What I Saw This Summer, Part 7: Montreal

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Marketing Mondays will be back on the 21st. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy my accounts of What I Saw This Summer

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With a bad French accent, une vocabulaire élémentaire and no Canadian money, I drove to Montréal recently to visit two artist friends, Alexandre Masino and Yechel Gagnon, who had promised to show me around the city. I was returning two paintings to Alexandre, who had exhibited them in an event I’d organized in June.
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Old Montreal: The history is in the wall

Newer Montreal: The writing is on the wall
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Travelwise, it could not have been an easier trip. From Manhattan you head north on 87 all the way to the border. I had a brief detour at les douanes, customs, where the guard said, "Bonjour, madame. Please get out of the car." He then proceeded to search my entire vehicle—everything except the box with the paintings, which I had declared and for which I had the requisite paperwork. Each step forward to see what they were doing as they went through my stuff was met with a "Stay behind the line, madame." Madame? Moi?

Back on the highway, U.S. 87 became Canadian Rt.15, and then Rt. 20, a little bit less smooth than on the U.S. side, but otherwise a straight shot. As for the money, pas problem: I had my credit cards.

You'll see Alexandre and Yechel, their work and studios in the next post, so here let me give you a few highlights of my visit, with them as my guides.


Le Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal

At this new museum we saw three shows: Betty Goodwin, whom the museum has called "the grande dame of Canadian contemporary art"; Robert Polidori, the Quebec-born photographer who has shown widely in New York (and elsewhere); and Spring Hurlbut, whose installation, Le Jardin du sommeil was a surprisingly poetic room full of beds.
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The Contemporary Art Museum of Montréal, set in a Lincoln Center-esque plaza downtown

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.Betty Goodwin was represented by a lifetime of work, from Kounellis-like canvases, to enormous figurative pastels. Her prints of actual clothing, which at first appear to be x-ray photographs, were the most evocative. Seeing the work of this famous Canadian artist whom I'd never heard of in the U.S. was a reminder that the art world can be uncomfortably like high school: showering a small group of popular kids with all the attention when in fact there's a whole school full of quirky, interesting students.

Betty Goodwin, Vest Two, 1970, soft-ground etching, 6/10. 86,7 x 69,5 cm. Collection Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo: MACM from the musée's website
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Spring Hurlbut's Le Jardin du sommeil, the Garden of Sleep, consists of 140 old-fashioned, metal-frame cribs and cradles set in the plan of an English garden—a center of cradles, all rounded shapes, flanked by rectilinear rows of cribs and baby beds interspersed with a few doll beds as well. The lights are low, and at first my thought was of hospitals, then of all the bodies that had slept on those beds but that were no longer there; there were no mattresses, only the skeletal bedframes. After walking around the in the low light, I understood the work as a metaphor for the passing of time, of the transition from one state to another, cradled by eternity.
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The big sleep: Two views of Hurlbut's Le Jardin du sommeil

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Robert Polidori's photographs are also about the passing of time. Extraordinarily beautiful, with saturated colors and panoramic views, they express decay and decline. His images are of a Havana that seems to disintegrate before your eyes, while those of New Orleans and Chernobyl record the aftermath of a specific cataclysmic event. The contradictoriness of their beauty and tragedy keeps you looking even while you feel as if you should look away.

I saw Polidori's grand Havana photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., in 2004, and his New Orleans After the Flood exhibition at the Met in 2006, but this was the first time I’d seen these bodies of work together along with photographs of Versailles, Beirut, and Amman, Jordan. Polidori, whom I believe is a staff photographer for The New Yorker, takes long exposures, which would account for the extraordinary richness of each image. You're seeing not just one isolated moment in time but something like a short film captured in each frame. (The shadows may appear to travel across the wall, outside foliage to appear as a dreamlike blur.)

