Ryan Haley's blog

You have nothing to do this weekend? I wish I could say the same, but its the 4th Annual NYABF and 2nd Annual CABC all under one roof at PS1.

A free opening preview is tonight from 6 to 8pm. And things really kick off tomorrow at 10:30 with the opening conference session. The Fair is entirely free and the bound-to-be intellectually stimulating Conference sessions are an affordable $20 each (or $100 for all 6 session and other assorted goodies).

In addition a slew of performances, talks and general fun have been arranged to concurrently happen in the Classroom at PS1.

Now what were your plans again?

The NYPL Photography Collection has one of the largest collections of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs outside of the Library of Congress. I’m not sure what it is about these images—though given the economic times I’d say they are due for a resurgence—but they continue be some of the most popular and to present some of the most iconic images in American history: Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Okies newly arrived to their hardscrabble yet hopeful life in the interior valleys of California being perhaps the most prominent example.

The history, plight, and societal conditions of California agricultural workers (not farmers) has been told many times over. It is not a happy story, but it is story of necessity and one that is generally forgotten as the state has been transformed into two regional metropolitan hubs. It is a nice addition, then, to find a book like Richard Steven Street’s Everyone Had Cameras. Street chronicles the photographic documentation & representation of farm workers from grape-pickers on Leland Stanford’s estate in the northern Sacramento Valley in the late 19th century to the present day migrant workers who pick strawberries in Ventura County.

A little later this year, Powerhouse Books—an independent publisher in Brooklyn—will be bringing out a volume of William T. Vollmann’s photographs of the Imperial Valley. Vollmann is well known for blending fictional and non-fictional portrayals of marginal figures in American history & society. He will follow up this photographic work with a 1300-page historical account of the Valley. Perhaps not summer reading, but it’ll get you through next winter.

Also, be sure to check out some of the NYPL's FSA images on the Flickr Commons...

It seems that my idea of Richard Bruce Cheney as a two dimensional nefarious character was hardly original, but this manifestation of others’ lack of imagination is mind boggling.

Exhibit A, the cover for Charlie Savage’s Takeover:

Exhibit B, the cover for Barton Gellman’s Angler:

Hat-tip to the Bernstein selection committee members for pointing this out!

Further hat-tip to Galley Cat for noticing this a while ago, albeit with the "revised" paperback cover for Savage's book.

Now that the art economy has collapsed and followed the mortgage derivative finance home boom bust buy now pay later consumption as a way of life whatever whatnot economy into the dumpster of ideas, I’d like to recommend a very sound investment for the young artist class: Get a Library Card and check out Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino. Or if you need a place to keep warm, get an Access Card and come read it here. & if you’re a contemplative fellow or gal and find yourself mulling over the heroic American Art-Culture Scene of the 50’s & 60’s: read Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.

As my Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC monthly statements used to say: “Be better informed, so you can make better decisions.”

A few days ago, I remembered that I liked Design Observer—a collective blog that occasionally includes posts from the great Steven Heller. Anyway, there was a post or a link or some other worm hole a few months ago that led to a Flickr page of book covers designed by Alvin Lustig for New Directions in the late 1940’s. Clean, with one or two colors, interesting use of typography or hand lettering, and abstracted shapes, Lustig’s designs are a revelation and respite from the lazy use of the photographic image and rote text layout (a problem then as now).

However, since NYPL, like most libraries, does not extensively collect book jackets, my forays into the stacks were for naught. That is until I ran across Alfred Young Fisher’s The Ghost in the Underblows. A 304 page arch-modernist poem that I won’t or can’t summarize, The Ghost in the Underblows was designed by Lustig and printed at the Ward Ritchie Press in Los Angeles in 1940. Lustig’s design for the title page and the section breaks are quite beautiful given the two-color palette (red and black) he utilized and vastly different from his later work. Each is a small symphony, composed of metal slugs and other odds and ends from the print shop where the positioning and edges of the components become visible on close inspection. Yet moving back the designs resemble a Frank Lloyd Wright window constructed by Malevich.

