We spent most of the day on the hillside out back pulling garlic mustard, wisteria and barberry bushes, a threesome of invasives. We each had a big bag to put the stuff in and I was carrying a shovel. The wisteria roots go way down and they often connect to underground runners. We thought we rid our property of wisteria years ago but it keeps coming back.
The barberry is just plain nasty. They sell it at garden stores and it’s labeled “Invasive” but people plant it anyway. It’s covered with prickers and you have to remove the entire root system. If any is left in the soil, it will re-sprout. Barberry has denser foliage than most native species so the plants retain higher humidity levels which ticks love. Invasives love invasives.
The garlic mustard comes up easy, roots and all. If you miss one plant though you’ll have a patch of it next year. Shelley and Pete cook with it.
We have so many beautiful wildflowers this time of year and the invasives are just as pretty but once you know they don’t play nice, there is no going back. I’d like to think the next caretakers of our property will keep this fight up but I have my doubts.
I am reminded again of why I like winter so much. The warm weather months are too full of activities (tasks that sat in the job jar all winter) and there is no time left to check in here or think about art projects or read a book.
The garden is going great guns. The direct seed lettuces, spinach, carrots, chard, cilantro and arugula all require daily doses of water. We had a setback with the plants we started indoors and had to toss all our little tomatoes and pepper plants after the seed company contacted us to say one tomato seed variety, one that we were trying for the first time, was infected with a virus. Luckily, it didn’t affect the kale or collards. We bought more tomato and pepper plants at Cases, ones that were bigger than the plants we threw away, but they didn’t have any Padrón pepper plants. Kathy gave us some elephant ear plants a few years back and each year I dig the bulbs out the basement and replant them.
Rick and I opened the horseshoe season. I won the first round 21-1 but Rick quickly found his groove and beat me the second. We had to settle things in a third round and I barely squeaked by. La Liga is not finished. We have three matches to watch this weekend. And our neighborhood group is opening the pool this week so I spent most of the day vacuuming the bottom.
I’m so tired at night I can’t even stay awake for an old Hawaii Five-0 episode. Oddly, I found Igmar Bergman’s “Winter Light” riveting. That will be one of our last red envelopes before Netflix closes their dvd arm.
Anne Punzi oil paintings from “Current Events” show at Colleen Buzzard’s
We couldn’t leave the house until the Atletico/Cadiz match finished so we got a late start on First Friday. Our first stop was the Wilder Group opening at Lumiere on College Avenue. George Wegman had sold about half of his beautiful pencil shaving drawings before we even got there. Pete Monacelli was having some repair work done so he wasn’t able to attend. His drawings on digital prints of his work added yet another dimension to his dynamic work.
We headed over to the Anderson Building and ran into a couple that had just come from Lumiere show standing beside their Hyundai. The passenger side glass had been smashed but nothing was stolen. They surmised the thief had been scared off. The sun was still up and their car was scheduled to get the theft protection software upgrade in two weeks.
We loved Ann Punzi’s paintings at Colleen’s. Her show, called “Current Events” features gorgeous abstracts based on environmental disasters. In her statement she says, ” While researching information on climate change I discovered information on Blue Carbon Ecosystems and this presented a hopeful direction for this series.
Peggi drinking a Mint Julep at the Kentucky Derby on our first date, 1973, the year Secretariat won.
I guess it wasn’t a traditional first date. In 1973 Steve Hoy suggested we go to the Kentucky Derby, not even a two hour drive from Bloomington. I invited Peggi. We were just getting to know each other. Thankfully we are still getting to know each other. We plan to watch the race tomorrow, just after the Copa del Rey final. We’ll celebrate with a bottle of Spanish Rioja and toast to our golden years.
Secretariat won, setting a record that still stands fifty years later, and went on to win the Triple Crown. NBC just posted restored footage of the race. I suspect they used a version of the AI app that Duane Sherwood is applying to Suicide footage.
Things are so green now I can barely see the neighbor’s house. I can see the cardinals’ nest in the small tree not more than ten feet from my desktop. It really attracts my attention when the male lights on it. It wouldn’t be this green if we hadn’t had all this rain. We put lettuce, spinach, carrots and cilantro in and we haven’t even had to water yet.
They say the season you were born in is most often your favorite. I can attest to that maxim. April 28 is still early spring so I can remember some brisk walks, some warm sunny days and my tenth birthday when I got a new baseball bat but there was still snow on the ground.
