Sara Meltzer Gallery in Chelsea this year (525-531 West 26th Street). The works can be seen there all afternoon today, beginning just about now, as I’m publishing this post, at twelve. The party begins at five, the live auction starts at 6:30pm, and the raffle will follow that.
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: This artist-run non-profit space based in Williamsburg is absolutely as good as they come; they totally deserve and definitely can use our support. Having stopped by their space when the curated donations were first displayed I can say that this year the work looks even better than what we’ve seen in the past, and for those who have heard me talk about it before, that’s saying a lot.
A $225 ticket gets two people in for free food and drink, and you also get to walk out with a terrific work of art!
The number of tickets is limited by the number of works available (approximately 130 or 140), and as of this writing at least, there are still slots available. Go on line from the Momenta site to get one or more tickets through PayPal. You may also call the gallery at 718-218-8058 for more information.
Even if you aren’t able to get to the scene inside Sara Meltzer’s great space, you can still order tickets and arrange for a proxy to make your selection from among the items in the raffle.
Brooklyn East River shoreline at low tide
untitled (sea moss) 2009
No, it’s not Ireland, Cornwall, Nova Scotia or Iceland. It’s the Brooklyn shore of the East River just below the Manhattan Bridge. I took this picture late Saturday afternoon while Barry and I had stopped for lunch just inside the northern entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park before we went on to visit the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation open studios.
The mud, the rocks, and the sea moss were photographed as the water was still receding with the power of the tide. While we were munching on our sandwiches, sitting on some rocks only a few feet away from the water, I realized we were at almost exactly the same spot where I stood in the mid-80’s to capture an image of a burned-out car heavily-camouflaged by tons of other dumped metal. There appeared to have been a protracted battle with some pretty aggressive weed types, but by the time I got to the site, the trash had clearly gained the field.
The Brooklyn shore environment is very different now, infinitely less romantic of course, as I suppose is all of New York. The Minox 35 print was black & white (as was everything I was doing then) and today even in my memory the entire under-the-bridges landscape is pretty noir. In my mind’s eye it all looks like something inside a Jarmusch film, maybe “Permanent Vacation“.
untitled (springs) ca.1985 silver print 13.25″ x 8.5″ [digital photograph of installation (minus mat and frame) of 35mm print behind plexi, showing flash hot spot]
7th anniversary of jameswagner.com
It seems to me like it’s been around forever, but today is actually the seventh anniversary of this blog.
For those of us who follow these things, this is also the anniversary of what turned out to be the most important event in my life, the night Barry and I met, eighteen years ago.
And, making the day even more perfect, . . . it’s also Paddy Johnson‘s birthday!
I just checked on what I had written one year ago. Today I may be more upbeat about the world outside the circle of our friends, but only a bit.
[the image is of one the three metal street numbers mounted on a metal service door belonging to a building down the street from our own]
staring down at the rails
untitled (blue ties) 2009
Waiting for the #7 train at the 74 Street – Broadway station in Queens this afternoon, scorning the more obvious idea of going for a shot of the complex Manhattan skyline visible off to the west, I looked around for some simple patterns and found these lines.
artists rubbing out illegal billboards all over New York
deleting the offense: first the white paint, then the message, in a classic font of course
Sometimes it seems that the canker of commercial advertising won’t stop until it’s succeeded in plastering every surface in New York, but now we learn that we don’t really have to put up with all of it. Thanks to the alert folks at the Municipal Landscape Control Committee of New York City [MLCCNYC] (with the help of Eastern District, as I understand it) hundreds of illegal billboards put up all over the city by City Outdoor and NPA Wildposting have been spotted and are being rendered faceless by skilled, activist artists even as I write this.
Progress at just one of the sites is documented above, in a picture taken earlier this evening. The wall shown is on the west side of Eldridge Street, just below Houston. The letter attached to the frame of the illegal billboard is copied below.
While doing some searching on line just now I found this spot-on paragraph posted by Jordan Seiler on the “Public Ad Campaign” site, outlining the proper concern of any New Yorker who is not personally a business or corporation:
Outdoor advertising in public spaces transforms those locations into environments intended for commerce and thus for private agendas. Maybe the subway was once a transportation system, but today it is a carefully crafted advertising distribution system with a controlled target audience. These NPA City Outdoor ads turn our city streets into private messaging boards sold off to the highest bidder. In the process, my interest in painting political messages about the failure of our city government is criminalized and my public voice silenced.
