Missing

Recently I saw "Man on Wire," the film about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the summer of 1974. I was slow to warm to the film's charms but the tale finally and completely won me over. Primarily, this is because Petit is an intriguing, exasperating, narcissistic, fairy tale figure. A little prince in many senses, he is both a singular personality and a caricature–as well as very very French. (Which is almost like being a caricature, anyway.)

What I didnt expect from the film was how emotional I would be over seeing so much footage of the World Trade Center: its construction, as backdrop against the city, sweeping aerial beauty shots.

For most of its existence I was indifferent, at best, to the WTC. I have no recollection of actually visiting the towers though I think there may have been a trip to the observation deck at some early juncture. They served a purpose as a visual anchor, a directional on which to get my bearings upon emerging from an unfamiliar subway stop. Other than that, I disliked their needlessly overscaled banality– their crudeness. I had been attuned to architectural grace notes and these buildings were power chords.

It was totally without context, then, that less than a year before they were destroyed I had an abrupt change of mind about the WTC. I was virtually struck in one epiphanic moment. The double towers in tandem, along with their uninviting windswept plaza were one conceptual gesture about scale, less about execution and finish than idea. A simple notion that, for some reason, I had not comprehended, and then I did.

Like lightning rods the WTC attracted Petit's fanatical curiousity. His nearly mystical draw to the towers began with an article he'd read in 1968 about their initial planning and was not extinguished even after completing his mission 6 years later. In the film, Petit recalls his high wire walk as spiritual, a "gift", "elation...I was actually venturing in another world.” The footage in the film shows Petit practically dancing on the wire, weightless, it seemed, and imparting an unexpected delicacy to the colossus he was so barely tethered to. He pulled off this caper, this coup, and managed to bring the building itself into the poetry of the moment.

When he stepped onto the roof after his 45 minute sojourn a quarter mile in thin air he was ambushed by police and reporters. Barraged by what Petit termed a "typically American question" he was repeatedly asked "why did you do it?" The disconnect between the question and the event itself was a sadly comical point in the movie.

Twenty-seven years later in the aftermath of a devastating surreal spectacle people were again asking, "why did they do it?"

Images from top: Tom Fletcher's New York City architecture; "before 9/11" by Baldwin Lee; from wikipedia; from Man on Wire.

the word made visible

The first time I remember seeing a book physically manipulated into a visual display I was hurrying past the window of a shop in Paris 3 years ago. The place was closed so I couldn't find out anything more about the piece or the intent behind it. At the time I couldn't tell whether it was an antique– some kind of Edwardian gentlemen's hobby? a lost folk art?– or a modern work made out of an old book. The piece, in my recollection, resembled that in the photo directly above, with pages folded, tucked and fanned into a geometrical three-dimensionality. I was drawn to its intricacy and mathematical refinement. It was delicate and old-looking yet without frills or baroque curlicues.

I now know there are a number of people creating "book sculptures", "altered books", "book surgeries" or any of a number of terms for books as raw material. It appears to me that some works are "autopsies" – pulling out or highlighting their subject matter visually, eviscerating selected passages– where the specificity of the book's subject or title plays a role (Su Blackwell and Brian Dettmer for instance. Jones calls his site "bibliopath" as in Greek "pathos"– feeling, suffering and "-path": one practicing such a treatment or one suffering from such an ailment). Others simply make use of sheer volume (no pun intended): stacks of bound paper of any sort will do, the more disposable the better. Cara Barer immersed phone books and old computer manuals in her bathtub and photographed the engorged and exploded results. Long-Bin Chen carves stacks of Sotheby's catalogues and phone books into figurative totems. (Truly, is there any other use at all any more for phone books other than fodder for an artist's buzz saw? A physical way of dealing with information overload).

Yesterday a friend mentioned she'd convinced her mother to get rid of a fair number of old books. These had, it seems, long since given up their usable lives to become piles in front of windows and an infringement upon navigable space. I wonder what they could have become in the right hands!

Addenda--now with links...
Images: Cara Barer, Georgia Russell (next 2 rows), Noriko Ambe, Brian Dettmer, Su Blackwell (3 images), Long-Bin Chen, Nicholas Jones (2 images)

suspended inanimation*

images: 30 pieces of silver (exhaled); 30 pieces of silver; Rorschach (endless column 2); work in progress with a steam roller; neither from nor towards; hanging fire (suspected arson); Mass: colder darker matter; cold dark matter: an exploded view; anti-mass

On a visit to the otherwise disappointing MAD, I discovered British artist Cornelia Parker (b. 1956). Known for conceptual installation pieces, she has been described as searching for "the elusive essence of material things." It is as though she captures things in moments of disaster, or more specifically, in moments of flux. Stopped in mid-combustion, preserved in mid-fall her work includes objects exploded, flattened, sliced, threaded, washed and suspended. Each work has struck me as surprisingly "alive" despite being in ruin.

Neither from nor towards is a collection of brick remnants from a seaside house which had fallen into the water, the bricks tumbled and eroded by tides. The work I saw, Rorschach (endless column 2), consisted of several pieces of iconic vintage silverware flattened by a 250-ton industrial press suspended a few inches from the floor. Perhaps too easily ethereal and haunting? Still, I found it ravishing. In Shared Fate (1998) she sliced mundane objects (a roll of daily newspapers for instance) with the guillotine used to decapitate Marie Antoinette, among other notables. Her “exploded” work, like Anti-Mass, includes charred remains of churches hit by lightning or destroyed by arson which she has gathered and hung. The particles appear like stardust that absorb light rather than emitting it...