Margaret Explosion performance at Little Theatre Café on Sunday, April 16, 2023
For twenty years Margaret Explosion has played Wednesday nights at the Little Theatre Café. A few weeks back we played our first Sunday night gig there. There were many familiar faces in the crowd but the vibe was different. Here are six songs performed Sunday March 16th for the first and only time.
Listen to Cloud Library
Listen to Evidence
Listen to Lake Effect
Listen to Pawpaw
Listen to Readymade
Listen to Reconnoiter
Peggi Fournier plays soprano sax, Phil Marshall plays guitar, Ken Frank plays the double bass, Melissa Davies plays cello and Paul Dodd plays drums.
Crystal Z Campbell’s “Lines of Sight” video installation at Memorial Art Gallery
I was going to enter two of my pieces from “Manifestation” in the biennial Finger Lakes Exhibition but I spaced out the deadline. I’m working on pieces for a Little Theatre show in September and enjoying the blank slate mind set.
We stopped by the Finger Lakes show yesterday and found some things we really liked. John Griebsch had a beautiful arial photo of a row of trees. I voted for Bill Keyser’s painting on found metal as my favorite and later wished I had voted for Eric Kunsman‘s black and white photo of two pay phones at the four corners of Webster.
The Gap Band’s “You Dropped A Bomb On Me” is like magnet drawing viewers onto the media space at the MAG but we only had time to duck our heads in and grab this still shot. We made a note to visit Crystal Z Campbell’s “Lines of Sight,”a take on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, at a later date.
Hermann Nitsch alter installation at Pace Gallery in Chelsea
Twelve years ago we stumbled onto a Hermann Nitsch performance at Pace Gallery in Chelsea. This wasn’t one of his bloody crucifixion performances, this was a musical performance of Hirsch’s composition for strings inside Pace Gallery where Nitsch’s paintings were on display. Nitsch, himself, sat in a chair in front of the quintet.
Last week, while popping in and out of galleries in Chelsea, we stopped in at Pace, just as they were turning off the lights for the day. It was six o’clock and we were cramming in as much art as we could digest. They turned the lights back on and we discovered we were at another show of Kitsch’s. He died last year and his paintings looked particularly somber but even more beautiful. His altar installation in the back of the gallery knocked me out.
I love the fact that Mark Bradford gets all his art making tools at Home Depot. I love our local outlet as well, even though the owner supports the T-man and they don’t take Apple Pay. The place is full of art supplies. We saw his show in Chelsea last week and I particularly like “Manifest Destiny,” above. The idea that the United States is destined by God to expand and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent is so bloated it is laughable. But then here we are. Underneath Bradford’s piece is a large billboard for a Los Angeles entrepreneur that reads, “Johnny Buys Houses.”
Earlier in the day I took the photo below as we worked our way through TrBecCa.
I have a few photos of our neighbor, Jared, in the wet suit, the waders that come up to your crotch and the yellow gloves that fit over your elbows. He looks like the frog man. Today Peggi took a photo of me in the gear. The filter in his pond was clogged and Jared needed help getting it out. The bottom surface of the pond is lined with rubber and it slopes toward the center so it is as slippery as can be. Jared has fallen in a few times. He told me the trick was to get all four limbs planted. I kept trying to grab one of the fish but they are too quick.
Our neighbor Rick went to the House of Guitars on Record Store Day and he bought me a record for my birthday, a live Nico album from 1980. Eleven of the thirteen songs were written by Nico and the other two, the ones that put her on the map, were written by Lou Reed. The first song was brand new at the time. The performance is majestic. We were so surprised to hear her in such good form, a completely timeless, singular voice. She is backed by uncredited musicians, a keyboard player, a percussionist and a drummer and they contribute to the dark mood with the gentlest touch until the last song, “Femme Fatale,” where they overstep their bounds and rearrange the song only to sabotage it.
Rick is covering for Scott Regan’s radio show this week and he asked me if I had a Ron Carter album. Apparently it will be Carter’s birthday that day. Damn if I didn’t still have a copy of Eric Dolphy and Ron Carter’s “Magic.”
