Where I’ve Been…
For the past four or so months I’ve been caught up in teaching, working and surviving a brutal winter here in the U.P. Preparing lectures is more work than I’d anticipated, but I did set up a blog for the class I teach. We take a four-day trip to Chicago, stopping in Kohler and Milwuakee, WI too. It’s art viewing madness but a lot of fun for the students; for many of them this is their first time in Chicago. The blog my students kept about the trip is here:
N. Cecelia Kettunen Papers: “Cecelia, Pages 1-10″
(The following are excerpts from hand-written manuscripts borrowed from the Ishpeming Public Library. They are part of an ongoing research project about N. Cecelia Kettunen (1896-1992) – see my other references and research on Kettunen here (past blog posts). See images of Kettunen’s work that is in the collection of the DeVos Art Museum here (the museum’s Flickr page). I evenutally hope to have all 300 or so pages in the manuscripts transcribed (i.e., typed) for the Kettunen archive at the DeVos Art Museum. I will be posting these as they are typed (by me!). Please forgive the bad translation of Finnish words and names – these are handwritten and I do not have a background in Finnish language. If you have suggestions for any of these words, please let me know!).
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My birthday falls on September 15th and I was born in 1896 at Mud Lake on Park Street, Ishpeming in the little home owned by my parents. I was the second one of their children born there at that time and one of Mama’s sisters had come from Finland. Her name was Elsa Kreeta. She was selected to be one of my godmothers – and I had Mr. and Mrs. Peter Koski also for godparents. Of her babies mama exclaimed Babe and I were the biggest crybabies.
In 1898, we moved over to the corner of division and first streets to live in a large apartment, second floor of the business building mama and papa had purchased. Among childhood memories stands out one quite clearly. As I recall it was in the morning and I was the oldest of the children at home with auntie. She had joined our family in the early 1900s and mama must have been out shopping alone, or was helping at the church with the ladies sewing circle. Auntie needed baking soda, so she sent me to a grocery store which was about a block from our door, but not on the same block as our house, so it meant I had to cross a street. She had me repeat to her several times the name of the article “Arm and Hammer baking soda, Arm and Hammer baking soda”. When I arrived at the corner of my block before crossing the street, the fire engine, which was fiery red in color and drawn by its handsome black horses, dashed by. Of course I had to stop not only to admire all that but also for safety’s sake I realized I had to stop. When all this excitement was over, “Arm and Hammer baking soda” had fled my mind but I proceeded to the store and went in. I stepped up to the counter and surveyed the shelves of groceries. Hilja Kandeliu, later Mrs. Herman Koinsto, clerked at her brother’s store. She waited on me and I chose a large can of tomatoes – it had a gorgeous label of fiery red tomatoes on it. With that in my arms, I returned home. Auntie kept the can of tomatoes sent me off again repeating “Arm and Hammer baking soda”. This second trip I decided on the large size oatmeal package and went home with it in my arms. By this time I guess auntie had decided she was going to train my memory if nothing else and sent me off again repeating, “Arm and Hammer baking soda”. This trip turned out differently from others. Hilja I guess could see I was non-plus and decided to go home with me to find out what it was that auntie wanted. Auntie rewarded her with 10 o’clock coffee and cakes and I returned with Hilja to the store to pick up “Arm and Hammer baking soda”.
In April of 1902, I fell victim with four other children in Ishpeming to Poliomyelitis, which in those days was called infantile paralysis. By this time I was in kindergarten. For a few days I had run a temperature and was kept in bed. Our family doctor was called immediately on my case. After a few days in bed, I was allowed to stay up and wait for Dr. Picotle, who had promised to call at our home before he reported to afternoon office hours. For noon desert the family was having strawberry shortcake. Mama advised me to wait until the doctor came before I was given any of it. When he came, he sat down on one of the chairs in the dining room where I was waiting for him. He took me up on his lap and I slipped my arms around his neck and asked him if he thought I could have some shortcake. He gave his permission and while still on his lap, I started on my share of the shortcake. Soon he had to leave so he settled mean on the same chair and I was enjoying my desert when I heard Papa call my name. He was in his bedroom giving each child money to spend at the circus, which was in town that day and he wanted me to get my share. I slipped down from the chair and instead of going into the hallway and onto his room, I proceeded to the door through the kitchen and the dining room and there on the threshold I was felled by polio. And not until late summer did I walk again. I was a baby all over again – I learned to crawl and finally to walk again. I was taken out in a type of stroller for fresh air. We had one of the collapsible wooden high chairs, which could be covered to form a type of stroller. It was in this mama used to take me for fresh air and occasionally call on her friends. I was massaged and massaged. Of the five of us whom Polio hit in Ishpeming, I had the mildest case for by fall I was back in school, and entering first grade with others of my kindergarten mates. I was massaged and massaged all the years until I went away to school. While grandmother lived with us, she massaged my left leg from the knee down every evening. Once a week I was in a stylish by Finnish masseuse. They massaged my entire body. They were women who had had training in Finland and four are the 10 years I taught in Virginia, Minnesota, I was able to have massage once or week at the hands of Mrs. Hilda Mattsou – very very capable in her field.
