Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
1. This painting is The Tape, by Michael Borremans, painted in 2010.
2. Walking through a great, brilliantly curated art museum is like a walk through history. You are always seeing signposts of the overthrow of an old order.
3. Among the beautiful works in the Columbus Museum of Art is one of the two Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons paintings by JMW Turner – the other one is in Philadelphia.
4. Also here: Stag at Sharkey’s by George Bellows; Claude Monet’s The Red Kerchief, so much more introspective and distant than the typical Monet; Albert Ryder’s weird, unsettling The Race Track.
5. I could go on with this, but hell.
6. Exhilarating and exhausting – that’s what seeing this museum was like; and we were only there a couple of hours because we had to get back on the road.
7. Next time in Cleveland, 9591 Iris wants to visit the antiquities.
8. Another great signpost of overthrow in this great collection: Joan Mitchell’s Metro.
9. The thing with Borremans is that, despite the captivating, refined detail and polish of his portraits, his view, at heart, is cryptic , anonymous. This is not a specific person doing a recognizable thing. This person is not a surgeon readying himself for the operating room: it is not clear who or what he is, nor what he is about to do.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
There is something about a monumental space that makes one understand that big, grand things are attainable, and that one can be part of them. This monumental space is the new Ames Atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
This morning was 9591 Iris’s first visit ever to the Cleveland Museum of Art – 9591 Iris is embarrassed to confess this.
I’m going to be showing some of the things I saw today, but for now, here’s a look at one bit, a detail from an abstract by Gerhard Richter, pretty much my favorite living visual artist – a painting entirely new to me – sublime, dense, powerful.
Here is something else about the Cleveland Museum of Art. It was founded in 1913 “for the benefit of all the people forever,” and it is still, today, free to all.
On our cross-country dash, here we are in Cleveland, which to our absolute amazement is really bustling. This is huge, historic Terminal Tower, part of downtown’s Town City Center, right now lit up to look like a gigantic holiday ornament, all intense scarlet red with profound black shadows and a gold sugary bit at the top. It is a stern idol and, at the same time, an adorable toy. Did we have a great time in our overnight stop in Cleveland? We did. Will we back? Oh, yes.
Here we are on another road trip, tonight at about 1,200 miles in 36 hours. This is a view from a rest stop along 90 in Pennsylvania late Saturday afternoon. We were getting ready to head to the car when we looked out back and saw this – the edge of the picnic area with that turquoise picnic table planted on the ground; then a little field of grapevines, gone dormant for the winter; past it, a line of trees; and then beyond that, hazy and gray and sweeping from left to right across our line of sight, Lake Erie. It was so indistinct yet vast that we almost did not understand it was the lake.
Here is something I look at every working day – the edge of the El platform. The composite material is the surface of the Clark and Lake Blue Line stop, near my office. The blue is the skidproof edge of the platform – beyond it, the plunge to the track bed, the puddles of garbage-strewn water and the electric rails. I look at this every morning and evening and, frankly, the place is dirty and dark and crowded with office workers like me and students going to and from college and insane beggars and musicians of wildly varying gifts and tourists heading for the airport or to get drunk in Bucktown and the occasional pairs of police officers completely absorbed in conversation with each other, and I love it. It’s a good part of my day, standing on the platform.
Here is another beautiful paste-up being seen here and there around Chicago. I found this piece at the corner of Lake and Ashland, slapped up on a supporting leg of the Green Line (noisiest train in Chicago).
I love the conflicts here: the clean red-and-sky-blue palette; the old rusty pipe; the girl’s eternally young, cool, assessing gaze; the peeling, failing edge. Youth, eternity, ruin. All this on a sheet of paper on an ordinary afternoon beneath the El.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
Chicago is having a pasteup moment. This picture captures three of the pasteup images most common right now in my neighborhood – Hipster Guy, Office Monkey, and Doof with Tongue, on the wall surrounding the El tracks at Milwaukee Avenue and Logan Square.
I suspect each of these images has a proper title, but that last one, especially, will always be Doof with Tongue to me.
Pasteups are low-tech street art, communicating directly to any and all – inexpensive, simple to slap in place, best appreciated by the slow moving, like pedestrians and bicyclists, and far more transitory than spray-painted graffiti. The beautiful Avondale T. rex, for instance, is already no more. Another Hipster Guy that just appeared a few weeks ago on a storefront west of here is being slowly, relentlessly peeled away, scrap by scrap, probably by bored people waiting for the Diversey bus. Indeed, pasteups invite alterations – they exist to be not just observed but altered, by people and certainly by the elements. Sooner rather than later, they erode and vanish.
The underside of the Bloomingdale Trail at Milwaukee Avenue is a treasure house of pasteups and street art right now, including Doof with Tongue; part of a Funk & Jive; a gorgeous letterpress poster for a performance by Via Verso; a pastel drawing on a torn piece of cardboard, affixed to a crooked, precarious Tow Zone sign, of a pair of cockroaches; and this eerie thing here.
Honestly I’m thinking of doing this myself. It appeals to the side of me that is secretive yet aches to be heard. An image, a photocopier, and some wheat paste, and I’m in business.
9591iris 