We sold most of our records years ago. We hung on to the 45s and a few stacks of lps and cds and we subscribe to a streaming service but that new Nico vinyl is precious. So is the new Nod cd, “Fly, Fly, Fly.” Even though they’re a local band I bought the cd by mail from their Bandcamp site. I think that means they get more the proceeds than they would if I bought it in a store. The trio’s new music reads more like an internal dialog than a guitar, bass, drums performance. Joe plays clarinet as well as guitar and both he and Tim play keyboards on the disc. Brian’s drums sound gentle. I can’t believe I just said that. When I ripped the cd the database loaded the wrong and hideous cover. The real artwork is by Chris Schepp and it makes for a must have physical package. The seven songs are short but if you loop it you won’t even notice.
Walking around Manhattan, popping in and out of galleries, digesting rectangular artwork on rectangular walls does something to your senses. It puts them on alert to possibilities. And they are everywhere.
Chryssa “Cycladic Book Nos. 2, 5, 8” 1955 Dia Chelsea
Dia Chelsea’s two large spaces are currently filled with big work by the Greek artist Chryssa. Her light sculptures were in the first dark room and her large newspaper like pieces are hanging in the the light filled space. I love her little plaster, terracotta sculptures from 1955.
Gerhard Richter Abstract Drawing at David Zwirner in Chelsea
Gerhard Richter has stopped painting for now but he is still working at the top of his game. His show at David Zwirner in Chelsea is a showstopper. In addition to some some of his last paintings there are rooms of pencil drawings, ink and wash drawings and watercolors. Peggi and I spent quite a while in front of this one (his third drawing from September 12, 2022) marveling at how he layers abstract textures and then dramatically plays with the space by adding ink lines.
One of the advantages of taking photos with a camera is not being able to scroll through them immediately like you would with a phone. It takes me days to get the Raw images off my card into PS Elements and into the Photos app. And in that time I get to relive my trip.
We arrived at Duane’s apartment in Brooklyn on a beautiful blue day with no agenda. Peggi had spotted an article on the way down entitled “100 best restaurants in NYC,” a listing that included moderately priced places, not just high end joints. We picked one in Williamsburg and Duane suggested taking the train from his place into lower Manhattan and then walking across the Williamsburg Bridge back into Brooklyn. We walked for miles around Williamsburg, by Duane’s old place and restaurants we ate at back in the day, all now just figments of our memories. We walked along the waterfront and finished at Number 39 on the list. We shared two incredible appetizers – baby artichokes (grilled and sauced with mint salsa verde) and marinated leeks (dressed with anchovies and pistachios) and a bowl of pasta.
We had tickets for a Broadway play in the old Studio 54. The building was originally an opera house and I can’t imagine how the space ever worked as a club. The play was a matinee so we I made a short list of Midtown galleries to check out before the show. We struck gold in three of them, I don’t remember the fourth and we discovered the fifth had closed permanently. The John McLaughlin show was fantastic (above.) Had never heard of Markus Lüpertz but the picture in Time Out drew us to his “Et in Arcadia ego” show and we loved his funky, luscious paintings. And at Hauser Wirth we discovered Winfred Rembert‘s dye on carved and tooled leather work, a revelation.
The play went deep into family relationships. Just three actors, all great, performing a script developed from the text in photographer, Larry Sulton’s book, “Pictures From Home.” That text is mostly transcriptions of dialog with his parents as he involved them in a series of photos of them in their home. He turned the tables on his parents who documented him as he grew up. What he uncovered was rich and moving as his parents pushed back on the “art project.”
We’ve been sleeping with our windows open for the past week or so, falling asleep to the sound of toads singing in the creek down below. I love that sound, so primal, like a native ceremony happening in the next village. In most cases it is many toads singing at once but yesterday we witnessed a solo performance by this guy in our neighbor’s pond.
The female toads, who are usually larger than the males, answer the call. The way Jared explains it the male hops onboard, the females let a string of tiny black eggs loose in the water, the male excretes his milky sperm and in a few weeks the pond is full of tadpoles. His pond was like some kind of sex club. Toads splashing around on the floating plants in twosomes, threesomes and even foursomes. The females, having answered the siren call, seem to be trying get away, to shake the male on their back. We watched this one pair climb out of the pond and up the waterfall where they ran into a frog.
One frog and two toads mating in Jared’s pond1 Comment
You won’t find Edmunds Woods on a map of Rochester. This tiny, mostly overlooked wooded area was once part of the Edmunds farm property on Westfall Road. The woods is nestled between highway cloverleaves, medical buildings and Brighton recreation fields. My father fell in love with this place while unearthing Brighton’s neglected history and he gave it the name, “Edmunds Woods.” Right now, before the trees shown in the photo above fill in, the forest floor here is full of wildflowers. It is a privilege to recall visiting the woods with him.
