twitter, oh I see

so I see twitter is more fun to write to, will do
why not do both!!! and facebook,like who has time???
but in the meantime, today I went to the Guggenheim to see the Abstract Expressionism and the Guggenhim, all about un art autre, cleverly translated as something like another kind of art, nice
and the slopes of the museum-- which I knew so well in those Tino Seghal days, up and down we went, conversing all the way-- always worth navigating, were SUDDENLY SWARMED upon at about 6 tonight Saturday,
but in any case, how lovely the Burris and the Fontanas and on and on, and the Sam Francis (how I remember translating a French book on him, such fun, did I get paid?probably not) and the Hans Hoffman (and my grandmummie, yes indeed, studied with him in Provincetown) and gloriously in a rush you come upon a de Kooning close up and then the Rauschenberg RED and you think, oh heavens, how glad I am I came even though, etc. etc etc. what you leave behind
art cheers you up, no matter what -- or rather, takes you out of whereever you were

and more art around...

New Yorkers don’t HAVE to stay in New York, of course. One bright Sunday, we made our way up north (not so very far) to the Dia Beacon. Lots of Lawrence Weiner painted maxims language everywhere, and still the Beuys felt you come to feel wrapped in too. Still the unforgettable Louise Bourgeois femme-maison upstairs, and still, for me, the Robert Smithson holds its and his own: Nonsites, Maps, Mirrors, and my favorite: Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust of 1968. Wonderfully, his thinking always seems to lead somewhere else in your mind..

Back in the city, what to see next?  To begin with just the art! To my recent astonishment, right at the subway station of 96th and Broadway, the Broadway Mall Community Center houses the West Side Arts Coalition, set up in 1979. Here it is, 2011, and I come across it yesterday: that's New York for you. There's now an exhibition called Moving Currents: Abstractions 2011, with Wind paintings by Leanne Martinson (Wind-Breakup, Wind-sturm, Wind-drang, very Sturm und Drang in brightness, contrasted with Robert N. Scott's Reassuring Mountain Breeze. These days, or any day, reassurance is nice.

If you are going to Chelsea, you do want to see everything you can at the same time, including the High Line, and the Chelsea Market. At the Loretta Howard Gallery is something super, which is an exhibition devoted to the Black Mountain College adventure in the mountains of North Carolina, and our remembering of it: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy.  A few years ago, as a North Carolinian infused with some sort of nostalgia for my summers near Grandfather Mountain, in a village called Linville (now very heavily golf country, and tidy), I went with my sister to seek what Black Mountain College would have been. Nowhere did we find it or any trace -- we were clearly looking in the wrong spots. We went to Daniel Boone inns, probably just one, but it felt numerous, we went to Appalachian State, a college with a library where no one knew anything about Black Mountain, and it all became deliciously mysterious.

All that to say that this exhibition, like the several books devoted to the BMC (our Bryn Mawr College merges in my mind with anything so initialed), is fascinating. Some legacy! I especially took to, take to, the publication with it, full of pictures of the adventuresome folk and their ongoingness there and after. So you get to read about Anni and Josef Albers, who came up often in Hedda Sterne's conversation over the almost weekly suppers she made for me. (Her memorial is this afternoon, so she is greatly on my mind -- I loved the wall-length painting in her apartment, I loved everything she talked about, I loved her.)

And the rest of them are wonderfully there, with their quarrels and splitups mentioned but not dwelled on, with their joyousness at what can only be called creative gathering in full and well-conceived display. Cage and Cunningham, Motherwell and Frankenthaler, Bucky Fuller and Ray Johnson, the de Koonings and Rauschenberg, Kline, Tworkov, and Twombly: good heavens, what a crew. Motley, if you like, but marvelous. Films of dance, preciously rare poetry journals, all that from the greatest years of the BMC. To celebrate this, there will be a reading very soon now, with Maureen Howard and John Yau and Francine Du Plessix Gray and Vincent Katz, all of them. In a moment when the cornerstone of St. Patrick's seems to be so noticeably lost, when it is drizzling in New York, this Black Mountain College goingonthing seems very grand to me. 

More Chelsea. As a fan of Vik Muniz (creator of all sorts of architecture in chocolate and sugar and other amusing concoctions – I remember a celebration of the dust on a Whitney floor some years ago), I hastened to Sikkema Jenkins & Company, to see Pictures of Magazines 2, with blowups of celebrated paintings, from Caillebotte to Corot, with all sorts of faces and references poking through the floorboards and landscapes. I loved it. 

