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.

1/7/2011

12.00am

Well, I made it to New York in almost one piece.  The plane flight was long and tedious as I expected.  But my neighbours were nice and we got chatting through the night.

I got to LA air port, they call it LAX, and discovered that I don’t deal well with sleep deprivation at all.  Managed to get confused and go off in the wrong direction and miss my connection.  I won’t go into too much detail, but what gets me is how unfriendly everyone has been during the whole process.   You would think that they would be nicer to you because A, you have just been through this arduous journey and B, their country is in a full on recession and the tourist dollar is probably the most important thing there is right now.   

Any way all was ok when I made it to NYC, Merryon was at the airport to meet me, we took a Taxi to Manhattan.  And I saw the city lit up.  Amazing.

Today I went to The Whitney Museum, tried to go to the Guggenheim but it isn’t open on a Thursday, what’s that about. An odd thing I am noticing is all the Security Gaurds are African Americans but the face of the place was these three young white hipsters, and all the patrons were white as well.  Then I went to a grocery store and all the checkout chicks were African American.  Maybe it is just the area I’m in but they all seemed to be in the menial jobs.  Just a thing I noticed.  The Upper east Side is full of "Stuff that white people like" though, very gentrified. 

At the Whitney there was a lot of old stuff and two really great shows of Contemporary art.  The first was a large solo show by an artist named Cory Arcangel, who uses al lot on technologies in his works.  The center piece was a video game work that of coarse was going to get me excited.  He (with help) has created a chip that is wired into the controller of a video game and presses the buttons and makes them play them self.  So he had collected Bowling video games from over the last 30 years starting with the Atari and working through to the Nintendo Game cube.  And in all the games the bowler is throwing gutter balls.  All of his work had a sense of humor about it that was in line with my own sense of humor as well.

While the show upstairs ‘Singular Vision’ was a collection of artworks mainly installation, from the last 50 years and invited quiet contemplation by giving each work its own room, rather than a sensory overload like Cory’s work induced.  It is an interesting juxtaposition of shows I thought.

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/SingularVisions

I should go to bed and attempt to get my internal clock in tune with this place.

29/06/2011

8.20am

Sydney.

Well, I am on the other side of customs now.  The customs officer was very unpleasant, she must of known I was a newby and didn’t care.  She kept asking for a document, waiting for me to get it out and close my wallet again.  Then she would ask me for the next piece of documentation, so I would have to go through all that again.  I mumbled by the end that she could have told me all that at once.  I think she realised she was being a bitch and made the effort to try to crack what may have been a smile.  It was hard to tell. I think she may need a new job......  The guy at the x-ray was nice and helpful, like that.

The Qantas woman at Melbourne was nice and helpful, and laughed at my jokes. That’s good.  I am travelling in a window seat the whole way.

That’s all I have for now.