I imagine my father would be all over the AI chatbot technology. He was always excited about what was coming down the road and usually was ahead of tech curve. He had a Mac II before us. We set type on his computer before getting our own, machines that revolutionized our lives.
As people worry that the AI chatbot technology could flood Facebook groups with disinformation, degrade critical thinking and erode the factual foundation of modern society, Cade Metz from NYT says “Think of the chatbots as jazz musicians. They can digest huge amounts of information – like, say, every song that has ever been written – and then riff on the results. They have the ability to stitch together ideas in surprising and creative ways. But they also play wrong notes with absolute confidence.” And why shouldn’t they. Miles already told us, “There is no such thing as a wrong note.”
Slide at Memorial Art Gallery talk by Yale’s John Hogan on the artwork of Sol LeWitt
John Hogan, a long time Sol LeWitt business partner and friend, spoke at the Memorial Art Gallery last night in conjunction with the recently installed “Wall Drawing #957, Form derived from a cube.” He explained how LeWitt’s thinking evolved as an artist, how he thought of himself as a composer and how he came to the realization that the idea is the art, not the execution.
His first wall drawing was installed at Paul Cooper’s gallery in New York in 1968 as a benefit for the Students Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. He sold the concept without a maquette. The buyer received paperwork like the one shown above (the title to Wall Drawing #957) and then hired craftspeople to produce the drawing on a wall as the MAG did.
We have seen many of LeWitt’s drawings over the years and I am always stuck by the way the isometric rendition of the forms plays with my senses. His forms don’t recede to any diminishing point. I came home with action points. Look up “Sol LeWitt – Sentences on Conceptual Art,” “Download Sol LeWitt app from the App Store.”
In this weekend’s NYT in an article entitled “35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now” an entry by the artist Amy Goodchild called, “Draw like Sol LeWitt,” she described feeding Sol LetWitt’s instructions to various chatbots. “On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place 50 points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.” With OpenAI’s older model, GPT-3, it was mostly a flop but GPT-4 did OK. Imagine if LeWitt was alive for this.
Pete Monacelli “Rock of Ages” sculpture on storage room floor. Piece including base is approximately 4″w, 6″h, 4″d
We helped Pete hang his recent show at the Little Theatre. The show was a mini retrospective and it included large paintings from the 60’s and 70’s so Peggi and I helped him move the lot. We left one item behind, a plaque given to Pete in honor of his work in creating the space that is now the café. Pete’s Renaissance Man resume includes rehabbing half the city as owner of Monacelli Construction. Pete’s sculptures line the shelves of his storage space and “Rock of Ages” (above) caught my eye.
Arpad at the controls recording Margaret Explosion “Civilization.” Paul Dood, Jack Schaefer and Peggi Fournier listening. 2016
For the last Margaret Explosion record (a cd) Arpad set up a work station in our home and we piled up the tracks. This time, like most of the other ME cds, we are simply compiling songs that were recorded during our live performances. But this one is being released on vinyl only so the tracks need to be mastered. And that’s where Arpad comes in.
Peggi playing Farfisa on “Civilization,” Arpad recording. 2016
Arpad’s home studio is mostly analog. He is toying with writing our recordings to tape with his tube amp and then bringing them back to digital. He would be happy if the whole world was in mono. He has suggested that we just hang one mic over the band the next time we play. We might just do that.
Claus Oldenburg vs. Damien Hirst from Rick Hock “Artist vs. Artist” drawings at Rochester Contemporary
A sure way to for me to get sucked down a rabbit hole is to dig into my photo library for something. Today, searching for something else, I came across photos of the drawings Rick Hock did, from a show at Rochester Contemporary in 2015, just after Rick passed. They drew me in all over again. Louise Bourgeois whomping Cindy Sherman. Claus Oldenberg with a Damien Hirsch doll. Hysterical and biting, caricatures so good they hardly need labels. William Kendrick scolding Ed Ruscha. But who is beating up Julian Schnabel? Walton Ford? Rick liked Walton Ford?
I wished I had photographed every piece in the show so I went to Google to see more. I found a picture of Rick, from PopWars (I hate it when that happens) and my post from 2015. I discovered I had already written what I was about to enter here today (I’ve copy-pasted that post below.) But I was delighted to find a listing for a $10 VSW book of Rick’s drawings (published after he passed) and this fantastic little movie by Matt Ehlers, “Driving Around Rochester With Rick.”
