Reflections, Pool
Art vs. commerce is one of the themes of my work-in-progress and also the theme of this week and the next, where the job where I participate in commerce is subsidizing the job where I participate in art in what is known as a “staycation.” In plainer terms, I took two weeks off to work on my book and stayed home to do it. After two experiments with cute little towns upstate where an enterprising artist type offers a room in a garret, I realized I needed to be with my books. (“Can’t you just bring them?” asked a friend. No. They fill an entire case.) I also needed research libraries and I write to you from the Rose Reading Room at NYPL, having been earlier to the Frick Art Research Library where the book I wanted was offsite but did you know you could just register for a card with the Frick Art Research Library? I mean, it’s a research library, meaning, you can’t roam the stacks, and you have to put your belongings in a locker and write with a pencil and all the other restrictions but also . . . a quiet room in which to write in a mansion on 71st Street, somehow free.
But to take a little break, yesterday I visited Clinamen, an installation currently on view at the Park Avenue Armory. The artist is Céleste Boursier-Mougenot who, according to the flyer provided by the Armory, creates dispositifs – orchestrated environments that expand the notion of the musical score . . . using a wide variety of situations and objects to reveal their sonic potential and generate spontaneous, live, acoustic forms.”
This installation features “circular basins filled with water in which ordinary porcelain bowls, selected for their distinct timbre, drift freely and gently collide to produce chiming sounds.”
I entered the vast, echoey hall (this is why theater is bad here, in my opinion) of the Armory and waited quite a long time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and my ears to adjust to the sound. There are three deep pools in which the water is propelled by gentle motors and the bowls clang into one another. I thought, perhaps foolishly, that most people would be elsewhere on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon, but the large venue was quite crowded. Most people understood that what they were witnessing was an acoustical installation, which required oh, I don’t know, less gossiping about your daughter-in-law’s baby shower logistics and more listening. I stood up from my first pool position and walked to the second pool where at least the distracting conversation was too low for me to hear the details of it. But the third pool was just right.
I was reminded of the wind chimes that used to pong pong pong in Socrates Sculpture Park, stirred by breezes from the river. I also thought of the phrase found music. After settling in by the third people, where certain attendees had chosen to embrace the sound to the point of lying on the floor with their eyes closed, I could hear the echoes of the clangs from the bowls in the other pools. Because of the high ceiling in the Armory and the way the sound carried, it sounded like the church bells of a neighboring town. The soft collisions in the pools nearest me produced a noise that sounded more like chimes.
When the bowls reached an intense congregation, the sounds they produced most resembled a melody.
“Congregation” is a concept I came up with recently when asked to describe my work in progress. “A meditative history of one block in my neighborhood,” didn’t seem to be cutting it, even when I added, “The block functions as a microcosm of American history – the Puritans, the rise of the merchant class, the rise of public art.” (“But why that block?” someone asked. “Why not a block in, say, Ohio?” Some people like to dispute, I have realized.)
When the Halletts arrived at Hallett’s Cove, which forms the north end of the block, they were Puritans. By the time they died, they had become Quakers, a faith which has an entirely different concept of what constitutes a “congregation” – more along the lines of where Jesus says in the Book of Matthew “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” rather than being scolded from a pulpit by a minister telling you that you were born in sin and will probably spend eternity in Hell but better live a pinched, dour existence in the meantime, just in case.
The piano factory, which is in the middle of the block, produced pianos for the home, rather than the concert grands produced by the Steinway factory around the curve of the Hellgate. “Made by our family for yours,” was one of the mottos of the Sohmer piano factory, in the days when families would congregate around the piano after a meal to sing together.
And Mark di Suvero (whose studios are on north end of the block) and Isamu Noguchi (whose studios, on south end, are now a museum) designed the Socrates Sculpture Park, across the street from the former piano factory. Both of these contemporary sculptors were driven by the concept that art should be available to everyone, not sequestered, and that it should encourage congregation. Both men designed both playgrounds and sculptures for children to climb on.
Finally, the dog café, housed on the ground floor of the former factory, is where people came to congregate during the pandemic, when one of the many difficult aspects of life was that we were not supposed to breathe the same air.
I was reminded of this when I reluctantly left the pools of the Armory to return to the bright, shrill Upper East Side. The “please stand six feet apart” stickers were still visible on the sidewalk wrapping around the Armory. But inside, one was reminded that close proximity could sometimes produce a sound resembling a melody.
Is there a place that means a lot to you?
Yesterday I conducted the second of my readings/workshop at Chateau le Woof. It was, New York-famously, the seventh consecutive Saturday of rain, so my expectations of attendance were low. Who would venture through more sogginess to attend a reading of a work-in-progress advertised by an admittedly cute but somewhat vague flyer?
