new york

Performa 09: Composition for Cello and Brooklyn Queens Expressway

Another piece from Performa: A Ballad of Accounting 2009: Composition for Cello and Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a composition by Alex Waterman with a 16-millimeter film by Elizabeth Wendelbo. I was quite interested to see this piece, given that it combines experimental music, art and highways, three of our interests here at CatSynth!

Waterman lived near the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, or BQE, and was inspired by the sounds of the highway as well as its history. It was part of Robert Moses’ master design for the city’s highways, and winds its way through a narrow corridor in densely packed areas of eastern Brooklyn and Queens. (See this article for more info.) Waterman often walked under the highway, listening to sounds and in particular the harmonics. The piece includes live cello performances near and under the highway, with microphones in the resonant chamber of the cello, as a way of modifying and eradicating the noise of the highway, as if “the cello was eating the highway.”

The video opens along the BQE, along the side, underneath, and riding on the surface, interspersed with images of Waterman carrying or playing his cello near the elevated structures. The music featured long notes set against filtered highway noises. There were lots of drones, often featuring noisy timbres or harmonics, but sometimes more familiar minor tonalities. The visuals included architectural close-ups of the elevated structures – hardly considered among the more picturesque in the city, but still quite interesting. I noticed exit signs for Metropolitan Avenue appearing a few times. One moment that particularly got my attention was a forlorn drainpipe. One could imagine the metallic resonances here, and indeed the sound became more electronic, reminding me a bit of early Xenakis. I also heard sounds that reminded me of more modern granular synthesis. There were also sharp departures from the drones, with very pointed “crackling sounds”, appropriate as the video began to feature rain and water dripping from the pipe.

There is a permanent installation of the piece near Calistoga, CA. I am curious to see it sometime after I return home.

Performa 09: In Order of Appearance

This past weekend, I attended several exhibits and performances from the Performa 09 biennial.

On Saturday evening, I saw the New York premier of In Order of Appearance by Youri Dirkx and Aurélien Froment. The piece began with a spare, white on white stage, which was gradually populated by Dirkx with various geometric objects.

I was quite taken with the silence, which in its way became musical (I have long had a musical appreciation of silence in art). It also allowed me to concentrate on the objects themselves, their shapes, colors and perspectives, and the dramatic gestures Dirkx used to manipulate them. The main objects were a cube, rectangular prism, ball (sphere) and cylinder, all in white to match the walls. Sometimes they were stacked, at other moments placed side by side. There were also miniature versions of these same objects, in a dark gray shade. Beyond these were a variety of shapes, clothing and architectural elements, some in bright primary colors, which gave the impression of a modernist/minimalist gallery in a museum.

I really liked seeing this work, with its minimal take on motion and geometry. The spare stage and the silence made it quite arresting to watch. And like a museum, I could switch my attention from one simple object to another on my own terms.

The piece ended with full complement of objects on stage:

I came to this performance without any context, so I pretty much experienced it as described above. It was only afterwards that I reviewed the notes, and found this excerpt quite matched my own perceptions:

“In Order of Appearance” questions ways of presenting an artwork. The presentation takes place amidst architecture made of paper, modelled on the white cube of the museum. This draft version of the gallery space is used here as an operating table, an abstract playground where objects and artworks are transformed in one way and then another, exploring their identity and functions. The piece explores the different viewpoints that one has of objects according to their context of exposition.

Bleecker Street Station, New York City

Many of the stations on the New York subway system have been upgraded over the years, cleaned up and adorned with artwork and location-specific decor. The Bleecker Street Station on the Lexington Avenue line is not one of them. It’s still quite spare and run-down, the supporting columns a bit rusty. As I waited for an uptown #6 train, I took this photograph looking along the tracks and platform:

Just afterwards, I looked across to the opposite platform and saw a young woman making a similar photograph, also looking uptown. Almost as quickly, a downtown #6 pulled into the station, and as the train pulled away, she was of course gone. A typical movie cliche, but our main purpose in this little station was to catch our trains to wherever it was were going next.

MoMA, Miró, Modernism and Theremins

In addition to my adventures on the F train, I did have a small amount of time to enjoy art and music while was in New York for the Thanksgiving holiday.


One of the featured exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937. Miró often appears in my artistic travels – I have been to multiple retrospectives and visited the Miró Museum in Barcelona. This exhibition was more specific, focusing on a single decade of his career, during which he challenged the definition of “painting.” It opens with his declaration in 1927 “I want to assassinate painting” and features several examples of “non-painting”, including collages (such as Composition with Wire, shown to the right) and wooden sculptures. At the same time, however, many of the works are things we would consider paintings. Some of the canvases are unprimed, and several use new media such as masonite. But there are still primarily two-dimensional works involving paint on a surface. And most of the paintings and non-paintings include Miró’s signature elements in his more famous works such as bulbous abstract figures, curing shapes, stars, and scarabs. In addition to the theme of “anti-painting”, the exhibition follows the events in Europe, and particularly in Spain, in the late 1920s and 1930s, with the impending civil war and rise of Fascism. It ends with the Fascists coming to dominance in 1937 and the painting Still Life with Old Shoe that marks the end of Miró’s period of anti-painting.

The MoMA’s website includes a detailed online exhibition.

A few of the smaller exhibits also caught my attention. Dreamland: Architectural Experiments since the 1970s featured experiments in architecture, primarily centered around New York, or the modernist urban ideal of New York, as seen be architects. Some of the ideas, such as those in Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, can be quite fantastic, such as an island oasis in a glass bubble atop a highway. Others were not only more realistic, but also realized, including some impressive homes in the country surrounding New York. It’s always great to see a celebration of modernism as it once was, before contemporary design and architecture took a turn away towards more mundane ideas.

