Continuing from yesterday’s posting about the Guggenheim show, The Third Mind, here is Ann Hamilton discussing her installation, “human carriage” from an article by Scarlet Cheng in the Los Angeles Times: “You become aware of something through the culture and atmosphere you inhabit,” says Hamilton, who’s based in Ohio. “It’s an influence everywhere and nowhere […]
Misreadings, Mediations, Denials and Imaginary Projections
Ann Hamilton, human carriage What an extraordinary day spent in Manhattan at the Guggenheim and the Met. I’ll parse the joy one show at a time. “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989” is curator Alexandra Munroe’s brave revision of the influences that affected the complexity and richness of the American art tradition. Raised […]
Inwardness, Seamus Style
Seamus Heaney. He’s a legend, at home and abroad. The first time I traveled through Ireland 10 years ago, I was incredulous to find his books for sale at the grocery check out counter and at the petrol station. While we get People magazine shoved in our faces, the Irish get volumes of Heaney. But […]
The Ones Who Knew So Little
Seasonal Much melting, and crows close to home. Snow giving its fingerprints this March morning. If I could, I would take your arm in the manner of our European forebears, linked elbows, fist pressed close to the heart, singing songs to the springtime, singing old songs. It would be this much to give the world, […]
Pulitzer’s Ideal (Dis-)Placements
Sometimes a shout out is needed. Here’s a link to a show at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts website that came to my attention by way of Tyler Green’s excellent blog, Modern Art Notes: Ideal (Dis-)Placements Here’s what Green wrote: Small, independent museums can do things big museums can’t (or don’t). They can take […]
Preferring the Hidden
The White Room The obvious is difficult To prove. Many prefer The hidden. I did, too. I listened to the trees. They had a secret Which they were about to Make known to me– And then didn’t. Summer came. Each tree On my street had its own Scheherazade. My nights Were a part of their […]
Thwarted by Awe
My posting about poetry from a few days ago (see April 1 below) drew some thoughtful and insightful responses. Here’s one from my dear friend and gifted poet Nicole that deserves highlighting up front. There are two thoughts I have regarding your posting on poetry today. As an instructor at a historically black college, I […]
To be Opened
A Green Crab’s Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like– though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled […]
Unnoticed, and Necessary
Variation On The Word Sleep I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves […]
Order From Chaos
A few musings on the amazingly counter entropic gesture of pulling something into existence from what appears to be nothing… *** I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have […]