#basilicia

[eopederson]

Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi, Umbria, 2009.

[10-96]

Italia por Franciele Garcia Via Flickr:

[10-96]

Sem título por Franciele Garcia Via Flickr:

[10-96]

Sem título por Franciele Garcia Via Flickr:

[postspecificpost]

Upstate New York, July 2016

It’s been a week and my ankle bone persists to ache. Could it by my body giving up or could it be the devil art? This has never happened before. But maybe just maybe I have finally lost my muscle memory of driving long hauls.

I recently gave away a copy of my old catalogue and this meant re-reading bits and pieces again. I still have the clearest memory of taking the final design proofs down to Stanley Park with me to read and re-read, forward and back, before sending off final edits to the printer. Three years later on a semi-comfortable sofa in Toronto, some of that writing makes me cringe, but most of the words hold their own. The difference is me.

Before leaving town, it was decided that we would drive first to Hudson, to see back to back performance lectures at the Basilica by Martine Syms and Sara Magenheimer. I knew Sara’s work, but not Martine’s. Danielle, Georgina, and I ate charcuterie the entire way down, and when we rolled up 7 hours later, the first thing we did was sit down and eat some more. Baked plantain with rice and beans from a pop up food stand, I had never visited upstate New York before. My first and lingering impression is that this is where 30-something artisanal Brooklynites go to retire. Hudson felt simultaneously industrial, quaint, deserted, and yuppie. Every other house on the way into town was up for sale. Georgina pointed out how cute the train station looked. I kept an eye out for ticks. Danielle went exploring with her camera. Vic and Evan soon arrived, and everyone huddled around the picnic tables stood up to greet them. Once inside, the Basilica opened up into a vast performance space ideally suited to live music, and in the smaller room, screenings and performances. Apparently visual art also happens, but I can’t imagine it to be any good in this raw cave. Somehow Patti Smith was involved in the project, but I became less interested then and just enjoyed the newly installed air con as I sat on a refashioned tree stump.

The primary purpose of the trip was to see and hear and feel the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC) for ourselves. A purpose built research facility in Troy as part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC is a visionary space for artist research, production, and performance. The next day, Vic gave us all a tour of their studios and introduced us to the curators and technicians who specialize in experimentation in audio and visual technology like wave field synthesis: the rendering of a virtual acoustic environment that in description alone sounds sculptural in scope. Engaging in critical listening practices and cognizant of psychoacoustics’ affects on artistic practice, EMPAC as an entity is audacious and confounding. Totally and incredibly awe-inspiring, and yet, I remain confused by its very existence.

After a late lunch at EMPAC, Vic led us onwards to MASS MoCA. Besides a fantastic effort by 2nd floor artist Alex da Corte, MASS MoCA is a terrible space. I never knew. I should have known. The sprawling group exhibition on the main floor which I will not link to was incoherent at best. I feel for the hapless gallery attendants who appeared trained in crowd control rather than art education. The audience deserves its own analysis, but the real insult of the space that took me most by surprise was the overcrowded stacks of Sol LeWitt. Dedicating an entire acre to LeWitt, you would think the experience would be transcendental. Somehow, I felt like I turned a corner into an IKEA. While explicitly marketing that the walls were built to LeWitt’s own specifications, the low ceilings and cramped quarters felt awful in a way I was unable to articulate in that moment. It would all become clear after I visited Dia: Beacon, but in that moment, I just knew I did not like art.

Continuing on to Williams College Museum of Art, Vic insisted we stop in to see the exhibition on Abbott Handerson Thayer, an artist and scientist whose paintings struck in me something that only painting can surprisingly still do. Thayer’s eye for nature, through collage technique and an applied form of Impressionistic ways of seeing the natural world, led to his early development of military camouflage, which when seen 1:1 in a painting of a duck, floored me.

Running out of time in a day, we stop into the Clark Art Institute to see the back reflection pool before a storm chases everyone inside. Their research library remains an alluring mystery to me. Driving up and driving down, we see the same group of shirtless boys running through the town. If I could go back, I would shout “Ghostbusters” at them from our car window.

The next day after breakfast and a stroll through the Woodstock flea market, we head straight to DIA: Beacon. As a space I have always intended to visit whenever I was in NYC, the train ride just felt a bit too far from Prospect Park. Turning off the highway and driving right up to the building, I remember I was raised in the suburbs of Edmonton. 160,000 square feet of exhibition space houses the most austere displays of American Modernist males (and Agnes Martin). I actually really loved walking through each room despite patriarchy. Tears welled up in Georgina’s eyes when we stepped into one of many spacious and light filled Sol LeWitt rooms. I lost my mind as I came up against the entire back wall of Dan Flavins. It was also great to meet up with Ted there, who came up for an afternoon visit with Sean, who has never been. We walked around catching up with too little time before sitting down with too many baked goods.

Closing in to 3PM, we got back on the highway up to see the shows at the Hessel Museum and the CCS Bard Galleries. Driving through the sunlit lush fields on campus, I thought about ticks again. Inside the Tony Oursler: Imponderable Archive show, the video presentations could have used more atmosphere, but the archive of occult objects literally made me ill, twice. Having to step out of the room each time, I finished seeing everything and cross referencing with the catalogue of items not understanding why my body was shutting down. I felt better once we went to the other side to see the collection show, Invisible Adversaries curated by Lauren Cornell and Tom Eccles. Taking the film of the same name by VALIE EXPORT as a starting point, the exhibition was fairly strong in its conceptual framework of the psychic body resisting and being. The Akerman piece was shamefully installed, and what a pleasure to see Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun again and to see the works of Lorna Simpson  in conversation with Patty Chang in the umbrella context of EXPORT.

Whether it was the long stretches of driving that my body had forgotten how to do or the objects of Oursler’s archive, I fell ill that evening with a crippling pain in my ankle joint and a fever through the night. Besides sitting in a river and eating a plate of mozza sticks, the rest of that day was blurry as I drove us back towards Canada, barely able to find it. My experience of seeking out art has changed over the past four years. I am no longer wildly searching, but I am seeing and thinking and writing still.