All of the images from Ghost as well as other information on Lustig are available here, but a close examination with the object provides a real delight.

One of Calvin Tompkins' Bachelors has shuffled off stage left. As the New York Times obituary makes clear, Rauschenberg's impact on the Visual and Performing Arts is pretty much incalculable.

I can't remember when I didn't know of Rauschenberg's work, having probably been exposed to a few pieces in my teens on a weekend getaway to the Art Institute of Chicago, but one of my favorite experiences that encompasses Rauschenberg and his cadre of New York pals was seeing the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform at Lincoln Center in 1999. There in one place--literally and figuratively--were Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, Bob Rauschenberg and, as something of a weird bonus Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gavin Bryars and Jim O'Rourke.

The Library for Performing Arts actually has a DVD of one night that I attended in addition to other videos and printed material relating to Rauschenberg's work with the MCDC as well as his experiments in Performance Art. In addition, the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs has a plethora of material outlining Rauschenberg's entire career.

Goodbye 20th century!

Architectural Record has a recurring section called "Building Types Study". The February 2008 issue’s section is dedicated to library design and one of the three libraries discussed is NYPL’s Mulberry Street Branch. The Record commends the architectural firm Roger Marvel Architects for allowing diffused light to penetrate “into both subterranean levels via the central stair”, which it calls “an important psychological feat.”

NYPL’s holdings on the architecture of libraries is fairly broad and historically focused; however Shannon Mattern’s The New Downtown Library seems to consider some of the more pressing concerns (public space, digital technologies, and modern librarianship) of the 21st century. For a more visual take on recent library projects consider Biblioteche: architetture 1995-2005, which offers a brief history lesson on libraries and then considers in some depth around 40 new libraries (renovations & reuse are included) from around the world. Very few are in the United States, which is hardly surprising given the dearth of imaginative thinking and design that goes into public works here (but that’s another post…).

That being said, Biblioteche came out too early to mention the slight redemption that is the OMA-designed Seattle Public Library, which has received accolades from just about every architectural critic (e.g, the late Herbert Muschamp) and librarian (Library Journal chimes in). Luckily, there is now a monograph devoted to the Seattle Public Library (recently brought out by the Barcelona & New York based publisher Actar); and while we don’t have it yet, consider it ordered.

Since we recently had a little dusting of snow it's probably a good time to mention photographer Ellie Ga and her current foray into the depths of the Arctic night as Artist-in-Residence aboard the Tara. The Tara is not Skowhegan, but a research vessel that has been locked in the ice of the Arctic Ocean since September 2006.

Ga, who joined the Tara in September 2007, has been keeping an online journal on the Alliance Francaise website and there is a little more information (in English) on the Tara's site regarding her Arctic projects. The Dispatch gallery (appointment only) has also been receiving audio missives from Ga that they make available to visitors.

You might remember the Tara from Pierre Huyghe's 2005 Antarctic voyage, which was the basis for a Central Park public art performance in October 2005. Also along for the ride with Huyghe was Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, who was working on project for the United Nations Environmental Program.

On a recent Saturday and with a few friends, I visited the Brooklyn Museum and the near-permanent exhibit, American Identities. Tired from the walk, we loitered around the first room and looked at the disparate paintings, furniture & objets d’art. Also in this room was a television monitor showing a loop of Thomas Edison’s films of revelers at Coney Island. These films reminded one of us of another Edison film from Coney Island that hasn’t made it onto the Library of Congress’ American Memory site: “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903). Two grainy versions of the film are available here & here, but it’s perhaps best to start with the reported account of the execution from the New York Times.

I’m not quite sure of the aesthetic merits of this animal snuff film, but it is imprinted in my mind like Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair series. The inventor of the electric chair was, of course, Mr. Thomas Alva Edison and the elephant was named—after a little girl who ‘growed’—Topsy.