Adventures in the New York Art World

6/7/2011

Wed

10.45

Today I did a lot of running around organising my room for the second part of my stay, made it across town and back again, then back to Upper west side from JFK under my own steam.  It took me a few days of jet lagged stupor before I started to work out the trains.  But it is pretty easy.

Merryon went back to Melbourne today.  The Taxi to the air port was a bit of a nail biter.  The Taxi driver was literally falling asleep.  First he took us to the wrong air port, then when he finaly got us to the right place he came to a stop on the ramp leading up to the departures because he had actually fallen asleep.  Good thing it wasn’t busy at the time.

Now I am staying in The Upper West Side, rather then The Upper East, it is a little more down to earth.  And I walk around the corner and what should I find but “The Ding Dong Lounge” with the proud declaration “New York – Melbourne” under the main sign.  How about that, I stumble across a little bit of Melbourne.

Well a week has zoomed by without me making another entry so I suppose I will go day by day and recount my adventures.

2/7 Sat

Today we ended up at the Bowery Arts District and got around to a few galleries.  But we also made the realisation that the US is in their equivalent of our long Christmas holiday, summer, causing a lot of places to be closed. 

The first gallery we found was New Museum (http://www.newmuseum.org/)  which was an amazing space that had probably been a store front space once.  It is a tall thin space made of glass and aluminium mesh.  With hidden stairs and where you don’t expect to find them and white spaces that are varied in there feeling and use of space.  It put me in mind of our ACCA, I believe it fills that sort of niche in the New York Art World.  My favourite show that was on was, Museum as Hub: The Incongruous Image—Marcel Broodthaers and Liliana Porter.  It was a fun play on words and images, with cows in a vet’s chart of breeds with the names of sports cars.  And a scrubbing brush stuck on a canvas poised to continue to push around the piled single splodge of white paint and discarded tiny ladders.   David Medalla, Cloud Canyon no. 14 The wall blurb said this artist signature is bubble making machines.  Can you imagine that, your signature being machines that make bubbles?  We were lucky we found this one it was down a set of steps that we almost missed and in an alcove.  Any way, it’s bubbles, (sort of like the bubbles in a bubble bath, not like the flying kind) were creating quite a tower, so i took my catalogue and fanned it until it fell...It looked like a very phallic object becoming placid.  The other work that stood out was by Apichatpong Weerasethakul in which lightening would hit the ground repeatedly, violently in a video of village scenes.  I didn’t quite know how he had done it.  Will have to research it.   Too tired now, will continue update tomorrow. Alister out.