[Later Edit - one of the links wasn't a link. Fixed it.]
Yesterday afternoon I went to the Loeb gallery at Vassar College to see an exhibition of books as art. Or art as books. Or something.
I'm no art critic, but much of it struck me as cut-and-paste and doodling by disenchanted and poorly-educated college students. I didn't "get" it, I guess. As much as I adore Sister Wendy, when art must be explained before I can even recognize it as art, it isn't art.
The pop-up books, however, showed an enormous amount of design planning, and detail cutting. They were impressive, delicate, and beautiful.
What I liked best were the two issues of Martin Wilner's Journal of Evidence Weekly (http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/wilnerma.html). They are tiny notebooks full of faces and snippets of conversation from NY subway rides. The pages unfold to about ten feet long. A few inches:
(Click to enlarge, click the enlargement to enlarge more.)
It was supposed to be a Mensa activity, but only the organizer and I showed up.
We also toured the rest of the collection, and I was impressed. I didn't know Vassar had so much good stuff, mostly donated works, including Church, Miro, Monet (or was it Manet?), a few Picassos, a Pollack, and a whole bunch of other stuff. (Including a 10'x10' rendition of a sheet of graph paper. Huh? Art? Why?)
We had late lunch/early dinner at a five-star yet inexpensive hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant.
At 3 pm today there was to be a docent-led tour at the gallery about the use of red - about how red was used and its meaning in individual paintings, etc., the kind of thing Sister Wendy might have done on an oh-hell day. I was very interested in going, but today is cold and rainy, and the sky is that awful depressing pinkish grey color, and so I lost interest in leaving the house at all.
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