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January 12, 2008

Melville, Miniatures and More

Concerning My Upcoming Show (see below for particulars)
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I’ve lived a block or two from the Hudson River, in lower Manhattan, since February 1976. In those days, we’d let our dogs run on the landfill beach and make sculpture out of stuff the river washed up. Most late afternoons, when the industrial streets finally simmered down, I’d go to the roof to watch ocean liners, barges and tugs slip by in the transcendent hush. I’d transpose them into barks and brigs, and imagine Whitman’s “forests at the wharves.” He used the same metaphor in “The World below the Brine” (“forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves…”). I like this unintentional connecting of above and below. Living near water is conducive to going inside and sounding oneself out. The paradoxes we’re made of come to light. “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever,” says Melville, who was born on Pearl St. at the Seaport and lived in New York much of his life.
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Moby-Dick, which I read only recently for the first time, begins at the Battery. Melville, the mystical cousin of Whitman (and Ryder of course), has spun me a new apprehension of life entwined with water and the call to attend the mystical. On the brink of his sea (see) voyage, Ishmael says, “The great flood-gates of the wonder world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose … there floated into my inmost soul … one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”
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Now little of the 19th-century maritime legacy remains in Tribeca which hasn’t been spiffed up, gentrified, rendered lavish. In the 90s, I tried to capture the old warehouses and domiciles in miniature, using indigenous found objects: a splinter from a crumbling loading dock became a miniature loading dock; a plank became a warehouse, a discarded painting some artist threw out became the wall of a tenement flat. What interested me then, before Moby-Dick, was the fugitive sense of age and of history, a desolate beauty on the brink of change. What interests me now, having read Moby-Dick, are the pointers a masterpiece provides to the timeless ineffable, and our delivery from the superficial mundane through archetypes such as Melville’s “grand hooded phantom”--whatever that may be.
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"Melville, Miniatures and More" runs from Jan. 25 through Feb. 17. Reception is Sunday, Jan. 27, 4-7 PM. Art 101 Gallery, 101 Grand Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. www.art101brooklyn.com.

Posted by Jane on 7:51 PM | Comments (1)

January 4, 2008

OVERHEARD, Passing into the New Year

When & where: 12/7/07, 6:10 PM, Hudson Street.
Dramatis personae: Thirtyish guy on cell phone
Affect: Weary but jaunty
Comment: “Hi, I’m just walking home from work now. Gonna get right in my jammies and become agoraphobic for the weekend.”
#
When & where: 12/7/07, IRT #2, northbound, rush hour
Dramatis personae: Two attractive 30ish women
Affect: Both nonchalant
Comment: “I was thinking of getting her something in London or Amsterdam, but I didn’t because I’m so poor. I grew up poor. We kids all had to sleep together in the same bed, six brothers and sisters. Nothing happened, but there was a lot of spooning.”
#
When & where: 12/22. L train to Brooklyn
Dramatis personae: 4 young guys
Affect: Droll
Comment: "A great big hookah was sitting on the coffee table."
#
When & where: 12/28. 5:30 PM. Metropolitan Museum of Art public cafeteria.
Dramatis personae: Young man with date
Affect: Making an impression
Comment: “The place where we always go to vacation is gorgeous, but it’s surrounded by a live volcano.”
#
When & where: 12/30 Sunday afternoon, Tribeca
Dramatis personae: Woman and man, strangers, in passing.
Affect: Polite and acerbic, respectively
Woman: “Your dog looks like Old Yeller.”
Man: “Yeah, but without the rabies.”
#
When & where: 12/30 Sunday, #1 train, pulling into Canal Street station
Dramatis personae: Large group of rowdy older tourists, on their way to South Ferry.
Affect: Excited, noisy, giggling
One of the women: “Oh look, here’s Canal Street!”
One of the men: “Let’s stop there on our way back for some fake designer bags!”
#
When & where: 1/3/08 Thursday, #1 train northbound
Dramatis personae: two 60ish men, the speaker a ruddy, weather-beaten, outdoors type; the listener pale, passive, sedentary.
Affect: Slightly patronizing.
Comment: “You gotta be careful around the docks. Your wallet could be stolen. Anchors disappear and you see abandoned kayaks floating around…”

Posted by Jane on 9:39 AM | Comments (0)