There was a funny play on Magritte at the Matthew Marks Gallery, La Carte d'Après Nature, with "domesticated nature" stuff, surrealistic in its wayout humour. Tacita Dean, the super real Dean, contributed. That would raise the level of anything.

And in the Astor Place neighbourhood, the Grey Gallery has an enormous and energizing show of FLUXUS and the Essential Questions of Life, as in Art (What’s it good for?), Change, Danger? Death? Freedom? God? Happiness? (etc., all in big letters on the floor in front of the captivating objects – all very George Maciunas, all very 1960’s.  You have to love it to like it, I guess, but I do. I like the Flux-Kit of 1965, like Duchamp’s Valise.

Big Things Happening here and all over: Occupy Wall Street is very much going on, all over, and then, in another key and more uptown, Willem de Kooning has taken over MOMA. I greatly take to the way Peter Schjeldahl writes, and his New Yorker essay on it, Shifting Picture, marks  the crucial turnings. Then – we are speaking of 1945 – “his genius bloomed,” then his “Shoot-the-works abstractions like Gotham News (1955) and Easter Monday (1955-56), then, with Two Figures in a Landscape (1967), he “was back in full throttle.” And it doesn’t end badly, as so many seem to think:  “The show’s concluding room should settle doubts of his last phase’s cogency.” When he could no longer even sign his name, Schjeldahl maintains, the artist seems to “grope for the basic, mysterious resilience of late-Renaissance pictorial space and to find again that, yes, it’s there. …When last seen, de Kooning was still inventing; the old art of painting was born anew at the ends of his brushes, day by day.” 

midnight reading

Being a not much sleeping type, and never ever through the night, I have a choice: a pill, providing five hours, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life hooked on having to have something (ok coffee is different) or getting up to read. Younger, I used to write much of the middle of my books like this, because no one could disturb me, even when the children were small.
So last night I read two of Lydia Davis's stories (having purchased her Collected Stories from St. Marks bookstore, as we are all trying to keep it afloat), one called "Glenn Gould" -- about the narrator watching the same tv program as he did, the Mary Tyler Moore show (I will read ANYTHING about Glenn Gould), and the other, the super-extraordinary "Marie Curie So Honorable Woman." Curie's story is all by itself remarkable, and in the equally remarkable play The Blue Flower, now playing in Manhattan again, there she is.
I loved every minute of reading, it is all figure and doesn't need a ground: "But she has known the privilege of privileges: coherence." Ah, that must really be a privilege, one absent from my slate, which already feels so privileged to me.
Why this figure/ground thing? Because we saw the De Kooning show at MOMA yesterday, and my favorites were the black enamel works, in which, indeed, figure and ground are interchangeable, as the super-intelligent wall texts said.
And you wonder how the figure/ground texture plays out in a life, usually. Yours and mine. 

Septemberish New York

One might well ask: so what is the great deal about living in this incredibly full metropolis when you can't/don't/haven't even tried to see and do 1/2000000the of everything? Well, I can tell you. It is that you could if you wished to. Concerts in the park, as well as in enclosed spaces (except I always love unenclosed spaces, such as Central Park, where the Philharmonic just played -- and we didn't go, but my husband was playing the piano, and what is better than that?)

Yes, to commemorate 9/11, there was Bach, there was Brahms, there was all of whatever anyone could do. We went out to our habitual Performers of Westchester, where my husband has been going for 32 years, and sat in someone's living room to hear a great group of musicians -- some Dvorak, a Bach Toccata, the Mozart C major String Quartet  and the G Minor Piano Quartet,  and as an encore, a movement from the Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet...

I did get to the Richard Serra Drawing show, a retrospective at the Met: and loved the severity and the sweep of it, reminiscent of Egypt - I remember going there first with  my son Matthew, and climbing up a little way of the pyramid of Cheops at night...

And you could choose what to love in the rearrangement of the fourth and fifth floors of the Museum of Modern Art, under the auspices of the newly-arrived Ann Temkin -- and now an enormous and welcome De Kooning. The Old Man and the Museum, runs a piece in the New York Times about Hemingway's choices of paintings, now in the Met...To go with this, The Sun also Rises is playing at the New York Theater Workshop...

Example of having to choose: between Hilary Spurling, such a great biographer, and Red Grooms' opening at on Wed. night -- right after my seminar, how in the goodness to choose?

All these events, and still the signage in Central Park changing seems the most exciting to me: because the new typeface is called Titling Gothic! On 1, 500 new signs! I was initially all excited, thinking it was Tilting Gothic, and I felt the joy of the signs all sliding on a tilt... a short=lived joy, but the enduring one is someone paying attention to fonts on any signs whatever.