ADDENDA: The image I’m adding below shows what the wall looked like when it was completed. It’s from the artist’s own site. Ji Lee is seen painting in the picture at the top. Also, it now looks like the proper acronym for the project is to be NYSAT [New York Street Advertising Takeover], Eastern District wasn’t really part of the project itself, and a concise description of the action can be found on the Wooster Collective site.
[third image from pleaseenjoy.com]
James Hyde at Southfirst
James Hyde Wave 2009 acrylic on digital print 32: x 42.75″ [view of framed work in installation, including shadows]
James Hyde Recline 2009 acrylic on digital print on stretched linen 70″ x 115.5″ [view of work in installation, including lighting hot spot at top]
James Hyde Blender 2008 silicone on digital print 28.5″ x 43″ [view of framed work in installation, including shadows]
James Hyde Tao 2009 acrylic and metal on styrofoam on digital print 14″ x 9″ [view of framed work in installation, including shadows, particularly evident as cast on projecting block]
This show closes on Sunday. It was a top pick on ArtCat, and was extended from its original closing date of April 19. Barry and I were there in the middle of March. We both agreed immediately that it was a terrific show, but I’d somehow forgotten to tell any one who might visit this site, and to post some representative images while I was at it.
I’ve always thought James Hyde‘s work was terrific. I once fell head over heels in love with a luscious, smallish, lipstick-red, wall-mounted cube* he had created which seemed to me to represent painting, in its purest, most fundamental form. Hyde has never stood still, and the show at Southfirst certainly shows that he’s still moving: painted abstract shapes and structures joined with his own conceptual photographic images.
*
something on this order (I found this particular image on evanread.net)
Food Blog: white pizza with ramps and guanciale
[detail]
Since the middle of March Barry and I have been assembling posts for a very modest new site, “Hoggard/Wagner Food Blog“, which we want to use to document, mostly for our own use, some of our more successful meals and make it easier to dig up information we could use in preparing others. Actually, the ArtCat calendar started out much in the same way: It was originally built for our own use as a device to simplify the listing of gallery shows we wanted to visit.
To date the Food Blog has been used only to write about dinners we’ve enjoyed at home, but some day it may be stretched beyond that limited assignment. Even the colorless name is probably just tentative. And, speaking of color, I hope to add some by including rotating pictures at the top at least, probably in the form of my Greenmarket images rather than pictures of the food being described, since Barry and I have both found that food photography is not easy – especially if you’re hungry.
Last night I tried something I’d never done before: I made pizza at home. I had never thought it made any sense for me to try to make fresh pasta in a tiny Manhattan kitchen, especially with so many store-bought or Greenmarket choices available close by, and I felt the pretty much the same about pizza. There were a number of times however when I’d dreamed of putting some very fresh or unusual greens or vegetables on white pizza, or even tomato pizza, the kind of thing I’d never be able to arrange for delivery.
When I changed my mind it was on account of the dual blessings of finding I had fresh ramps and fresh guanciale in the larder at the same time. What I went for wasn’t a pizza that most people would recognize: White pizza with ramps and guanciale doesn’t show up on the menu of the corner pizzeria.
I had already decided I was never going to make my own dough from scratch, and even dealing with the frozen ball I picked up at Whole Foods almost exceeded both patience and counter space. I’m going to be looking into alternatives, although we both thought their product was delicious – and very inexpensive.
After letting the dough rise (twice) and arranging it on top of a sprinkling of semolina flour in a large stoneware pan, I brushed it with oil and covered it with shredded mozarella, a dozen or more tiny ramps from the Union Square Greenmarket which I had quickly blanched, adding a scant ounce of guanciale [wanna make your own?], chopped and slightly pan-warmed, which I had picked up at the Murray’s Cheese location inside Grand Central Market, and I finished working it by adding some grated Parmignano-Reggiano before I slid the pan into a hot (450 degrees) oven for nine or ten minutes [barely enough time to clean up a messy counter area now covered with flour glue].
While I was fretting over the dough, Barry was deciding we’d accompany the pizza with a Venaccia di San Gimignano ‘Rondolino’ 2006 from Philippe Wine. I suppose, if we had found any in our wine rack, a bottle of a more northern Italian white (or red) would have seemed even more appropriate, but the Vernaccia, one of our favorite everyday choices, worked very well.
As I said earlier, it was the first time I’d ever attempted a pizza of any kind, so until I had actually put it into the oven on the (previously-heated) heavy pan I thought the whole thing was going to be a total disaster. Instead, I think it may have been the best pizza I’ve ever had, both a perfect crust and a rich, savory topping.
