IMAGES OF RUINS

Ruins, of course, have been a leitmotif in western art since Claude Lorrain and Poussin. What is different now,perhaps, from the period of the baroque with its nostalgia for the pastoral, or the Enlightment with its grand seigneural overview of civilization's rise and fall in the form of a folly, is vertigo. This begins--it is a commonplace to say so--with Piranesi, both the recorder of the vestiges of imperial Rome, and the fabricator of the Carcerari, the Prisons, those dark interiors replete with huge intruments of torture and tiny humans,whose spatial ambiguities are said to presage cubism. They come with a distinguished literary geneology, moreover, ranging from Choleridge and de Quincy to Marguerite Yourcenar.



De Quincy, who devotes pages of Confessions of an English Opium Eater to the Prisons, projects a curious error on Piranesi's etchings. He finds in one the figure of Piranesi himself (how he is so identified is unknown) who is seen not only on the ground floor of one such prison,but at intervals on the stairs. He finds in Piranesi, in short, the same effect which in heraldry is called mis en abyme, in which the image contains an image of itself and that in turn an image an image of itself ad infinitum.But couldn't these receding figures on the stairs be Piranesi's descendants rather than Piranesi himself? There would be not only Kafka, then, but Borges, and Dino Buzzati, and the Cavafy of The City, and M.C. Escher and George Tooker among visual artists. Several artists of our time might find themselves on Piranesi's stairway, among them Anne and Patrick Poirier, Cheryl Goldsleger, Jean-Michel Fauquet, and most recently,the photographer Lorie Nix.



I am trying to remember where I first saw the Poirier's early work--Sonnabend? The De YoungMuseum? They had constructed a vast ruined neo-classical city out of charcoal in a dim room .It had stadiums, temples, monuments, a fallen colossus, racetracks, and thoroughfares.We viewers loomed above these like titans in mourning. I found the work unsettling then--charcoal was once wood and the wood a tree:now it is burnt; an altogether more symbolically freighted material for models than cork.There was also the sense of clumsiness that being a giant in the near dark provoked, a sensation almost of guilt at the ruin of such a vast-if even-so miniature civilization, as if we off-stage were somehow at fault.Finally, there was what we might call the Ozymandias effect, a mixture of regret with relief at the passing of civilizations,for so many monuments have been made under the whip, and not only during antiquity.



Charles Simonds, at about the same time, was covertly placing his tiny and artfully constructed models on fugitive sites through the Lower East Side.If the imagery of thePoiriers might be described as Graeco-Roman with a dollop from Roland Topor's cartoon epic,the Fantastic Planet added, Simonds' seemed to derive from the abandoned cliff dwellings in New Mexico or the bee-hive shaped brick structures--prototypes of the dome--originating in Cappodochia. He invented an anthropology of the little people who had dwelled there--it was an age of anthropology, with the semi-Utopian counter-cultural aspiration to posing alternative social structures--and his placement of these beautifully constructed buildings was done with the co-operation of the neighborhoods,which were then mostly poor. His work is now in museums, and the neighborhoods are high-rent.

A salient feature of the Carcerari is the wedding of the constructive with the destructive , a quality especially noticeable when the earlier versions are compared to the much revised later plates, which sacrifice coherency for depth. The earlier Prisons are buildings; the later Prisons are buildings and the destruction of buildings and the reconstruction of buildings over the relics of their destruction.It is this quality of multiple perspectives which causes them to be cited as proto-cubist.



Something of this multiple-perspectivedness is to be found in the paintings of Cheryl Goldsleger, whose work, on first glimpse,seems to be a skillful depiction of early Renaissance or late nineteenth century Beaux Arts architecture, but proves on inspection to be many layers of depictions of such buildings skillfully --I am tempted to say almost harmonically--sequenced to co-exist, as if we are viewing their construction through layers of time. Her colors are mostly amber, honey,and black, remindful of architectural drawings of Bramante or the Sangallo clan, done in sepia or bistre. Now and then she will overlay what might be called a "memory scaffolding" over the other layers in white. She glazes a sedimentary metaphor for time on the flat surface of canvas.


