I am a collector of sorts. It was from Arnnie (Finnish word for grandma?) I acquired the first object for my collection – an old knife. For her to travel all those miles from Finland to this country with that little knife included with her belongings indicates she had an appreciation of worthwhile objects. By many it could have been considered junk. Way back in childhood, when I was the age that grandmother, after tucking me in bed for the night, listening to my prayers and then turning off the light and leaving the room, my collector’s instinct was aroused and first realized. One evening after all that ritual, she asked me if there was anything I wanted before she turned off the light. “Yes Arnnie,” I answered, “will you let me hold that little knife that is on top of your cupboard”? “Here it is child,” she said, “and not only may you hold it but you may keep it.” And thus I became the proud of owner of a little knife that dates way back to the iron age. My youngest step aunt, as a little girl in Finland, had been treasure hunting in the fields with her children. In the course of their hunt, they found an immense iron tub buried in the ground. The tub, among other objects, yielded this little knife. Instead of leaving it in Finland when she came to this country, Arnnie brought it with her and kept it on top of a high cupboard in her room. The knife is all iron, pockmarked with rust holes, it’s only 4 ¼ inches in length and on the handle has a primitive design of double lines repeated four times. The shape of the handle adds to the interests the general design. A cross-section cut of it would be a diamond shape. The handle terminates in a little heart about 3/16 of an inch in diameter. If little Finland were secure from invasions by the Russians, I would send the little knife to the National Museum in Helsinki. But not trusting the Russians, I have planned to offer it to the Art Institute of Chicago. The knife eventually was buried with the other articles and that a to avoid their falling into the hands of some plundering gang of whose approach they had been warned. Countless finds of that sort have been made in Finland, where the most interesting ear ornaments, rings, pendants etc. have been brought to light of day since 1900. Reproductions of these finds are in the market in Finland. Interesting to note many of the designs involved remind me of the designs found in the crafts of our American Indians. A coincidence some would say, but maybe all primitive design speak to the same language when its modes of expression are so limited.
My second great find would have been a beautiful handmade cradle. My first teaching job after graduation was running the art department of a fine little Christian college in Bluffton, Ohio, called Bluffton College. A Mrs. Fox did my laundry. One day as I sat in her kitchen, I spied a darling baby cradle. It was handmade and not of local talent. It was getting coats of paint applied to it. Upon inquiry, I found the cradle was being prepared for a grandchild of Mrs. Fox, who was to pay a visit to the grandmother with her mother. At the time I did not say anything about wishing to acquire it for my own, but for two weeks I went about the campus with the same dream of acquiring it - the beauty of that cradle for myself. But at the same time I came to a “thump” with my dreams. What would people say if I, a single woman, would purchase a cradle!
But in later years I did acquire a cradle and though I am single, it graces the hearth in my living room. For years I have been a very close friend of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Nara of Mass [City], Michigan. All his life he had been interested in painting and collecting articles of interest and eventually had quite an interesting collection of beautiful furniture, paintings, dishes, silverware, rocks and even a piece of cork salvaged from the wreck of the Titanic. After Mr. Nara’s death in the early 1940s, Mrs. Nara gave his collection of rocks to the Michigan Technological Museum at Houghton, Michigan. I was a guest in their home frequently and they were guests in our house so, they seemed like a second pair of parents to me. Mr. Nara and I, with others, made frequent painting trips to the Mass [City] and Three Lakes area. Mrs. Nara was a registered nurse before her marriage and came from the same village in Finland from which Mama came – this made them feel as if they were related. Both she and her husband had innumerable cultural pursuits. After he had passed away, on one of my visits to Mrs. Nara, she took me up into the attic to look for frames, which I could purchase from her for my use. In the attic we ran across a handmade cradle with dolls in it be longing to Mr. Nara’s niece whom they had raised as a foster child but who Mrs. Nara had sent packing to Oregon. I of course admired the cradle. Some days later Mrs. Nara inquired if I would like to have a cradle to place at my fireplace at Three Lakes. I told her I liked it very much but hesitated to ask to buy it because there were so many nearer to her than I was. She told me nobody was nearer to her than I was and that she wanted me to have the cradle.