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Robert Polidori. Above 6539 Canal Street, New Orleans, March 2006

Below, 2520 Deslondes, New Orleans, September 2005
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Polidori. Above, Velours Frappé, Salles Du XVIIeme, Versailles, 1985.

Below, another view of the palace
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A salon, once grand, Havana
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Chernobyl, below. You probably can't see it in this small image, but those consoles are crudely constructed out of plywood. Nuclear technology in a box! It was funny on the old Star Trek series; frightening in real life

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DHC Art

At this non-profit contemporary art venue, the work of Michal Rovner was on view. I showed Rovner's work in my Armory Report in 2008, but this is the first time I'd seen it in a museum setting. With digital projection, Rovner shows DNA and petri-dish cultures aswarm with movement and life. It comes as a shock on close inspection to realize that what you are seeing are tiny projections of human figures, or perhaps a digital replication of human figues—the macro forming the micro, which of course composes the macro. In a similar way, her projections of script on stone—cuneiform? Hebrew? something more ancient?—surprise you. That tiny text is composed of human figures in a constant range of motion.

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Rovner does the impossible: She creates a bridge that connects you, virtually with each individual work, to the whole history of human culture.

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Rovner. Installation view, above, with specific "artifacts" below

The text is a digital projection. If you could look up close in real time, you'd see those letters move; that in fact the letters are formed by human silhouettes
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Next "What I Saw" installment: Montreal studio visits

"You Lie!"

Surrounded by colleagues from both sides of the aisle,  repugnican house member, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, last night shouted, "You Lie!"

Was he responding to Sarah (being-uninformed-doesn't-stop-her-from-having-opinions) Palin, who blathered about "death panels" for senior citizens?

Was he responding to the repugnican governor of his state, Mark Sanford, who told his constituency that he was hiking the Appalachian trail when in fact he had flown to Argentina to, uh, tango with his paramour?

Was he responding to any of the "family values" guys who have been caught with their pants down--in bathroom stalls, in hotel rooms, on mic talking about spanking, in flagrante delicto--with women or men who were not, in fact, their partners?

Was he responding (belatedly) to mission accomplished?  To weapons of mass destruction.  To swift boat? To Read my lips: No new taxes? To I am not a crook?

Was he voicing his opinion of everything Dick ("I might run for President in 2012") Cheney has ever said?

Amazingly, no. He shouted it at President Obama--the first person in the Oval Office in eight years who has integrity and honesty and who actually makes sense. The topic was, of course, health care.

CNN and The Huffington Post (which called the representative "Old Yeller")  have the stories.
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What I Saw This Summer, Part 6: An Alfresco "Studio"

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The view at Slate Hill Farm in Salem, New York

Sometimes the palette is achieved with pollen. That's the case at Slate Hill Farm, a daylily farm run by Mary and Craig Barnes in Salem, New York, where hybrids come in a beautiful range of hues and configurations, some even resembling orchids. Salem is not far from from Battenville. In fact, I visited with my Battenville hosts Gerald Coble and Bob Nunnelley.

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I'm old friends with Mary Barnes, who commutes between Manhattan and here. (We've known each other from when we were neighbors in Shushan, a hamlet of the village of Salem. Now we find out we're neighbors in Chelsea. Life--so interesting.) Anyway, Mary and her husband Craig, a painter, have taken the roadside daylily and created a business. You can see specifics on their Slate Hill Farm website, so here I'll just show you a few pics:

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The daylily is so named because the flower blooms for one day only. Because there are many buds on each stalk, and many stalks in each plant, the plants are in constant bloom

 

.Above: This daylily is a Barnes hybrid called the Edythe Donovan. Edy was a good friend of Mary's and a friend of mine. She lived a too-short life but a full and productive one. This delicate flower remembers a force of nature who could knit, smoke, converse in German, do a crossword puzzle in English, eat, stoke the fire, and hit you with a bon mot, wisecrack, insult or compliment all at once
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Mary Barnes, taking a break from the field; Craig Barnes in the field (this image from the Internet)

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Below: Mary shows how she pollinates the lilies by hand--pistil to stamen (or vice versa, I forget). But the point is that all flowers are propagated by hand

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.Next "What I Saw" installment: Montreal

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What I Saw This Summer, Part 5: Art and Life in Battenville, New York

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.Marketing Mondays will be back on the 21st.