Two others I admire who also use architecture to metaphorize the workings of time are Jean Michel Fauquet, who does sequences of dark stairways descending (they don't appear to ascend)into oubliettes, and Lori Nix, whose recent photographic sequence, The City, is a surveyof the imagery of disaster.Nix has had to take pains to clarify the point that these works were conceived before the destruction of the Twin Towers. This says more about our historical attention-span than her art.Nor would post 9/11 imagery account for a vein of humor in the dread--there is an archaeopteryx or pterodactyl or something with leathern wings not to be found in an aviary flying above the ruins of" The Library". The aquarium has pools of recent fishes on the floor.The museum of natural history is in ruins but its dioramas are intact.Here is an interior of a clocktower, obviously defunct.It looks exactly like where I would liked to have lived as a boy.There is a vacuum cleaner show-room, the view outside its window overgrown with bramble.These are painterly photographs of exquisitely fabricated images of destruction. Their colors are saturated, autumnal,sunset, with the streaked skies of storms only recently receding, of broken columns--a repertoire of romantic cliches revived by a hint of parody:they are toy tableaux after all,which evoke concrete disaster.

Anne and Patrick Poirier show at Sonnabend
Cheryl Goldsleger at Kidder Smith in Boston(but I saw her work at Hodges and Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, N.C.)
Jean Michel Fauquet at Chaim Hanin
Lori Nix at Clampart in New York and MillerBloc in Boston

ZEITQUEST:HILARY BRACE AND ROLAND FLEXNER

Among the lesser known works of Poe is The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, a saga of a stowaway aboard a vessel undergoing mutiny, of cannibalism and of lots being drawn to see who would be eaten, and finally of an expedition into the hollows of the earth where an in-world exists which may be entered via antarctica. It was sold and published as a factual account, Jules Verne wrote a sequel, and hollow-earthers still cite it with fixed conviction . It is one of the great landscapes of a peculiar time and climate, at the end of the age of a world map with tracts marked terra incognito and the industrial revolution.It is strange that two very different painters, working on a modest scale, should evoke its tonality a century and a half later, the tonality of nascent science fiction and the romantic sublime.

Hilary Brace is one of several artists of whom I am aware who works with charcoal on mylar. Her draftsmanship seems nearly photographic but her content-- of spaces which could be macrocosmic, like the Magellanic clouds, or microscopic, like an xray of the aveole--conveys neither locale or scale despite its graphic clarity. Looking at them over intervals, I find some principle of compression, of shrinking a big vision into a narrow compass, keeps them from being facile; they cross a territory of an ominous brightness,dawning in a place which is vast and very cold.Something not quite remembered at the tip promontory of collective memory.

Roland Flexner's sumi ink and soap bubble drawings have a similiar effect. His work is as dark as Brace's is luminous, but a similiar skill, the skill of sheering off into metaphor- thwarting ,is one he shares with her. I thought when first viewing them that these are landscapes, of course--but the "of course" is due to the desire to interpret a bisecting line as a horizon, a swirl as a vortex. Actually it is heuristic device by someone expert at brinksmanship. The blackness of the ink instantly brought to mind Milton(I'd been rereading Paradise Lost):

"a dungeon horrible on all sides round as one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames no light; but rather darkness visible.'

but what is being depicted might also be as unapocalyptic as a forest at night viewed through a rain-streaked windshield.Not every abstract work has this image-permutability, or this memorability.Flexner has the ability to convey grandeur in a the span of few inches -like Blake, or Samuel Palmer.

According to the press release, Flexner's last show at D'Amelio Terras was shown with Japanese "looking stones", which I have not seen but which I suspect I own something like. One of these is a chrysaloccoca given me by the late Bill Martin as we viewed a butte between Santa Fe and Taos New Mexico. The stone I held in my hand resembled in extreme reduction the monument before us. These painters evoke similiar sensations of the reversal and re-reversal of scale.
Brace is represented by Edward Thorp. Flexner is shown at D'Amelio/Terras in New York and Hosfelt in San Francisco.