Rick Hock, Visual Studies Workshop Director, 2011
SEPTEMBER 6, 2015 We got to know Rick Hock a little at a time. Steve the mailman would talk about him as “another music nut,” someone we should know. Rick lived the next block over, on Barry Street. My cousin lived on that street too and we never saw her. Steve used our bathroom because we worked out of the house. He’d bring us cookies that the ladies at Elite Bakery would give him when he delivered their mail and he always had the new Neil Young record on the day it came out because he was friends with Kim at the House of Guitars. And then he would let Rick borrow it. Steve kept telling us “we had to meet this guy.”
We met Rick’s wife first and she offered us a kitten, one born to a scraggily white cat that lived under their house. Stella, who is solid white like her mother, is seventeen now and a real sweetheart. Every time we saw Rick we’d tell him, “we still have that cat.” We’d see Rick when we went out running Peggi remembers Rick looking at us and asking “Why?”
Rick was someone you wanted to get to know. He was intriguing and opened himself slowly so that each encounter was an adventure. He played guitar and jammed with Peggi and me in our neighbors’ (Willie and Ethylene’s) driveway while they were having a garage sale. Rick was an artist, he converted the attic in his house into his studio. He worked at the Eastman House and curated some of our favorite shows there.
Rick was dark and sweet at the same time. He was very bitter about the Vietnam Nam war and it didn’t take much to get him going on politics. He was frustrated about a lot of things but always looking for an opening or a way to express the madness. The last few times we saw him were heartbreaking as we learned he had cancer. He died when he was on a roll.
His drawings, on display now in the small gallery at RoCo, are explosive. I hear these are some of the last things he did so the show was put together without Rick’s guidance. The large drawings portray pairs of artists locked in battles. Joseph Bueys beating up on Warhol etc. RoCo has made these pairs out to be winners and losers, favorite artists putting posers in their place, but I like to think they just portray the struggle, to make art, to create, to be successful in the market or true to the creative gods. Artists vs. art.
There are ten of them here, even one that Rick didn’t title which RoCo has turned into a contest to identify. I cast my vote and am pretty sure I have the answer.
Bruce Nauman, Kara Walker, Anselm Kiefer, Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, Walton Ford, Claes Oldenburg, William Kentridge, Louise Bourgeois, Andres Serrano Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Julian Schnabel, Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman are all there. Don’t miss this show.
Here’s the Meredith Davenport’ statement that accompanies the show: “Drawing was a fluid way for Rick McKee Hock to metabolize ideas and to connect with people, whether he was sketching his frustrations out in a meeting or sharing complex feelings through the loving marks on a birthday card, it was the process of drawing that was a primary connection to the world around him. His fascination with the mark and to visual language combined with his intellectual complexity would move him towards the photographic images he is so well respected for.
But the drawings are essential. They are artifacts of the conversations he was having with the world- sometimes profound, occasionally banal and most times they were very funny. A few times they were also terrifyingly prescient. He struggled with the limitations of his drawings. Were these “cartoons”, truncated one-liners that could not transcend into the deeper things he felt and observed and tried to express? How could he imbue these marks with more? It was a constant struggle for him because he loved the mark and the paper and the pen even more than the silver image.
Like many artists before him, Rick located himself in the creative cosmos through the artists he admired and he made reference to them in his work. Maybe it was a way for him to commune with their ideas or to pay homage to the impact they had on him? He made an early set of small engravings of photographers he respected and his polaroid works reference writers like Ezra Pound and William S. Burroughs. In these drawings, he was into deeper questions about contemporary art through narratives he created via the artists he admired and hated. The marks and humor were a way for him to think about and distill their work and their careers. They are a beautiful expression of his own labor to resolve the tension between his big brain and his skilled and intuitive hand.
For me these drawings are also a love letter. When he made them, I was in New York City taking two‐week drawing course at the Studio School. Each night, after eight hours of classical figure drawing, I would receive a photograph on my cell phone of one of these drawings that he made during the day. It was his way to be with me. He knew that I also battle with similar questions in the contemporary art dialog. He worked with artists I admired like Louise Bourgeois and Bruce Nauman. In his drawings their authenticity always defeated the charlatans. We were somehow all in this fight together!” – Meredith Davenport