It had been made for her in Finland. She was cradled in it until a new baby arrived. Her parents were planning on leaving Finland to travel to America. The second baby called Anni was ailing so the mother of the father of the child suggested that that they leave the baby with her and when the baby got better she would send her to the parents in America in the company of people from that area who were making the trip to the New World. But the young mother couldn’t entertain the least thought of leaving her ailing child, so the mother-in-law suggested the child be taken to America in the cradle. And the mother-in-law said “if Anni dies on board ship, you stay by the cradle rocking it, and when the ship’s doctor comes by tell him little Anni is sleeping, you do not want her disturbed. Because if they find out she is dead, they will take little Anni’s body and fling it into the ocean and the sharks will get her little body.” Well Little Anni arrived safely in America with sister Mary and their parents. Anni eventually became a Salvation Army worker and later married a Mr. Darlington in Racine, Wisconsin. Traveling by train after leaving the ship that had sailed thru across the Atlantic, the father would grab one end of the cradle and the brakeman of the train the other end of the cradle and lift it on the train and thus Anni traveled to Calumet, Michigan where twelve more babies followed her in turn to be rocked in the cradle which had been made years before for Mary. The cradle is constructed so as to have a handle opening at each end. The floor of the cradle has a regular interval of small openings about one half inch in diameter bored into it and each of these holes connected by an incision about one inch wide. There was a purpose for all this boring and incising. In Finland, the cradle was used with straw for a mattress – straw which was changed daily. Over this straw was placed a blanket or sheet. As the child urinated, the urine would seep through the straw to the floor of the cradle but with drainage provided did not stay there but drained down to the bare floor of the room. The cradle was painted with earth red and tar right from Pudasjärvi where the cradle was made. It still has the original paint on it. The maker of the cradle, a bachelor, I understand, traveled from Finland to this country where he eventually landed in the state of Oregon – where he continued making cradles. The cradle I have, I use for a sewing cabinet with a lid which simulates a cradle set up for occupancy of a little one.
The coverlet is from a peasant apron from Finland given to me by Rousa Hilkka Salmineu as a token of appreciation for an art exhibit of public school art which I prepared for teachers in Helsinki schools. The apron is woven of home spun yarn of many beautiful fibers. The sheet for the coverlet has a decoration; a bit of mama’s bridal linen – “A.L.K.” worked out out in red felt paint on her white linen – “A” for Andrew, “L” for Leenu and “K” for Kettunen. She had worked up a pair of pillow slips and a sheet with those letters at the edge of the sheet and ends of the pillow cases was several lace four inches wide, which she herself had crocheted.
On the underneath side of the floor of the cradle, Mrs. Nara wrote information relative to the cradle; also a statement that I happen to have. As I mentioned, Mr. Nara was quite a collector. On one trip to visit his in-laws in Calumet, he discovered the cradle out in the alley, where it had been place for garbage collection. He asked for the cradle and hauled it to their attic in Mass City. Pastor Heidenau of Hancock had asked to have it for his summer house but the Naras did not comply with his request. For one of my assignments in story writing in college, I wrote the enclosed story of the cradle. When Mrs. Nara bestowed the cradle upon me, Debbs was to come and pick me up for a return trip to my home in Three Lakes – so in the back seat of the car the cradle made its trip from Mass City. The next morning, when my chore-man came in to attend to chores, I of course showed him the cradle which was in the living room where he had to carry wood for the fireplace. It was the habit of this chore-man to propose marriage to me several times a year, which proposals I managed to laugh off. When he saw the cradle he said, “Now my poor woman, you are mistaken”! Propose the statement an elderly peasant woman makes in “The Peasants” – a novel of Polish country life, namely – “I do not trust any man unless he is paralyzed and only God knows what he is thinking about.” Only one thought seems to drive on the minds of men.
Bailing Out Art Museums
The New York Times ran an article about Eli Broad offering a $30-million dollar bailout to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Apparently their endowment has lost 75% of it’s value, combined with the museum consistently dipping into the principle to keep the doors open, leaving less than $10-million in the bank. This made me think of two things:
1. Thanks to the magic number of $700 billion I’ve heard about 700 billion times in the past month or so, my perception of money is getting a bit skewed. When seeing the NYT story my first thought was, “wow $30-million is not that much, really”. Then I thought about it for a few seconds more and realized, actually, yes that is a lot of money. Reality check anyone?
2. Part of me wants to go down the road of complaining about banks getting $700-billion because they screwed up, while many museums are also being affected by the economic downward spiral but they don’t get any help. Boo hoo. I’m going to put on the breaks though…MOCA LA mismanaged it’s endowment and was spending too much money. Perhaps the museum hasn’t been running like a non-profit cultural institution, but instead like a major corporation. Perhaps they were spending too much money and expanding too quickly, falling into the traps of contemporary art that insists that bigger is better and more is better. Perhaps it’s time for everyone to chill out a little and take the advice of my seventh grade art teacher: it’s about quality, not quantity.
