When A River Changes Course 1/9

I went back to see John Bjerklie’s show Jan. 9 : another First Friday reception. at Parker's Box in Williamsburg. Things changed quite a bit since the first viewing. A lot of the crate wood that had been in the gallery was out in the front window. The remaining wood in the main room was reorganized into tree like structures with wires spewing out the top like twigs. Additional video elements and mirrors became more prominent. A couple of the mirrors are hung on the wall on the diagonal , they’re smudged, with a circle cleaned off in the center. A new video of the sunrise to sunset on the Savanah river was placed in front of a mirror with the same smudging, an allusion to the shows title. In the center of the action there are 2 TV monitors on folding chairs facing each other. The monitors have cameras hooked to them so each is taking the others picture, on there screens are list’s of dollar amounts , sometimes John would cross out and change the prices. It seemed to be pointing out the artists relationship with the marketplace.
I was there early and got to speak with John about his work and he brought out some bronze pieces he had recently cast in N.C. One was of an easel with a hole chopped through the canvas another was of his Hothead bust made of gum balls. People started showing up ,it got busy, I left feeling amazed by getting so many ideas out of such debris , an Arte Povera experience.

Terry Winters "Knotted Graphs " at Matthew Marks

I went to Chelsea Friday , Jan. 9 to see a couple of galleries before going out to Williamsburg to revisit John Bjerklie's"When a River Changes Course" show. The shows I saw in Chelsea were Terry Winters at Matthew Marks and Nick Cave at Jack Shainman. First was Terry Winters show of paintings “Knotted Graphs”. I saw a review in the Times that morning and I was so attracted I couldn’t resist going to see them.I painted canvases with knotwork patterns in the 80’s. Mine were inspired by the knotwork in the Book of Kells and George Bain’s book
“Celtic Art the methods of construction”. When I look at Terry Winter’s paintings I see them as abstracted images from that same world and I feel euphoria to be amongst kin. The way they are painted with layers of translucent lake pigments is luscious. I ‘m disappointed though when I read the press release mentioning the study of topology (mathematics of continuous closed system curves i.e. mobius strip) as the inspiration for the paintings without mentioning the meaning behind
the use of the imagery as a metaphor for the interconnected nature of life. While at the gallery I spoke with the gallery attendant about the information in the press release and
after my mentioning the celtic knotwork he brought up parallel evolution; meaning Terry Winters could come up with the similar imagery through the use of mathematics without
having seen historical references. I left finding this hard to believe, since then I’ve read the interview in The Brooklyn Rail by Phong Bui


“Peter Lamborn Wilson: Quite recently, we were talking about Ireland
where we both have been and became obsessed with the stones. Does that
kind of monumental abstraction of the stones as they survive, not as we
might hypothesize them originally being, like the reconstruction of
Newgrange, which neither you nor I seem to care for, but the way they look,
denuded of the earth and in ruins, inspire your work in any specific way?
Winters: Not in any way that I would want to claim for myself, but I feel a
tremendous attraction to the development of that kind of abstract
language. A geometry that is rooted to its location as well as its relationship
to the given geology.
Wilson: It struck me that you could look on those stone structures in the
way they tie themselves into the landscape, which at times appear like a
topological puzzle.
Winters: Well, that reading of pattern making, which is tied to notions of
surveying both of the landscape as well as the cosmological movements of
planets and constellations, develops a structure that goes beyond
formalism. I think that’s been a challenge that I’ve applied to my own work,
that the work would become what Wallace Stevens called a ‘necessary
fiction’. That the paintings would be a product of exploration, an excavation
of factual material to reveal other levels of, I don’t want to say reality
—other possibilities.
David Levi Strauss: As Peter said, we are seeing these ancient Celtic
forms in ruins and it is this kind of deformation that I think is applicable to
some things that are happening in these new paintings.
Wilson: How so?
Levi Strauss: How forms once made and put in play break down over
time. Certainly, in the paintings in the front room that we were just looking
at, we’re seeing forms break, not necessarily into their constituent parts,

but to make new forms possible.”

I think I’m on the right track.

