October 10, 2012 Arts & Culture Crossroads of the (Art) World By John Reed Views of the Time Square Show (organized by Colab), 1980. Photo collage by Terise Slotkin At what date on the calendar, at what precise location, did counterculture become pop culture? And who do we mark down in the history books as the hero, or the villain, who masterminded the switch? There is an answer: “The Times Square Show.” In June of 1980, more than a hundred artists, under the auspice and directed by the vision of Colab (Collaborative Projects), took over a four-story building on Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue and mounted a two-month exhibition. There were big names: Tom Otterness, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, Nan Goldin. But, already, this is a wrong turn; the notion of individual heroism, of the creative ego that strives for and achieves recognition—in other words, a modernist view of the artist—is an anachronistic way to view “The Times Square Show.” Time Square Show (organized by Colab), map of the first and second floors with list of participating artists. Floor plan by Tom Otterness, notations by John Ahearn The idea behind “The Times Square Show” was different: a collaborative, self-curated, self-generated group show that transcended trappings of class and cultures. As John Ahearn, a Colab initiator who spotted the location on a Times Square jaunt with Tom Otterness, told the East Village Eye, “Times Square is a crossroads. A lot of different kinds of people come through here. There is a broad spectrum, and we are trying to communicate with society at large.” Ahearn went on to tell the Eye, “There has always been a misdirected consciousness that art belongs to a certain class or intelligence. This show proves there are no classes in art, no differentiation.” Read More
October 9, 2012 Arts & Culture Austen Takes Brooklyn By Sadie Stein This weekend, seven hundred members of the Jane Austen Society of North America congregated in Brooklyn for its inaugural meeting, a discussion of sex, money, and power. Anna Quindlen delivered the keynote. Cornel West addressed suffering. And, of course, bonnets were worn. “This is a place where people can let their Jane Austen freak flag fly,” said one attendee. [New York Times] [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 9, 2012 Arts & Culture Cossacks and Clowns and Bears, Oh My! By Sophie Pinkham Galina Brezhnev. One cold March day in St. Petersburg, I paid a visit to Vladimir Ignatievich Deriabkin, whose apartment does double duty as the Museum of Gramophones. Above me was a gramophone wearing red and white clown shoes, perched on a unicycle. A samovar walked a tightrope across the room, holding a stick to help it keep its balance. Train tracks stretched across the ceiling. Brightly painted, blooming wide, the gramophones were like a garden of enormous morning glories. I was in St. Petersburg, the city once called the “Russian mirage,” doing research on criminal songs of the Soviet period. My investigations had already taken me to such exotic places as the St. Petersburg Record Collector’s Club, a set of subterranean rooms full of grizzled, toothless men in caps and striped sailor shirts. Escorted into the back room, where the head honchos were celebrating International Women’s Day by drinking cognac from metal jiggers, I suspected that I was the first woman ever to enter the building. One man asked me to marry him, saying that he didn’t want to live in New York but wanted to live as if he were in New York. This intriguing rhetorical turn was the central finding of that day’s research; the men were too busy celebrating to answer my questions. A helpful friend had told me that Vladimir Ignatievich was someone I absolutely had to meet before I left town, and I hoped that my interview with him would be more fruitful than my trip to the record club. Armed with my dictaphone, notebook, and tattered map, wearing my too-thin, too-short New York coat and my cracked, leaking New York boots, I tramped through the drifts of snow. (The St. Petersburg city administration is lax in clearing the streets—but they do better than Kiev, whose mayor was said to have proclaimed, “Let whoever put the snow down clean it up!”) The Museum of Gramophones was clearly marked and above ground, just off a major thoroughfare, and from the moment I entered it was clear that there was no risk, as with some of my previous research subjects, that I would be invited to consume multiple liters of vodka in the course of my interview. Read More
October 5, 2012 Windows on the World Etgar Keret, Tel Aviv, Israel By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. The nicest place I ever got to write in was in MacDowell. My studio there was surrounded by a beautiful snowy forest, and looking out of the windows I could often see deer. During my residency there a friend came to visit. After having a beer together he said, “There is so much beauty around you, yet I can see from the angle at which your computer is placed that when you write all you can see is the toilet. Why is that?” The answer was simple. When I write, what I see around me is the landscape of my story. I only get to enjoy the real one when I’m done. In the Keret family tradition my writing space is always one of the least desirable spots in our apartment, a place which only a person who is busy writing can bear. Currently it is a small metal table placed between the living room and the kitchen. The moment I stop writing I can notice on the other side of the road a beautiful grand tree allegedly planted sixty years ago by one of Israel’s finest children poets as well as the happy mess my son and I left on the balcony the day before, but this is just for a moment, most of the time I just see my stories which are usually much messier than the balcony floor. —Etgar Keret [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 4, 2012 Arts & Culture The Flanders Duck By Cody Upton Perhaps you’ve seen it: that building out on Route 24, in Flanders, Long Island, that looks like a duck. Thirty feet long and twenty feet tall, it weighs a little over eight tons. It is called the Big Duck, and its white cement body sits in a permanent squat. At the center of its breast is a door that opens into a one-room museum and gift shop. There, three or four days a week, throughout most of the year, Barbara Bixby sits alertly behind the counter. Babs, as she prefers to be called, is a trim sixty-six-year-old with long auburn hair and bangs that fall over her eyes. Her accent is difficult to place. Not Long Island. Not New England. She draws out her words like an old film actress and speaks with great enthusiasm. She is infectiously friendly. On a Saturday last winter, I trekked out to Flanders to spend an afternoon in the Duck with Babs. I traveled by train and by taxi, and when I arrived just past one P.M., Babs was entertaining a large, dark haired man and his young daughter. The shop smelled of potpourri. The Little Rascals played in black and white on a television set built into the wall. Babs wore a rose-colored sweater (a little threadbare at one elbow), a floral scarf, and a ring on nearly every finger. After the man and girl had gone, she turned to me and said, “What a sweet little lady!” Babs is one of two duck sitters, and though she insists there is no hierarchy, she is more or less the head duck lady. Read More
October 3, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 5 By Katherine Bernard Gertrude Stein takes notes from the front row at the Céline Spring 2013 collection. Pause Play Play Prev | Next