Knowing the many, many small (and yes, struggling) non-profits just in the Upper Peninsula alone, it’s hard for me to feel sorry for the large museums that are suffering now. Perhaps they need to scale back (sorry Mr. Koons, we can’t commission you to make another huge doggie balloon for the front courtyard) and focus. This could make everyone a bit more creative about what they do and how they are able to do it. I’m not wishing hardships on any museum, but I am saying that this could be a much needed wake up call, similar to the wake up call going on in the for-profit world.
Loss and Continuing On…
I just returned from a trip that took me to Chicago, Grand Rapids and Flint in about seven days. Part of that trip was related to a class I am teaching at NMU and part of it was to say good-bye to a friend who lost his life way to soon. Ben Schaafsma was someone I met while in grad school at SAIC. He turned out to be one of a few people who popped up in my life who helped and inspired me in more ways than I can fully explain. In his 26 years he did more for the communities he lived in and for connecting people to art than most of us could ever dream.
As I talked with people at the various gatherings for Ben in Chicago and Grand Rapids, I came to realize just how much time he actually did spend on g-chat, talking art, politics, life, whatever with many many people. After I moved to Marquette, I spent more time on g-chat and had many conversations with Ben myself…thankfully gmail automatically archives these conversations. I was scrolling back through some of those chats and realized how naturally Ben wanted to connect people. I also realized this while on my trip, as I met some of the artists who will be coming to Marquette next semester as visiting artists. I’d only met them over e-mail, at the suggestion of Ben, and was now only meeting them in person for the first time because Ben was gone. It was a strange and overwhelmingly sad feeling, but it inspired me none the less to carry on.
There is a more proper and deserving memorial written about Ben in Newcity as well as on G-RAD.
(From Newcity)
Essay: Denise Burge and Lisa Siders: On the Point of Crystal Time
“…the crystal is never pure and perfect; it has a failing, a point of flight, a ‘flaw’. It is always cracked. And this is what depth of field reveals; there is not simply a rolling up of a round in the crystal; something is going to slip away in the background, in depth, through the third side or third dimension, through the crack…Everything is mirror-images, distributed in depth.”
-Gilles Deleuze, The Time Image
Denise Burge and Lisa Siders began working collaboratively in 2006 after Burge was awarded a grant from the University of Cincinnati to produce a series of short music videos, collaborating on each video with a female friend. “Driveway”, the video created by Burge and Siders, was constructed using a series of still frames set to music composed by the artists. The process of constructing quilts, a background shared by both artists, visually influenced the resulting video and inspired the artists to continue collaborating.
The work presented in On the Point of Crystal Time is part of a larger project created over the past year by Burge and Siders titled Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running. The maiden is one of many reoccurring characters throughout the work, characters that are (or attempting to reach) a sort of primal and blissful state of being that evokes a sense of drama and mythology. The dark shrouded character, seen in the photo collage and video monitor installation is another character, as is the woman dressed in puritan-style costume. The forest is the fourth character, represented both visually (through imagery) and literally under the salt-covered table in the center of the gallery.
The exhibition can be read as an exploration of extremes, whether in materials (soft stretches of fabric hung on the wall juxtaposed with technical videos), sensory stimuli (a woman in antebellum costume set against a loop of Donna Summer’s song “I Feel Love”) or visual themes (the dark wall collage running down the outside wall contrasted with the soft white lighted line in the hallway). These mirroring of extremes and remixing of imagery, characters and ideas, continue through each element in the exhibition. They are sometimes represented literally and other times implied symbolically.
In the photo collage (Black Line / White Line II), the layered stories of the reoccurring characters are presented as an installation, constructed from printed video stills, lace doilies, yarn, photos and drawings. Dark and light maidens are interwoven with images of disco balls and video stills, surrounded by black yarn, stretched to create mirrored compositions. The visual webs and lace patterns reference the repetition and shapes often found in nature such as crystals, diamonds and rock salt.
The hallway running down the center of the gallery begins with a projected video (The Hill – I Feel Love Remix) of a woman in a costume made by the artists; the woman dances and spins with a web-like shawl. The forest observes from behind the woman as she flows into and out of herself, an effect created by digitally cutting the video in half and mirroring it. The character is attempting to twirl towards a heightened state of being, with the help of the forest, Donna Summer and comfortable shoes.
The mirror below the video is covered in salt and two female figures, also cast in salt. The figures reference the sleeping maiden, also found in the photo collage, the animated drawing and the video screen display. The gently glowing white line (Black Line / White Line I) stretches down the hallway, covered in a variety of contrasting elements such as rock salt and thrift store shoes, glitter covered bones and porcelain statues, buttons and honeycombs. On the walls hang different versions (or remixes) of text that could be read as a mantra, which are chanted repetitively to achieve different states of mind:
I TWIST AND I TURN IN THIS FEELING OF NATURE
MY PORTION OF HOPE IS THIS FEELING OF NATURE
MY JOY AND MY FEAR IS THIS FEELING OF NATURE
I RADIATE GLOOM IN THIS FEELING OF NATURE
I’M SPROUTING AND SHITTING THIS FEELING OF NATURE
I’M LOST IN THE ECSTATIC FEELING OF NATURE
I’M VIVID AND VEILED IN THIS FEELING OF NATURE
The reflective version, on the right side of the hallway, was machine-cut from mirrored acrylic. On the opposite wall, a stenciled version was painted directly on the wall, made from wet Indian black salt. Further down the hall are two more remixes; on the left, another stencil made from wet charcoal. The last version (on the right) was also machine-made, cut from felt that was then soaked in saturated salt water. As the water evaporated, the crystals adhered to the felt.