PETAH COYNE

"...the black fugatos are strumming the black of the black...Thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.He does not lie there remembering the blue jay, say the jay.His grief is that he mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,In that distant chamber, a bearded queen..."(Wallace Stevens:Madame La Fleurie)


Space in our time has grown steadily more eccentric, more nest-like than building-like. It is as irrational as Mies or Mondrian was rational. Architecture seems to be attempting its own dis-embodiment, and sculpture a space which makes earlier installation artseem almost classical.If there is some familial resemblance to Conceptual Altar Space or Immersive Assemblage Space, it is a Gothick decade later, with its mutant concerns.

A sculpture of braided horse-hair ensnaring a tide of silk roses punctuated with hyper-alert taxidermied pheasants and plovers, as do the sculptures of Petah Coyne, turns the whitest cubicle into...what? The names which one comes up for it---gesticulative spatial expressionism or Carnival of Souls Rococco--are absurd, but the work is a marvel.

Coyne's work first reminded me (A)of a Victorian relict seen in a great home, a floral arrangement made of the rosettes of braided hair of the female family members and kept under a bell-jar (B) the women's-training- hospital ghost in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, which abided by day in a pencil eraser but which by night rolled around on tenacled eye-balls to crush the breath from the sleeping(C) Poe's mystical yearning for Annabel Lee and/or Ligeia(D) Hearses from a horse-drawn time (E) Bernini. It is the sense that the sculpture turns the room on a centrifugal force of its--the sculpture's-- making which brings up Bernini. Coyne's work seems to tilt the room off its armature.

In a Bomb interview with Lynn Tillmann, Coyne spoke admiringly of Miss Havisham in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, the Miss Havisham of the sealed off wedding-banquet chamber,whose wedding cake was colonized with rats and festooned by spiders, who had not changed from her wedding gown in thirty years after being jilted at the altar. This accounts, indirectly, for the sense of her earlier pieces being like brides and their own cast-off bouquets, a synthesis of the wedding and the funeral. Miss Havisham alarms us because in some sense she is buried alive,like Madeline Usher or Persephone. She becomes the death-bride ; the Russian surrealist Tchelitchev referred to her as the White Lady.

The myth of the rape of the bride by the underworld is more central to modernism than is commonly observed. It appears not only in Poe, among the pre-Raphaelites, in poets as different as William Carlos Williams and Rilke, but was critical to the early days of feminism, which attempted many revisions of the myth of Persephone. Obviously, it marked the strong sense among women that they had been seized, captured, and confined--entombed-- in unwanted identities.This is a political truth with an historical dimension, as events in the world testify. It is also a metaphor for the imaginative faculties of the human Psyche under warrant, hence its appearance in Dickens and Poe. This is the Self kidnapped from Ceres, or Mother Nature,by Pluto ("RICHES"), into the airless and artificial mirror realm of cunningly be-jeweled counterfeits. According to Guy Davenport, it is the diagnostic myth of the mental illness of western culture from the nineteenth century on.

This is the vein that Coyne taps. The artists she cites as influences--Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Anne Hamilton--don't form a school or even resemble each other much, but they do outline a geneology.The keen awareness of the abjection of the flesh, the tumnescent neediness and the decay of the body, are Bourgeois' contribution; the de-regulation of minimalism in favor of a willed awkwardness,lopsided eccentricity,is Hesse'--along with her tangled skeins. Ann Hamilton provided both hair-as-metaphor and hair quite literally, as she gave Coyne the horsehair used for her 1993 DIA installation-- those famous stairways covered with hair. What these artists have in common is the will to revise further and further into the intuitional unknown. There is nothing neatly rounded off or pat about any of them.

This is why I don't think Coyne's work is kitsch, as it has been accused of being.Those undulating beds of roses, each with their own separate sigh, animating each otherby implication, over which some fatal candle has dripped, and which are interwoven withthose aforementioned birds and leaping taxidermied squirrels, remind me of a constellation of things without being quite like anything else I've seen. That's a complex response. And formally what keeps it far from cliche is Coyne's feeling for orphaned forms, for fungal shapes and weed shapes,the way twigs are plaited together by the flood which casts them ashore as detritus, by algae, and stumps, and curly willow, by the revival and transmutation of life through the process of decay.Those upsidedown bouquets which are also chandeliers or those biers which appear to rustle are also nests in which souls seem to gather. She calls them her "girls".