We’re being more and more conscious of costs these days (we’re now eating at home more not just because I really enjoy cooking), so I’ve been very happy and proud to see that some of our best meals can be reproduced for very little money. On the food blog I should really make it a habit to point out those that shine in that category. I estimate the total cost of this particular meal for two, without the wine, to be just under $10.00.
[images by Barry]
time is frozen in the stone poetry of St. John the Divine
the fire this time: the towers are are forever collapsing up above 116th Street
Each time I head uptown for something going on at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, almost always with friends who haven’t been there before, I look for this capital above one of the massed columns surrounding one of the formal entrances on the West Front. I had come to assume that almost everyone had probably heard about this treasure, and its various companions, but after a look around Google-land just now, I found that they may not be as well known or photographed as I had thought.
Barry and I went up to Harlem once again last week with friends from the East Bay area on the other side of the country. They were former New Yorkers, visiting the city for the first time after an absence of seven years. We had decided we were all interested in a concert of ancient and modern Spanish choral music being offered that afternoon inside the cathedral’s crossing.
Naturally while we were there I showed them one of my favorite things, this stone capital, which had been completed well before September 11, 2001. It and several others were carved by workers who were a part of an apprenticeship program proposed in 1978 to serve urban youth but also intended to preserve the stone mason’s craft. During its existence one of St. John’s own twin towers managed to grow fifty feet (still 100 feet short of the height intended for both). The money ran out in the early 1990’s, and both structural and decorative work on the Cathedral was once more discontinued, for the third time in that last, very messy century of ours.
For more images of the stones, and more on the church and its Close, see Tom Fletcher’s New York architecture site, or that of the church itself.
Louise Fishman’s show, redux
Louise Fishman Berm 2006 oil on canvas 12″ x 16″
[detail]
Louise Fishman Arctic Sea 2007 acrylic on canvas 72″ x 65″
[detail]
Louise Fishman Heart On Fire 2007 acrylic on canvas 66″ x 39″
Louise Fishman Geography 2007 acrylic on canvas 72″ x 65″
Barry and I went back to Louise Fishman‘s show at Cheim & Read on Saturday, partly because we knew the artist was going to be there, and partly because I wanted to photograph one of the paintings I had seen hanging in the rear of the gallery during the opening reception. That small oil, which is not actually part of the show, is the image at the top of this post. The next three images represent a little of what I referred to in my first post, Fishman’s enormous confidence with color and the diversity of the means used in displaying it.
In the back of the gallery, in addition to “Berm”, we saw another dozen or so paintings. All of them were equally as terrific, and all of which Fishman had completed in the last two years or so. We were told that the gallery had literally run out of installation space well before the artist had run out of work.
Louise Fishman Loose the Flood 2009 [approximately 66″ x 38″]
Ostara’s eggs
I hope this image doesn’t make the blog look too sentimental, especially coming after my last post (a picture of some yellow spring flowers in front of a blue wall), but today, or some other day close to it, is a big holiday for a lot of people – for many different reasons, some of them even related.
Easter was one of my favorite holidays growing up. We were observing Catholics, but my obsession with the holiday was more about the return, finally, after another interminable Lent, of lots of smells and bells: colorful church vestments (including pink!), fresh flowers everywhere, lots of music, and candy of course (even before church).
The ancient Germans, who seem to be behind all of our biggest holidays, revered a fertility goddess called Ostara (there are many spellings), who was associated with the rising sun and spring, but who was also a friend to all children. She had a pet bird that for some reason she had to change into a rabbit to produce brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the children as gifts.
None of this makes sense to me now, and I’m referring to the yarns spun by both Catholic and pagan cults, so the fact that once every year at this time I pull out of the cupboard an opaque nineteenth-century glass egg (made for darning socks?) which has sat forever on some dry grasses inside a two-inch-round antique splint basket from the same era would seem to represent as much nonsense as its inspirations. Maybe it’s my way of freely rendering an astronomical calendar, but I do know it makes me feel good.
We have another very old basket which I also set out early this morning, this one in the living room. It’s a bit larger. Inside its ancient woven splints rest three hollowed-out and brightly-decorated real eggs. The eggs have grown old themselves since the day they were purchased at a Ukrainian holiday fair decades ago, although they don’t look like they’ve changed a bit. Although These curios are real, and they definitely have color, I think I’ve always preferred their glass replica, and it’s the one I’m looking at now as I type these lines.
Happy spring!