* inanimation: 1) Lack of animation; lifeless; dullness; 2) Infusion of life or vigor; animation; inspiration.

pietra paesina

Pietra paesina, also called “landscape stone,” “ruin stone,” “ruiniform marble,” and “Florentine marble” among other names, has been collected for centuries. The “marble” is in fact a type of limestone which when cut into slabs and polished reveals natural veining of iron oxides that resemble –with minimal poetic license–mountainous landscapes, castles, and ruins.
Displayed as natural objects of contemplation in European Renaissance wunderkammer the marble was also incorporated into decorative panels in architecture or furnishings. The stone was sometimes further embellished with painted detail, which, to me, seems sacrilegious.

Ruiniform marble hovers between natural specimen and artifact, abstract configuration and narrative. Its markings are angular, geometric, almost Cubist, vividly etched, yet undefined at the same time. Many stones have the suffused colors of a foggy twilight but some, like the specimen third from bottom, give off the sonorous (yes, sonorous) golden warmth of classical ruins.

How wonderful (in the true sense of the word) it must have been that first time to cut into something solid and “see” the spiritous atmosphere, to peer into something small and see distant wide vistas.

Images: St. Francis exorcising demons from Assisi, Giotto, c.1297; View of Delft, Vermeer, 1659-60; my specimen, which I had framed, was purchased a few years ago from Claude Boullé Galerie 28, Rue Jacob, in Paris.; 3 sample pietra; at bottom is another variant of pictorial stone, Cotham marble, quarried near Bristol, whose striations usually evoke natural landscapes of trees and stormy clouds.

waking words

Today I awoke saying the words "four out of five birds use wings" out loud.
I'm not sure what that was about. (Or what the connection with dentists might be...)

Images: American Flamingo John James Audubon, 1838; Dodo skeleton, Michael Sporn; Clairvoyance Rene Magritte self-portrait, 1936; Cassowary Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 1745; Young Girl Eating a Bird Magritte, 1927

good for what ails you

A few things found at random from "Very Ill!," an online exhibit of medical caricature at the Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia.

From top: "A Cure for a Cold" anon. 1833; "Will I like it?” L. Noël ; "Headache" by George Cruikshank,1819;

Victor Prevost

Originally from France, Prevost (1820-1881) established a photography studio at 627 Broadway in New York around 1854. He worked in the calotype method which produced a waxed paper negative and allowed multiple image copies to be made– as opposed to the popular daguerreotype which created a single unique image. His studio failed rather quickly but he continued to photograph around New York City for years.

These ethereal, ghostly views of New York are, of course, misleading: The city was bustling and experiencing tremendous manufacturing expansion. The camera was fixed on the stable, unmoving buildings as people, carriages, horses and carts moved through the image, the exposure being too long to capture their presence. And now, in most cases, the buildings have moved on as well, their presence proving, essentially, momentary.

The exhibition of these images and other of Prevost's work is at the New-York Historical Society until October 19th.

From top:

Engine room at the Crystal Palace, 1854

Gurney’s Daguerrean Gallery, undated, 349 Broadway corner of Leonard Street
There were more than 100 daguerreotype saloons in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century and Jeremiah Gurney, "photographist," operated one of the most succesful ones. The Illustrated News (12 November 1853) reported that, “Mr. Gurney’s establishment consists of nine spacious rooms, devoted exclusively to his art.”

Old Herring’s Safe Factory, undated, Hudson Street between 12th and 13th Streets
Portions of the building remain today. I love the type on this building.

Ringuet-Leprince, Marcotte & Co. showroom, 1854, 343-347 Fourth Avenue
A favorite of the elite in mid-nineteenth century New York City, eminent French furniture manufacturers Ringuet-Leprince, Marcotte & Co. (1849–60), produced Louis XVI and "Renaissance Revival" style piles of walnut, satin and marquetry. [Note the signs– where did all those beautiful hand-painted wooden signs and letters go...]

Marble Working Establishment of P. Gori, undated, Broadway and 20th Street.
Lord & Taylor would move to this building in 1872.

Clothing Store of Alfred Munroe & Co., 1854, at 441 Broadway between Grand Street and Howard Street, just north of Canal Street.

Highlights from the Collection (part 8)

part of an ongoing series, from my storage to your screen.

Since I haven't gone anywhere this summer, chained as I am to my computer, I thought I'd feature this little tourist booklet of photographs I picked up recently. A souvenir from someone's vacation, sometime in the 1940s, it shows the Cote d'Azur surely not as they experienced it, but as they wanted to remember it being.

Smaller than a business card, I think it was the size, at a diminutive 2 x 3", that clinched the sale of these "photos-bijoux." Attractively hand tinted, the b/w images are actually quite sharp (see detail, above).

Details of note:
• eccentric Deco-ish lettering
• scalloped edging (a phenomenon which I've queried before, if anyone has any info to share)
• gold edge-finishing, an unexpectedly luxe touch
• a delicate glasseine fly sheet, difficult to see in the third row, left

Now if we could only go enjoy a Gauloise and glass of Kina Lillet over ice.

Homo repugnans*

A few weeks ago I visited the Natural History Museum. It struck me, as we sauntered past the dioramas, that most representations of "Early Man" I have ever seen (Geico cavemen aside) are of these fright-wigged, snaggle-toothed, worried-looking creatures. They've usually got brambles and straw matted into their wild, frazzle mop and often sport a dyspeptic expression. This seems a bit odd considering many animals are fastidious about cleaning themselves. Cats will lick and smooth their coats, chimps will sit and pick lice off one another and appear to have quite a nice, happy time of it. Doesn't it stand to reason that man would be like the rest of the animal kingdom and groom himself? Perhaps even devise a way to get that cr*p out of his hair?

* I made that up

image: I got this on Flickr and regret that I've forgotten whose it was...