Keeping with the idea of the 1960s and 1970s as particularly modern decades, the exhibit Looking at Music features visualizations of music from the era. This includes direction visualizations, such as the scores of John Cage, as well as early media works by Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Steven Reich and others.

I did have a chance to hear some music as well. The weekend after Thanksgiving is often low on opportunities for new music (which is probably why I was able to book an NYC show without much difficulty after Thanksgiving in 2005). But the reliable Issue Project Room in Brooklyn hosted a show sponsored by the New York Theremin Society. The first set featured rather graphic stereo photos from World War I – still a horrific war when viewed a century later – with theremin accompaniment, presented by Robert Munn and Sara Cook. By Munn’s own admittance, this was not a performance for the faint of heart. The second set featured “Master Thereminist” Kip Rosser, who treated us to a series of jazz and pop standards that would be very much at home at a wedding or bar-mitzvah. It is interesting to think about a hybrid program featuring Rosser’s light jazz on theremin against Munn and Cook’s disturbing images from the Great War. But perhaps that would be a bit too ironic.

hpnyc.org on the F train

Yesterday while was in the F train in New York, a young blond man came through the crowded car soliciting donations. I would not have given him much notice, except that as he was carrying a small black cat, and supposedly collecting for an organization called “Homeless Pets NYC” with a website hpnyc.org. The URL will take you to a site that describes the person I saw and his black cat, and suggests that like most subway solicitations it’s a scam. Very sad.

Super Tuesday Fun with Highways: I-80

So how to continue our “primary highway series” when so many states are voting at once? Well, we can't visit them all, but we touch several important places with a trip along Interstate 80. I-80 runs the entire width of United States connecting New York City to San Francisco, two cities to which I have connections. In between New York and California, it crosses three other states voting this Tuesday: New Jersey, Illinois and Utah. We have already visited two other states crossed by I-80, Iowa and Nevada, during earlier contests.

Actually, I-80 never enters New York. Rather, its eastern end is in Teaneck, a town on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge:

It would have been cool if I-80 crossed the bridge along with I-95 into New York. Perhaps then splitting at the Bruckner Interchange in the Bronx (yes, I had to get the Bruckner Interchange into this article) before heading out to Long Island.

North of New York City is Chappaqua, “hometown of CatSynth and Hillary Clinton,” as I have mentioned a few times on this site. And while it is my hometown in that I grew up there, Hillary's original hometown is a little bit west of New York and New Jersey, in Chicago. But of course you can get there by heading west on I-80, which passes through Chicago's southern suburbs.

Chicago is all the home of Barack Obama. So we have two candidates with Chicago roots, either of whom I would be very happy to support.

What a strange position to be in, to have such a choice – and I admit I have had a hard time deciding. There are historic opportunities with each, connections to various aspects of my own life (geography, education, mixed heritage). I guess it's much better than 2004 when I was excited about no one.

Traveling further west along I-80, we eventually come to Utah, a place of striking natural beauty that I would love to visit again soon. In the south are canyons, stone formations and other wonders of the southwest. In the north, along I-80, are the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats:


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When they say salt flats they mean flat. It is an incredibly stark landscape, and that's part of what makes a great experience. And the silence. Longtime readers know how such things appeal to my personal and aesthetic sensibilities. Although I have been to the Great Salt Lake, I did not get to see Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which is considered a major work of modern American art, and which I have seen reproduced countless times.

Heading further west, we cross Nevada and then arrive in California, where I-80 crosses the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, my new hometown.

I-80 actually ends as the western approach of the Bay Bridge, although most people (and road signs) suggest that it continues into San Francisco to US 101. This section of freeway actually cuts through my South-of-Market (SOMA) neighborhood, contributing to its urban, industrial feel.


[Click to enlarge]

I did manage to find my polling place, and will soon have to make a choice as this election season reaches home. But it is great that those of us in California finally get to make a difference. Same for the folks in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Utah. So many of us have had very little opportunity to actually have a say in the process, long dominated by Iowa and New Hampshire and the South. The rest of the country will finally have to listen to the people in our major urban centers and in the west. And I'll be satisfied with whomever we end up choosing (at least in one party).

Highway 120 in Westchester County, NY

A little local “fun with highways” as I spend Thanksgiving with family in Chappaqua, just north of New York City.

We have noted Chappaqua in the past as the “home of CatSynth and Hillary Clinton.” It is a relatively small but affluent town in the middle of Westchester County. You can read more about it here, including its noted school system and famous residents.

Our main road is NY 120 which starts in the nearby community of Millwood (which is actually part of the same town), and continues southeast through the town center of Chappaqua. The main intersection is famously confusing and dangerous and years of trying to install such safety conveniences as a traffic light have met with local resistance. Apparently a traffic light would ruin the character of the town (in a way that car accidents apparently do not). 120 also crosses the Saw Mill Parkway, our nearby excuse for a highway, and the main commuter rail line that passes through town to New York City.

From there, 120 works its way southeast, through Armonk (one-time home of contributor whaleshaman of JellyPizza), the Westester County Airport (which I have never used), Purchase (home of a state university campus) and eventually the town of Rye on the Long Island Sound (home of the Playland amusement park). It's not really the most efficient way to cross Westchester, that's what our freeways including aptly named Cross Westchester Expressway are for, but that's a topic for another day…