LEITMOTIFS

Things I noticed as I viewed the holdings of gallery after gallery:
there are big pieces with small ideas and vice versa
there are schools but not trends
what was once a trend is now a historical option
an historical option is not perceived as in being any chronological order but as an item on a menu equidistant to all others
there were virtuoso scissorers who I thought of, absurdly, as string players and artists who were literally string players
black on black which always has a matte vs shiny mystique was undergoing a revival
there were any number of permutations on the theme of the scary clown or the innocently- but- fatally- demon born
that our Gothick is more Teutonic than the Gothicizing modes of previous decades; it has a Hoffmannesque quality to it. One of his heroines turned into a carrot.And if a certain morbidezza is the mood it is the mood of more than a moment.
ALSO
Graphite artists of utmost nuancedness, photographers of urban prairies of desuetude or other alienation effects--always alienation effects--under enlargement.the morganatic marriage of art to costume legitimized ,the triumph of the C print.the happy sense that an artisanal technique did not,after all, require the aegis of irony to assist in its revival.
AND
in every major american city a major painter of celestial blues, blues out of medieval books of hours transposed to the twenty-first century;why now?

ON LISTENING TO WHAT YOUR EARS TELL YOU

I am falling down the corridors of cyber-information with delight. Several months ago I "discovered" the number of classical performances on You-tube, last night all sorts of sources for music ranging from Fado to Sean-nos. This almost makes up for a huge record collection jettisoned during a divorce. The You-tube phenomena is interesting for the great music available, as well as the sometimes imbecilic commentary which accompanies it. Thanks to a site called Tru-crypt I have been able to acquaint myself with Soviet-period pianists of the Russian school about whom I had only heard before. Pianists have their geneology--what Lincoln Kirstein used to call in ballet the "apostolic succession". Some of these studied with Tchaikovsky's friend, the great Anton Rubinstein. And one, Vladimir Sofrinitsky, was the son in law of Scriabin. Scriabin wanted his later works to be accompanied by light shows and the burning of incense-- psychedelia avant la lettre--and hoped that he could hang bells from the sky. Such were the aspirations of the pre-Bolshevic theosophists. His perverse, beautiful sonatas, with their air of opium-smoking in the orchid pavilion, have had many distinguished advocates, including Horowitz, Richter, John Ogdon, Askenazi, but the Scriabinisti accord
special status to Sofrinitsky, and in hearing them, I can hear why. He manages to give a human amplitude to what can sometimes seem pathological, special case, like a madhouse made of venetian glass. But it was Sofrinitsky's recording of a very great piece of music, the Chopin op. 60 Barcarolle, which really floored me. This is a work to which Friedrich Nietzchte ascribed transcendent powers. Sofrinitsky's is among the best I have heard. Here,however, is where the fly is found in the ointment, in the comments made. Someone says that the Sofrinitsky blows away Dinu Lipatti's classic account , and someone else says that of the performance of Alfred
Cortot. I listened to both again, and to a performance of Artur Rubinstein's from 1958, and each seemed definitive as I listened, as did an admirable account by Krystian Zimmerman. And each, of course, was subtly different, the Sofrinitsky performance being almost two minutes longer than Dinu Lipatti's account, a minute longer than Rubinsteins, and three quarters of a minute longer than Cortot, as I dazzedly recall. The sound world of each pianist was also quite different--for tonal beauty it would be difficult to match Cortot, the earliest recording, but this impression soon evaporated at different times which each of the others. Completely unnecessary and ungenerous to demote any of these superb performances at the expense of the others, as the Chopin Barcarolle itself is the raison d'etre. In heaven there are many mansions. Which brings me to the imbecilic aspect of comparison here: if a great work has been played for over a century and a half by an array of pianists of the first rank there is room. Time has made room and we can choose different interpretations in different seasons. There is no need to beat excellence down. I have given up on "definitive" performances myself, though like anyone else I have my druthers. Strange but enlightening to hear a Beethoven sonata on a forte-piano. Years ago I would only listen to Bach or Handel if played on a harpsichord. To continue with this dogma, useful in its way, would have deprived me of the Bach and Handel of Andras Schiff, Richter, and Glenn Gould. Each has given me joy, and joy is always in short quantity. Apropos which, one You-tuber said of Gould's Bach that it exploded Sviatslav Richter's. By wicked coincidence, I had just listened to an interview with Glenn Gould in which he described Richter as the greatest musical communicator he had ever heard.