At the end of the hallway another video (The Hill) is projected onto the salt-covered floor. In this version of the video, the same character, still in comfortable shoes, is mirrored as in the previous video. She grasps a mirror as she moves slowly in an out of the center creating web-like patterns. The soundtrack to this video, slow purposeful noises of the forest combined with deep guttural voices, attempts to find a primal place or sense of being using the same elements, but remixed once again.
The final projection in the rear corner of the gallery (Maiden in the Forest in the Maiden) and the seven monitor video display (Circuit), combine drawing, video, animation and at times, “live editing”, to further explore the duality of subjects (the forest) and media (specifically technology-based media). The forest character is central to both of these pieces, filtered through an obvious technological lens. In Circuit, the editing process is extremely self-aware; one can occasionally see where the artists filmed the computer screen as they were editing and remixing the images.
The video work at the front of the gallery (The Hill – Lace Remix) presents yet another reinterpretation of imagery and sound. A piano version of I Feel Love plays bucolically over a black and white video. The video was composed by layering elements from the other videos, visually and metaphorically alluding to the ideas of a web or lace. Adjacent to the video is the word “Fantasy” strung directly onto the wall in black yarn (Double Fantasy). The word is mirrored to create the illusion of a pattern or web. Here the artists use this specific word to symbolize how they place themselves in the videos as they create the characters and environments.
The collaborative work of Denise Burge and Lisa Siders delve into what Deleuze defines as the third dimension, sliding joyfully into the crack between the first and second dimensions. According to Deleuze’s theory about film and video, the first dimension is the present and the second is what you remember based on your experience. The third dimension is the crack in between, the uncertainty that creates a sense of depth. The characters in the videos wholly exist in these first two dimensions. However, by exploring the duality of the characters and themes through the literal and interpretive mirror, Burge and Siders’ videos find placement in the depth of the third dimension.
(Denise Burge and Lisa Siders: On the Point of Crystal Time is up at the DeVos Art Museum through September 28).
Some Geordies Like Art
If London felt charming, then Newcastle was like a nice bear hug from your grandfather. If your grandfather liked to drink to all night and yell loudly about football. Nestled on the Tyne River, the city is loaded with history (which to my surprise people seemed quite knowledgeable about) and tells another story of post-industrial hardships. I’ve been in England long enough to start noticing the differences in the accents; in Newcastle people sound more Scottish. For example, the word “do”. In London it sounds like “due”. In Newcastle it sounds like “dew”. I found it comforting for some reason; Geordies (as they are called) seem very rugged, hardworking and hard playing, and maybe just a little bit brash at times. I did inadvertently get mooned here after all.
(studying the mating rituals of the Geordies from my hotel window. apparently that involves dressing like superheros.)
In the art world circles run small and I found myself on a tour yesterday with the incredibly nice and lovely Paul, the brother of a friend of a friend. Michael, the brother, happens to be in Chicago, as a resident of InCUBATE, a space run by some friends of mine. I’d been e-mailing with Michael about my trip here and he kindly put me touch with his brother and off Paul and I went yesterday for the Newcastle art tour.
My favorite stop on the tour was on the outskirts of the city center, in an area known as Byker. The amazing gallery space Waygood (in the city center) is under massive reconstruction and while the new building is being redone, the studio spaces are located in a giant old furniture factory in Byker. The building itself is pretty isolated in a largely industrial area that is slowly being torn down (Paul informed me that a newly empty lot across the street was until recently, an emptied industrial building). It looked like Flint in a way and I immediately felt a warm cozy feeling. We toured through some of the studios, including Michaels, and went to the communal kitchen on the first floor for some tea. The first floor also has a space reserved for exhibitions, a way for the artists with the studios in the building to experiment with displaying their work or contextualizing it with other work – when the exhibitions are up a public reception is held. Truly brilliant.
During tea, James Johnson-Perkins joined us from a nap on the couch and we ventured to his studio to see his work. During the entire time I was cursing myself for the dead batteries in my camera; particularly when we went up the narrow staircase to Perkins’ studio. Standing floor to ceiling were huge lego-bots made out of plastic Tupperware-type containers in bright primary colors. Shelves lined the walls with hundreds of smaller, yet equally satisfying, lego-bots made out of actual legos. Some had guns, some wore skirts. Paul asked if one was wearing a chef hat. Perkins shrugged and said, sure. On the floor was his latest project, an in-progress dinosaur made out of Ken-dolls tie wrapped together in a big blob.