The Wassaic Project

My parents and sisters live in the Northern Berkshires.For the past 25 years I drove up there with my wife, Francie, and my children, Gillian and Liam. We always drive up Rte22 and along the way pass through Wassaic. Wassaic was only ever noteworthy because there is a large Metro North Train station right along 22 and down in the village away from the road is a distinctive mill structure 8 stories tall. Six months ago Eve Biddle e-mailed me that she in conjunction with Bowie Zunino were organizing an installation oriented art space at the mill building in Wassaic called the Wassaic Project. They planned a weekend in late August full of performance pieces , music, video and visual art. As it happened it was a weekend we were planning to drive to the Berkshires so we stopped in. We went inside the mill and climbed to the top checking out the sculpture, photography and painting along the way. Particularly memorable was the boat piece by Jessie Henson, Jin Kim and Lisa Iglesias. A nylon rope sculpture of a boat with oars suspended 4’ above the floor.
We checked the schedule and saw we had time for one of the performance pieces over at the old cattle auction building. We went in just in time to see Tonia Schoumatoff perform a folk song called Dona Dona, about a calf on his way to be slaughtered with a group of young girls from farm families in the area. It was a tribute to all the cattle that had passed through that space but no longer do (for economic reasons). The way of life of the farmers is changing due to global politics. It was so moving my wife Francie sang along with them as this was a camp song she knew from her childhood. After the performance we went on our way to the Berkshires much richer for the experience as the arts festival continued on through the next day. We stopped in on our way back and got to say hello to Eve and her husband Josh and Bowie before we returned home. You can follow them at wassaicproject.com.

Martha Clarke's Garden of Earthly Delights

My daughter Gillian and her girlfriend Kim gave my wife and I a pair of tickets to see Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights. We went early and went to eat at Caffe Reggio around the corner on Mac Dougal St. We had soup, salad and espresso and soaked in the exquisite atmosphere: heavily carved dark wood,dimly lit old portrait paintings... We left to wander around the West Village: Carmine, Bedford, Cornelia Streets then went to the Minetta Lane Theater.
The lobby was peppered with prints of Bosch’s triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, so the ground was prepared for the journey into the world you were entering.
We had seats in the balcony , a great view to see the reflections of the dancers but the seats are so cramped. The access is so limited that people in the middle of rows have to stand up and let others pass so much so that one man started losing his patience and tried to refuse letting some young men pass, his response was “ Come on, it’s the theater!”. We cracked up!
The show begins with musicians dressed as monks casually coming on stage to make very atmospheric wind and drum noises. Around the stage there are stumps and branches (barren of leaves) sporadically placed among other props; like debris. The dancers come out walking on all fours in nude body stockings, like reptilian creatures, very primal.The progression of their movement is to the discovery of sex. The music is at turns nature driven, melodic, classical, increasingly discordant. The relationships between the dancers progress through the sexual ,becoming increasingly violent. The dancers at one point put on medieval peasant clothing. They create an image of log rolling by the women standing on the hips of prone men. As the men roll, their reflections in the floor imply a watery surface; indelible. Pairs of dancers sequentially begin slow motion leaping across the space, this evolves into the dancers putting on harnesses and flying. Daringly they flip , spin and swing; multiple dancers in the air; out over the audience, they’re assisted by the other dancers onstage , At one point a dancer on stage extends a 5’ long stick to the eye of a suspended dancer. Smoke fills the space from the top down, the climax of the action (in my opinion as this is just a fleeting impression of actual experience) comes when a male figure ascends, spinning, is dropped and raised several times and while at the apex of the rise , lights out, disappears in the dark and smoke.
On leaving, my wife Francie said “The moral of the story is it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. I said I saw it as creation myth as opposed to Bosch’s painting, which I always saw as man’s descent into Hell.
When coming down from the balcony I was moved when I saw some old show posters, the first was from Angry Housewives, Francie had painted the scenery for it back in the 80’s when the theater was first built, the second was a poster for Jeffrey that my sister Donna assisted on the sound design for in the early 90’s; ah! nostalgia.
For me it was interesting that a show inspired by a painting had no painted elements, as it was done as a black box with props and it was fun to see the mechanics of the flying system.