ZEITQUEST INDEX

During the months of July and August last year, I viewed the web-sites and
the entire rosters of 700 art dealers nationwide, 250 in Chelsea alone.
I suspect that the approximate figure of 14,000 artists whose work I viewed is too little.
It certainly was a quasi-mystical experience. I tried, without success,
to come up with some grand-scale oracular pronunciamento until I realized that I,too, was
succumbing to an afflatus of the election year. Thank Heaven, I was spared and so were you.
Also : I have always wondered what eyrie the large-scale surveyors of history--it could be Spengler,it could be Foucault--perch on.
While a general thesis eluded me, I did have the pleasure of discovering for myself
a number of artists of whom I had been unaware; some have influenced
my thinking, and I will write about them eventually.But for a time, here is the list of those I found compelling, starting in Chelsea, but proceeding to Brooklyn,Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Austen, Los Angeles, Scottsdale, San Francisco, Seattle,
Portland, Montreal, and Toronto.
(footnote: as this list was put together before the economic crisis,it inevitably
mentions dealers no longer in existence; it is important to remember that their artists
still are.To those dealers who remain: permissions to reproduce work will speed
any comment I might make, and the prompt response to correspondence
will provoke astonishment as well as gratitude. The asterisk means: I adore you from afar; the + means seriously elegant work;the marginilia preserves my notes, but inclusion is proof of my admiration.)