There seems to be this underlying theme of good silly humor in a lot of the art I saw made by the Northerners. At Vane Gallery there was work up by Jock Mooney, an Edinburgh-born artist. There were small black and white drawings lined on the wall, simple illustrations that were absurdist and induced many giggles in me, for example a dog with four very saggy breasts looks out to the viewer, and above it simply says “hello boys”. When I flipped through Mooney’s book of drawings and photographs of his sculptures I stopped at a drawing of a pasty in mid flight. Underneath in a hand-drawn font of mock-horror was written “The Pasty”. I bought a copy of the book…art about pasties?! If only I could curate an entire show with that theme…for now that page may have to be cut out of the book and framed on my wall. And I’m not going to go into Mooney’s sculptures, grotesquely awesome and made out of lightweight plastic. They need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.
At the Laing Gallery I had a pleasant surprise of seeing an installation by Song Dong, based on his “Writing the Diary With Water” work. Song Dong is a prolific artist whose work beautifully and subtly addresses issues of the passage of time and the often futile nature of life. “Writing the Diary With Water” is part of a daily ritual that Song Dong does, where he literally writes a daily diary with water. At the Laing, Song Dong had set up a series of rocks across the gallery floor, about 2 feet by 3 feet. Next to the rocks were pillows and a container of water with a brush. Gallery visitors were encouraged to sit at a rock and write their own entries with water. A few children sat at rocks and wrote their names and then slowly the water evaporated. As with most of Song Dong’s work, its simple but extremely effective.
My first day in Newcastle was spent at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art and was largely my reason for visiting Newcastle. The BALTIC, much like MASS MoCA, is housed in a converted factory. The Baltic was a flour and grain mill that closed in the early 80s. With a lot of help from the government (as is typical with the arts in England), almost the entire interior was ripped out (including well over 100 silos) and rebuilt into five floors of art space.
The BALTIC is impressive from the outside, the towering brick structure looking over the Tyne. But from the outside the Millennium Bridge (for pedestrians and bikes only, designed by Wilkinson Eyre and Partners) stole the show. It’s very sculptural and takes on different shapes and characters depending on which side you view it from. Looking at it from the Newcastle side, it has less of an anthropomorphic quality, looking more like something from a Miro painting. As I wandered up to the entrance of the bridge I noticed a sign, announcing “lift times” for that day. Lift? Hmm. The next one was about 5 minutes away so I walked down the river a bit and waited. Sure enough, a big horn sounded and a man came over a loud speaker, cheerily kicking everyone off the bridge – and then it started to lift. The bottom part, the actual part you walk on, began to rise up, the row of steel wires barely creaking with effort as it rose. It was breathtaking as the shape started to completely change as the bottom rose up, visually criss-crossing with the top part of the structure. No boats were around to make the passage underneath, so it paused briefly then began the descent. Impressive.
When I made my way into the BALTIC, I went first to the top floor (to my dismay the rooftop restaurant was closed for remodeling) to check out the viewing box. Another view of the bridge and of the city – I had a sneaking suspicion that for some, the draw of the BALTIC is the view up there.
The exhibitions at the BALTIC were hit and miss – a Yoshitoma Nara show that was fun, I’ll admit it. The stuff is cute. He worked with an architect to create three structures out of scraps of wood (one structure was sourced locally in Newcastle which had some amazing windows). Nara’s work filled the inside, creating a bizarre environment of ugly materials painted pastel colors and filled with images of Nara’s misplaced children and pets.
The group show, Double Agent, was on loan from the ICI London and had some interesting work – particularly photos by Phil Collins of art world people (curators, etc.) in the form of portraits taken in the style of a head shot. Collins had permission to slap the person as hard as he could before the photo was taken. He has had no trouble finding people to be in the photos, including the two curators of the Double Agent exhibition, looking startled with a big red mark along the side of their faces. How far will people go to be included? Pretty far.
The exhibition also had a video piece by the Polish artist, Artur Zmijewski. He brings together four groups of people in a big warehouse space: Polish nationalists, socialists, Christians and Jews. He gives them each a big sheet of paper mounted on stretcher bars. Each group wears the same color t-shirt according to their association. They are asked to paint symbols that are important to them, then they are asked to paint over each other’s work, over and over and over again. It gets pretty ridiculous and destructive but it’s also really poignant and entertaining. Sure he’s manipulating people’s emotions and their actions but that’s sort of the point, I think.
I liked the BALTIC, but beyond the factory converted building, it seems very very different than MASS MoCA. I won’t expound on that here, you’ll have to take me for a beer when I get back if you want to talk about it.
