When I walked out of Studio Yada yesterday after yoga, I noticed a bouquet of green balloons on the railing. A sign read "Open Art Studio," so I wandered back upstairs and found my way to the first of about twenty artists' studios I ended up visiting on what I discovered was a yearly event for Gowanus artists. It was a wonderful way to spend a sunny afternoon in Brooklyn.
Visual artists are endlessly inspiring to me. I like to see their bookshelves, oil cans, stained fingernails, the postcards and anatomy books and maps they have taped to their walls. I like to pet their dogs and eat their meager snacks and ask them questions about philosophy.
I saw provocative work by, among others, Bethany Bristow, Joanne McFarland, David Schlegel, Waylon Tait, Kevin Cooney, and Joelle Shallon.
Dale Williams was showing dark, allegorical scenes that made me think of Max Beckmann and Goya and the brothers Grimm. He was super smart.
Delfee - mixed media with collage on paper
At Justin Neely's groovy studio, I stood for a long time in front of an icon of Solzhenitsyn. I had to ask who it was, because "Solzhenitsyn" was written in Cyrillic. This painting had a rejuvenating effect on me, like a spa treatment.
Солженицын est морт (Solzhenitsyn est mort) - acrylic, spray paint, and pencil on plywood
"I love transliteration," Justin said.
I told him about my favorite book from my high school years, Dictionary of the Khazars by the late Milorad Pavic. This was a novel in the form of a dictionary, about a tribe of dreamers named the Khazars, and it came in masculine and feminine editions.
Pavic wrote in his essay "Beginning and the End of the Novel":
Long ago I came to understand that the arts are "reversible" and "non reversible." There are some arts which enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it changing the spot, the perspective and the direction of his looking at it according to his own preference, as is the case with architecture, sculpture or painting, that are reversible. Other non reversible arts, such as music and literature look like one-way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. I have always wished to make literature, which is non reversible art, a reversible one. Therefore my novels have no beginning and no end in the classical meaning of the word.
I thought of Pavic again that night as I wandered through Sophie Calle's Room, an installation in a suite in the Lowell Hotel. Room was an updated reperformance of a piece Calle had done at London's Freud Museum. It was free and open to the public for three days, 24-hours a day, as part of the FIAF festival. I got to the Upper East Side just before the show closed at midnight.
The Lowell was staid and dressy. A uniformed doorman waved me and two cute gay boys into an elevator to the third floor. I thought it was cool how the elevator buttons and hotel hall were not specially marked for the show, so finding it was just like going to a friend's hotel room. A sign hung on the closed door of the suite, instructing us to come in if the "Do Not Disturb" sign wasn't up. I opened the door.
It was hushed inside Room. A dozen visitors milled about the sitting area, bedroom, kitchenette, and bath, examining the artifacts and placards. The vibe was sober and almost awkward. I thought of walking into a home where people are sitting shiva.
"Can I sit in the chair?" I asked the security guard, pointing to the armchair that did not hold the dead cat.
"Yes, that one you can sit in," he said.
Normally I chat up art security guards, but I felt shy about talking to anyone at this exhibition. The hotel room was so intimate it was almost isolating. Even the television was on mute.
Photo: Lucy Hogg
An open window let in a nice breeze and a view of New York at night. Little signs hung everywhere, with numbers on them, and each sign had a story from Sophie's life, accompanied by an object positioned among the suite's furnishings. You had to bend down to read some of the stories, which were beautiful little jewel pieces in the vein of Pavic or Calvino, but with a definite French, feminine twist. I thought Colette was in there somewhere, and Nathalie Sarraute, and our post-post-modern obsession with memoir/fame/reality TV.
A stroller sat beside a scathing account of how Sophie has never wanted children.
A pig snout mask sat on a windowsill with a story about one man's cruelty to her.
There were wedding dresses, bed sheets, a burnt matress, orchids from Frank Gehry, erotic photographs, love letters, stories of shame, love, suicide, and seduction. Some of it was true, but you didn't know which parts, and you didn't know if the objects in the room were originals or facsimiles.
Photo: Damien Saatdjian, courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY © Sophie Calle/ADAGP
The way Sophie wrote about her lovers made you want them, too. I felt at the time that the whole thing was a little too pretty. In retrospect, though, it had a very long finish, and it left me thinking about whether life can itself be art and about how time acts on us.
Sophie's stories were truly reversible, because you didn't need to go in order. Characters appeared and reappeared, but the only important character was the artist herself. As Pavic imagined, it was a story you could live in for a while, like a room.
My nose was running - there had been a very strong scent of peaches in the lobby - so I took a tissue out of the holder in the bathroom. While I read the story about the black bra hanging on the shower rack (Sophie's mother teased her daughter about her tiny breasts by calling her first soutien-gorge a soutien-rien), I discreetly blew my nose. This was mildly thrilling: I was blowing my nose with art!
I wish I'd thought to look for a mini-bar.
The artist herself came in and out a few times, talking French to her entourage. She sat on the sofa and fiddled with her iPhone, put a bag in the closet, and went outside for a cigarette. When I left, I thanked her for letting me visit her Room. She smiled and kept smoking.