CHELSEA
DL. Alvarez	Derek Eller
roger anderson	Sarah Meltzer
esao Andrews	J Le Vine
paolo Arao	Jeff Bailey Gallery
assume vivid astral focus*
	John Connolly Presents after the wake, an orgy
ali Banisadr	Leslie Tonkonow
gary Baseman		The big stories are all fairytales
gary Batty	Feature
james Barsness*	George Adams	He draws like Rackham; he thinks like Tex Avery
tony Bechaka	Andre Zarre
Berkowitz and Brua	Derek Eller	tables climb walls decked with the soul's laundry
Tim Bishop	J Le Vine
suzzane Bocenagra	Lucas Schoormans
Hilary Brace*	Edward Thorpe	Apparitional Whiteness from the Hollow Earth
alex Brown	Feature
jason Brown	Rare
jeff Burton	Casey Kaplan
dean Byington*	Leslie Tonkonow	an Heir of Richard Dadd
olaf Breuning	Metro Pictures
ingrid calame	James Cohan
james casabere +	Paul Kasmin	the de Chirico sublet
jonathan Callan	Nicole Klagsburn
Beth Campbell	Nicole Klagsburn
martines Canas	Julie Saul
gillian Carnegie	Andrea Rosen
nathan carter	Casey Kaplan
St Clair Cemin*	Sikkemma Jenkins
peter Coffin*	Andrew Kreps	the wreck of the Hegel in the form of crunched stairs
matthew Collishaw	Bonakdar
lia Cook	Nancy Margolis
george condo	Luhring Augustine	De Kooning and Saul Steinberg fight over a broad
petah coyne*	Gallerie Lelong	Miss Havisham and Madeleine Usher discuss Nerval
andy cvijanovic	Bellwether
Inka Essenhigh	303
tim daly	DFN
james Davis	Rare
edith derdyuk+	Haim Chanin	String theory meets Atropos
leonardo Drew*	Sikkemma Jenkins
jeff Elrod+	Fredericks Freiser
jean-michel fauquet	Haim Chanin	Physical stairways to metaphysical oubliettes
angelo filomeno*	Galerie LeLong	as true (and as artificial) as Chopin or Baudelaire
roland fisher	Von Lintel
roland Flexner*	D'Amelio Terras	Taoist of the profound soap bubble
Mark Fox*	Larisa Goldston	The Paganini of Scissors shapes a Tornado
adam Fowler	Margaret Thatcher Projects
yuichi higashiona	Boesky
Francesca Gabriani	Sarah Meltzer
stan Gregory	Sunduram Tagore
orly Genger	Larisa Goldston
sam Gibbons	Claire Oliver
Tomoo Gokita	ATM
Anthony Gormley
richard Greaves*	Andrew Edlin	The bigfoot of the Canadian Rockies
jonah Greensberger	Bellwether
stan Gregory	Sunduram Tagore
Andreas Gursky	Matthew Marks
diana al hadi	Perry Rubinstein
Liz Halloran	DCKT	streaks of speed in progress
trenton doyle Hancock	James Cohan
Jutta Haeckel	Hosfelt
Jacob el Hanani	Hosfelt
Ann Hardy	Bellwether
lyle ashton harris	CRG Gallery
jeppe Hein	303
julie heffernan	PPOW
kent hendricksen	John Connally	Presents Part of the problem is that my boyfriend dabbles in dark arts
oliver Herring*	Max Protech	Victor Frankenstein's career in high fashion
eva Hild	Nancy Margolis
julie Hirst	Pavel Zoubok
Karsten Hollier	Casey Kaplan
timothy Horn*	Hosfelt	the debate of the baroque with the rococo conducted in spun sugar
jacqueline humphries	Greene Naftali
aaron johnson	Stux
butt johnson	CRG Gallery	I was in the outhouse when Daddy got raptured
cassandra c jones	Vanina Holasek Gallery
brian Jungen	Casey Kaplan
jen kim	Steinberg
Ron Klein	Howard Scott
jolyn kystosek	Lucas Schoormans
Jeff Ladouceur	Zieher Smith
rezi van lankveld	Petzel
sarah Leahy	Kim Foster
Catherine Lee	Galleries Lelong	the disaffection of the great horizon
wonju lim	Boesky
graham little	CRG Gallery
donald lipski*	Gallerie Lelong	the charioteer of found objects
nicola lopez	Caren Golden
john maeda+	Christenrose	So slick it becomes another substance
Marco Maggi*	Hosfelt	depict the cryptogram and decrypt the pictogram
frank magnotta	Cohan + Leslie
didier Massard	Julie Saul
tatsuya Matsushita	Mehr Gallery
josiah mc elheny	Andrea Rosen
maureen mc quillan	Mc Kenzie
jason meadows	Bonakdar
sarah Morris	Petzel
ron mueck	()
james nakes	Paul Kasmin
ernesto neto*	Bonakdar	angelic snot sacks
aaron Noble	Pavel Zoubok
ludwika orgozelec	Nancy Margolis Gallery
jean michel Othoniel+	Sikkemma Jenkins
gary panter	Clementina
james paterson	Bitforms
jorge Pardo*	Petzel
roxy payne	James Cohan
emilio perez	Galerie Lelong
diego perone	Casey Kaplan
ara Peterson*	James Connally presents
jack Pierson+	Danziger
jaume Plensa*	Galerie Lelong Alphabody Fountainface
ken price	Matthew Marks
matthew ritchie	Andrea Rosen
john rappeleye	jeff bailey	Snakes writhe through skulls in desert blanched colors
mary reilly	DFN Gallery
anil reuri	Sundurum tagore
matthew ritchie	Andrea Rosen
michel angelo roca	ATM
jimmy joe roche	Rare
betsabee romero	Galerie Ramis Barquet
alexander Ross	Boesky
victoria Ryan	John Stevenson
ursula von rydinguard	Galerie Lelong	Treetrunk Tankards for Fafner and Fasolt
dennis rudolph	Perry Rubinstein
alain saret+	James Cohan
tojkijito Sato	Leslie Tonkonow
robert Sagarman	Marguerite Thatcher Projects
peter sarkissian
aaron spangler	Rare
peter schuyff	Nicole Klagsbrun
michelle segre	Derek Eller	the cracquelature of the biomorphic forms found near Oz
hiroshi senjo	Sunduram Tagore
gary simmons	Metro Pictures
john stashkevitch	Von Lintel
james everett stanley	Freight+Volume
simon starling	Casey Kaplan
max streicher	Ricco Maresca
mark Swanson+	Bellwether
francesca sundsten	Jenkins Johnson Gallery
james Surls	Charles Cowles	Old Wild Cowboy Ropes Trickster Tree
barbara takenaga	Mc Kenzie
maki Tamura	Lucas Schoormans
whiting tennis	Derek Eller
gordon Terry	Jeff Bailey
fred tomaselli*	James Cohan	vast worlds from small aspirins
tam van tran	Cohan + Leslie
scott trealeaven+		James Connally presents The Commedia del Arte meets the Neopolitan Inquisition on toile
james Valerio +	George Adams
mark dean veca	J le Vine
michael velliquette	DCKT Gallery
mark wagner	Pavel Zoubok
hugh walton	Clementina
wayne white	Clementina
adam wallacavage
kit white	Andre Zarre
wayne white	Clementina
terry winters	Matthew Marks
mike womack	Zieher Smith
c yass	Gallerie Lelong
amy yoes	Steinberg
jason young	Christenrose
Michelle Zapony	Esso	Spook girl sends large postcards
Rhonda Zwillinger	Pavel Zoubok