I’m now in Birmingham and preparing for my presentation…so far I’ve met some nice people here for the conference, bonding in our mass confusion of how to check into the dorm rooms…you never know at these things how you will end up befriending people.
(special thanks to Paul for showing me around! Here he is on the left with Dee and Pat of the wonderful Waygood Gallery)
London
London is charming. Granted I kept a pair of rose-colored tourist glasses on for much of my time there, happy to breathe in a city again. It also helped that for some reason my budget hotel offered me a cozy room with it’s own private garden, where I spent a few mornings basking in the sun over morning tea. I’m not a picky traveler, I don’t intend to spend a lot of time in my room anyway, but being surrounded by beautiful flowers in my backyard managed to melt my hardened traveler’s shell:
A lot of London cracked my shell actually:
St. Paul’s Cathedral:
Huge, old, beautiful. I sat through a half hour express lunch service like a good guilty Catholic, mostly staring at the light hitting the gilded gold on the statues. Then I trudged my way up the 530 or however many stairs to catch the view:
But a definite highlight of the Cathedral were two video works on display inside the chapel by Bill Viola. Which apparently is old news, St. Paul’s had his work on display way back in 2004 (along with Tracy Emin) in a show depicting contemporary images of Christ. Who knew the Brits were so progressive?
Another good way to see the city was the Tate to Tate boat ride, literally shuttling people between Tate Modern and Tate Britian. I had read that Damien Hirst actually designed the decoration of the boat and I was quite excited to see a polka-dot covered boat pull up to the dock. A bright pink “TATE” flag flew on the stern…yet for some reason (bad luck I guess) this boat was not doing the Tate to Tate tour that time. Thanks to Flickr, I found out later the only thing I really missed inside were more polka dots. Way to go Hirst!
But I digress, this is (as my Time Out London guidebook obediently told me) a fantastic way to see a lot of sights in a small amount of time. The Eye of London, Westminster Abbey, London Bridge, Big Ben…in about 30 minutes no less:
I actually took an almost break for a half a day and spent some time in Hyde Park, per the recommendation of a wise friend. I got off the tube at Notting Hill and found my way into the entrance to the park near Kensington Palace. The crowds kept me from paying the entrance fee to the Palace, instead I kept on track of having more of a day breathing in London than seeing the sights.
I sat in the shade for much of the late morning and afternoon, going from one tree to another around the park, mostly near the Princess Diana fountain. A police-escorted horse-drawn carriage passed by carrying Some Very Important Person but I continued to sit lazily under my tree. My one “art goal” for Hyde Park was Serpentine Gallery, co-directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, an amazing curator and master of the artist interview. The show on display was Richard Prince, a sort of mini-retrospective of car hoods, joke paintings, nurse paintings, record covers, Marlborough men and a few sculptures thrown in for good measure. I like Prince’s work and see the validity in his use of media-soaked imagery…although I did have trouble grasping his newer work, aka the De Kooning series. Maybe I’m conditioned to seeing his work in a certain way and the fact that he’s doing something less immediately satisfying is actually my problem, not his. Most likely that is the case.
Outside of the gallery was a new architectural installation by Frank Ghery:
In honor of my day of lazying about, I took a few minutes to sit under the wood and glass canopy, and thankfully, for once, not thinking about the episode of the Simpsons that Ghery guest-starred on where he crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it on the ground, then picked it up and turned it into a design for a building. The piece at the Serpentine is all angles and no aluminum; lots of cast shadows and wide open steps. I could have gone without the frosting on the glass, but once again I’ll humbly defer to that being my problem, not his.
The bookstore at the Serpentine, by the way, is worth the trip alone. I practiced much self-restraint from blowing my meager savings on buying and shipping a giant box of art books back to the US.
One last art note, the ICA is programming an ambitious exhibition called “Nought to Sixty”, a presentation of sixty projects from emerging British and Irish artists happening over six months that started in May and lasts until November. For many of them this is their first major exhibition – I made it to a Nought to Sixty opening for The Hut Project, a group of three artists based in London. Their exhibition was half “retrospective” and half artist archive detailing pretty much every creative endeavor they’ve undertaken individually and collectively. From stacks of books on Duchamp and a massive installation of brown packing tape to rejection letters from galleries, The Hut Project definitely knows how to highlight the many absurdist sides of the art world.
Finally, I’d like to commend London on the amazingly clear and informative signs on the Tube. Chicago take note: see how easy it can be to show people a big map at each station, one on each side of the platform that shows clearly if they get on this train where it will take them! And electronic signs that give really accurate estimates as to the length of time until the next train arrives! No more staring down the dark hole down the tracks, anxiously craning your neck hoping to see the glimmer of train headlight knowing your wait is soon over! Think how much easier life could be for everyone involved in public transportation. Think how much happier people could be! It’s not that complicated, I swear!
