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June 13,1998
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I met Mark for breakfast at the Deli King, our old haunt, oblivious to the fact that today's weather is news.Sure it was raining hard and I got soaked in the 2 minutes it took to put my umbrella up, but, heck, this is New England, it rains. After breakfast we headed to the Addison for the Arthur Dove retrospective. It is Phillips Academy's reunion weekend and the alumni registration was in the basement of the Addison Gallery so the place was packed. We had a great time viewing the alumni as well as the Dove paintings. I always get a big kick out of making fun of pompous academic language, particularly artspeak, so I had a ball with the text explaining each period of Dove's career. Some of the sentence fragments were long and complex with lots of dependent clauses but no verbs. Neither Mark nor I could decipher them. The handout we got at the front desk was a little clearer but the idea of "biomorphic images meld with grazing cows, plowed fields, summer haystacks..." cracked me up. Dove's cows don't look like cows, fields don't look like fields, haystacks don't look like haystacks so aren't they already morphed from their biology? I have no idea what biomorphic means and it's not in my dictionary. Are they like the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers? Personally I thought a lot of his images look like potatoes. Potatoes being struck by lightning. Potatoes mating. Potatoes being sliced with a saws all. One painting was entitled Long Island so it may well have been biomorphic images of actual potatoes given that potato farming was a big thing on Long Island in Dove's day. I actually like abstract art and was impressed with the exhibit. Dove's influence on O'Keeffe is apparent as is his influence on later American modernists. My potato jokes may offended some of the reunion-goers but I don't think art appreciation has to be so ridiculously reverential. Can't it be fun? For more on Dove, this Smithsonian article gives a good overview. We also took in Urban Visions, photographic works of cities by various photographers. It was neat to see Walker Evans, Berenice Abbot, Robert Frank, etc., etc. etc. hung side by side. Different photographers' views of the exact same building in New York can be strikingly different. This made me want to go out and take pictures, but I'd need an underwater camera. The rain is unbelievable. Mark and I had coffee at Starbucks and watched the rain pour down, the fire trucks and ambulances go by, the lightning flash, the soaked alumni wend their way down from Phillips to Starbucks, motorists parking irrationally so they wouldn't have to walk far in the rain, and all that stuff. By the time Mark left to back to his hermitage in Worcester I was pretty sure this was another hundred year flood type storm. The radio news and later the tv news confirmed my impression. Flood warnings are in effect all over the place. The funniest thing I heard on the news was Boston mayor Tom Mennino declaring an emergency (not funny) and telling the reporter this was the third hundred year flood in his administration. Guess they're going to have to redefine hundred year flood. Either that or Mennino has been in office since Puritan times :-) |
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