(no James Turrell or Christian Boltanski or Mona Hatoum or Olafur Eliasson or Yayoi Kusama?
no one from certain galleries I greatly respect? No, merely a certain mental footweariness
and the understanding that a jeux d'esprit does not have to be ecumenical-- so many a blue chip's
been left out, not that I'd mind owning one) Oct.9th, 2009

SPEM IN ALIUM

I am listening to Renaissance Polyphonic music again, to Tudors, and Flemish composers at the court of Beatrice D'Este in Ferrara, and trying to understand the compositional differences between Obrecht and Ockheghem, Josquin and Isaac. Why do this? Because it is some of the most heavenly music on earth. It is music of great fervor and almost kaleidoscopic complexity, and its re-emergence in our own time has influenced many. Neither Arvo Part or John Taverner or Oswaldo Golijov or Nico Muhly would be the same without it, different as each is. It is one part of history which our part of history is trying to bend its skull around. The work "supreme in its anomaly"--the work our own time is most attracted to-- is probably Thomas Tallis' motet Spem in Alium, a motet for eight choirs of five voices, or forty parts, which may be the most complex piece of music written. It has been recorded sixteen or so times, including a budget CD of it alone (it averages about eleven minutes in performance)by the King's Singers, the CD equivalent of a single. I have six recordings almost accidentally, of which I tend to rely on three:the Tallis Singers on a two-disk anthology of Tallis' music, Paul van Nevel and the Huelgas Ensemble in a recording on Sony called Utopia Triumphans, and a recording by David Wilcox and the Winchester Choir on
Hyperion--
the pellucid, the plangent, and the weighty. The Tallis Singer's anthology fully demonstrates Peter Phillip,the director's, assertion that Tallis is one of the composers with the greatest range, from plain four square hymnody to this auditory cathedral of a work. Van Nevel's disk puts Spem in Alium in the context of other high Renaissance tour de forces, and it is instructive to compare a masterpiece, as Spem in Alium surely is, to a feat of ingenuity, such as a forty voice motet by Striggio, much as it is clarifying to compare Michelangelo's frescos with Guilio Romano's. Van Nevel's approach has a certain controlled wildness to it. Wilcox's has from the start a sense of the work's bigness that the others don't. But each reveals things that the others de-emphasize; this is a work which can not be summed up, only successfully traversed. The Kronos quartet has recorded it as an instrumental work with multiple dubbings, and there is a midi program of all forty parts from top to bottom on the internet, (thank you,David Siu ) which allows one to hear it part by part, which I have done, the matter of a good part of a day. In 2006, the Scottish artist Janet Cardiff installed 40 speakers at MOMA to play each part separately; the speakers were set up in a circle so the part-singing swirled around the listeners in conformity with some theories as to how it was performed in the time of King James 1, with the choristers encircling the listeners. My first exposure to it was in the 1970's on a recording released by the CLERKES OF OXENFORD. It featured, if I remember correctly, counter-sopranos as well as counter-tenors. It seens to me now, as it did then, to be like a huge Dantesque rose of heaven in sound or the musical equivalent of Borges' Aleph, the coin at the bottom of the stairs in his parable of the same name, in which all that is or shall be can be seen clearly, separately, simultaneously.