Next stop: Newcastle.
Liverpool: Deriving Myself Crazy
A person from Newcastle that I’ve befriended and have been e-mailing with over the course of my trip pointed out the fact that Manchester is based more on the grid system and cities like Liverpool and London are much older thus the streets follow ancient waterways and other landmarks, which may be the reason I really enjoyed Liverpool. I wish I had more than one day to spend there (especially a not-Saturday) to spend more time wandering in general directions, similar to what the Situationists coined “the dérive” or to drift through a city. Maybe it’s not drifting in a specific sense when you have a destination in mind, but I’m not a purist.
Apparently I’m not much of a day trip planner either. I went to Liverpool on a Saturday, and that Saturday happened to be during the tall ships festival, which I didn’t know about until I saw the line up of huge skeletal wooden frames in the distance:
I’m familiar with tall ship festivals as I’ve made trips to a few places around the Great Lakes to see them: Detroit and Saginaw to name a few. Marquette, my current home, is actually bringing a tall ship into Lower Harbor in August as part of “Pirate Fest”. I’m organizing a workshop at the museum for kids to make pirate flags for it.
I made my way through some pedestrian areas, taking alleys and empty streets with close-set buildings lining them, but always heading towards the water. It was quite enjoyable and I saw some public art, graffiti, and a few swanky tucked away bars waiting for night to fall to open. Liverpool definitely felt more textured, less polished:
While maybe it is true that Liverpool is in as much of a state of change and new building as Manchester there seems to be character being retained in Liverpool. True, I saw just as many cranes in the sky in Liverpool, and they have their own central mall (still in development) that was just as terrible as Manchester’s, plus it was outside so it felt like Disneyland too. But Manchester’s buildings seemed to be waiting for the glossing over…sitting sad and just waiting. Liverpool’s building still seemed to be breathing. Perhaps I’m getting to esoteric with bricks, so I’ll move on.
My plan was to wander from Lime Street Station towards the harbor, find my way to the Tate for a visit, then wander back towards the Station going a way that seemed closer to the Walker Gallery. The closer I got to the harbor though, and Albert Dock (where the Tate is located) I saw more masses of people. And I mean a lot of people.
Albert dock is basically one giant square with water in the middle. And water surrounding it on the outside except for the side connect to the the land. Apparently because there were so many people they were herding them in one direction, which I found out when I unknowingly started to walk towards the “exit” side. A nice policeman stepped in front of me and asked me what I was doing and where exactly I was going. I was a bit shocked and intimidated so I muttered something about being new to town and was looking for the art museum, yes the Tate. He pointed back in the direction I was coming from “follow the crowds and mind your purse”.
So in with the crowds I started to walk, a good 15 minute walk onto the pier to get to the Tate. They had set up a que on the right for people wanting to see the boats. There were about 300 people in line. Stay to the left to go to the museum. I stayed to the left. As I was walking I started to notice the signs for the Gustav Klmit show at the Tate and then it all started to come together: I had picked probably one of the worst possible days to come here. And the next few hours were probably going to involve me elbowing my way through crowds of people either here for the boats or for Klmit, or both.
I started a mental race between the boats and Klmit. Que for the boats, about 300 people. Que for Klmit, about an hour’s wait for entry. Not bad Klmit!
He had some tough competition, the flimsy paper signs pointing to the exhibition flapped in the incredible wind that was pounding the harbor. The boats had lots of people dressed up keeping the waiting crowds entertained – clowns, people dressed up in a big fake cloth tub. Sometimes the entertainment stood in front of the Klmit signs. I felt sorta bad for him, but not bad enough to wait an hour and pay 10 pounds to see the show. Instead I saw a nice print show from the Tate’s collection, watched a bit of a Francis Bacon film (”Francis, isn’t art about creating order out of chaos?”) then decided to head back. I skipped the Beatles Museum (that que had about 50 people in it…I think they’d get the bronze medal in the popularity contest) and made my way back towards the Walker Art Gallery.
I felt a little bad for skipping all things Beatles while in Liverpool. That is probably the only time I’ll ever go and I sort of wanted to indulge even though I’m not really a fan. I was tempted twice by signs leading to things like Magical Mystery Tours, but instead I just took this photo from outside the “official Beatles store” (one of four in Liverpool I think):
I spent a few hours wandering around the beautiful cultural quarter where the Walker Art Gallery is located. The Walker was quite nice, I saw a very nice Kitaj painting, as well as nice classical paintings by Reubens and Rembrandt’s Self Portrait as a Young man. Good good stuff.
Then I sat outside in the park before heading back to the train and basked in the sun that finally came out for the first extended period of time in three days.
I’m now in London and already pleasantly overwhelmed (and pleasantly full of Indian food) at what I want to see here: two more Tates, the British Museum, National Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Whitecube…and that’s just the art.