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Some years ago I lived in Washington County, lush dairy-farm country that shares a border with Vermont, about 200 miles upstate. (Well, lush in the summer; snowy and cold as freezing hell in the winter.) My longtime friends Gerald Coble and Bob Nunnelley live there in an early 19th-Century farmhouse, which they've meticulously restored inside and out. (The house was glimpsed briefly as the domestic setting for Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer.) I get my own wing when I stay over--a second-floor room, accessed via its own staircase, with a four-poster and a bathroom with a pedestal sink. It's hard to leave.

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Art and life at the Coble/Nunnelley residence in Battenville, New York

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Coble and Nunnelley have the most integrated lifestyle of any artists I know: artmaking, gardening, cooking, woodchopping, socializing, exhibiting--the very antithesis of nine-to-five--an idyllic and productive life in Battenville, a tiny town allong a stretch of Route 29, which runs parallel to the Battenkill River not too far from Saratoga. Coble constructs collages and assemblages in a small studio overlooking the Battenkill while Nunnelley paints on the second floor of an old tavern across the road (another meticulously restored building). Let's visit.

House and Garden
I'm showing you just a glimpse of the house and its grounds--I was visiting, not shooting for a shelter magazine, after all--but I think you get a sense of its utter fabulousness.

 

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Tuscany on the Battenkill? Corners of the garden above and below

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This is the inside view of the screened-in summer room with its owners, Bob Nunnelley, below left, and Gerald Coble

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The porch outside the kitchen. Look familiar? It was in a scene from The Horse Whisperer. The Battenkill River is down the hill to the right

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.From the kitchen looking into the dining room, with a view of Coble's most recent work. Closer view below

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I love this work, so evocative. An image of the Three Graces, spools of red silk thread and a swatch of fabric suggest not so much the Roman goddesses of charm, beauty and creativity but the Norse goddesses of fate, the Norns, who spin , weave and clip the fabric of life

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The Coble Studio
Coble's studio is not far from the porch with the firewood, at the back of the house overlooking the Battenkill. It's an intimate space, which seems appropriate for the kind of work he creates: introspective, poetic assemblages that evoke nostalgia even for an imagined past.

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A corner of the studio, with a detail below





Another corner, with a work in honor of Emily Dickinson, below. The white kid gloves, so hauntingly suggestive of life in another time, come from friends who pick them up at yard sales

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A doorbell to the past? I love this one. It's as if you could press that button and be transported to the time and place of that chunk of wall enclosed within the frame

The Nunnelley Studio

Across from the farmhouse is this 18th Century tavern, which the artists have restored with historical accuracy. Nunnelley's studio is on the second floor--reached by the narrowest, steepest stairs I've ever climbed. But before we ascend, I want to mention that just to the left of this building is the childhood home of Susan B. Anthony, which was recently willed to the state. (Sorry, my pictures were too dark; I shot them as night was falling, but the link has a picture and good info.)

The second floor of the tavern, above, is Nunnelley's studio

.Above and below: Two views of the studio's viewing room, shot from opposite ends

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.The recent painting above is my particular favorite. Nunnelley's Matissean style was established when he was in art school. The ink-brush painting on paper is from his days as a student of David Smith. I love the calligraphic elements in his work, and his palette which is so reflective of the Washington County light

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This is where the work on paper is done. To the right is a smaller room where Nunnelley paints
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Below: the inspiration wall in his painting room. Many images are of Nunnelley's own paintings, along with photographs he has taken and reproductions of other painters' work

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Next "What I Saw" installment: An alfresco "studio" in Salem, New York