Yet, people came. One was my friend Tess, who I met at the VCFA conference last August, her friend Hannah, two kind neighbors, and a woman who I met in the most interesting manner. This work-in-progress has been a work-in-progress, as I shift and distill its focus from so many tantalizing possibilities. Initially, I began visiting the Chateau le Woof (aka “the dog cafe”) just after the vaccines were rolling out, in the late spring of 2021. I was privileged enough to be able to work from home, but also stir-crazy enough to need to be somewhere other than my home, with other people, yet not indoors. The dog cafe, an indoor-outdoor space, was perfect. I reflected on how we had quarantined ourselves during this pandemic, but during previous epidemics, New York City had quarantined the sick on the islands surrounding Astoria — Roosevelt Island, previously known as Welfare Island and before that Blackwell’s Island, had been home to hospitals, jails, poorhouses and a notorious lunatic asylum. North Brother Island had been home to a tuberculosis hospital. Hart Island was a potter’s field begun after the Civil War and in active use during the height of the pandemic, where graves were dug for the unclaimed dead by the unhappy residents of Riker’s Island.
I still have a draft of that chapter — “Exiles of the Smaller Isles” — but realized I could not use the background research I’d done on Typhoid Mary. She was sentenced to life on North Brother Island, not in the tuberculosis hospital (where she worked as a lab assistant) but in her own small cottage from which, in the imagination of novelist Mary Beth Keane in her novel FEVER, Mary falls asleep to the sound of the rushing currents of the Hellgate, a rapid, still-dangerous stretch of the East River between Ward Island and Astoria. FEVER is an excellent if bleak novel detailing the options of an unmarried immigrant woman at the end of the 19th century. At one point, the caretaker on North Brother Island points out to Mary that her life in her tiny cottage with her little dog, however lonely and powerless, is still much better than some have it.
My favorite of these books was TYPHOID MARY: AN URBAN HISTORICAL which was surprisingly hard to get a hold of, considering its author, Anthony Bourdain. It is top-of-the-game Bourdain, scathing and snappy, but I had to get it on Kindle, because it may be out of print. So it was not among the stack of books I took to the closest Little Free Library. I deposited them and at the same time was delighted to see that the small wooden box held a copy of UNCOMMON GROUNDS, a history of coffee, which was on my list of books I needed for research.
Another woman browsing the Little Free Library eagerly grabbed ALL the Typhoid Mary books, with such enthusiasm that I tilted my head at her. She explained that she was an epidemiologist with the New York City Department of Health.
“So . . . how was your pandemic?” I asked.
She attended the reading, along with her friend, another epidemiologist.
I started keeping this blog such a long time ago that I forget my own logline sometimes, which ends with “champion of the chance encounter.” This was one, if ever there was one.
Mark di Suvero meets the Golden Gate Bridge
I haven’t been posting as often as I would like because I’ve been buried in research for my book about the history of the section of Astoria you can see from Chateau le Woof. The project was previously known as “Summer of the Dog Cafe” but it seems to have morphed into a book and it involves Hallett’s Cove, the former Sohmer piano factory where the dog cafe occupies part of the ground floor, and Socrates Sculpture Park, founded by Mark di Suvero, and Spacetime, the red warehouse which di Suvero uses as workspace. Teaching myself about the Puritans, the history of pianos in New York City, and the rise of public art and then trying to turn it into prose has been a slow process! It took me forever, it seems, for example, to come up with the opening paragraphs of the chapter on Mark di Suvero, but here they are for your appraisal.
In 1941, a family left China to sail across the Pacific, fleeing a war that would not be fled. Although they had been living in China for years, the family was Italian. The father, a naval attaché, was Venetian, as was the mother, a former Countess. With them were their four children, each of whom faced radiant destinies: an activist lawyer who would establish a law school, an art historian, a poet and a world-renowned artist.
Let’s envision the future artist, nine years old, on the deck on the S.S. President Cleveland. His hands, wet with ocean mist, grip the railings as the Cleveland navigates from the great Pacific into San Francisco Bay. Here it is at last: America. America, named for an Italian explorer, just as he was, Marco Polo di Suvero. Perhaps he claps with excitement. We focus on his hands because his early public work will be of hands, clutching, opening, pointing.
Days of gazing at the endless blue of ocean and sky are suddenly broken by the terrible bright splendor of this span of steel, stretching across the bay for a mile, so long that the bridge never stops being painted. The last brush stroke on the south end in San Francisco serves as a signal to commence the next coat on the north end in Marin County. The color of the paint is International Orange. It flares into the eyes of the blue-blinded boy, himself an international fruit, an Italian raised in China entering America under a suspension bridge with towers so tall that they routinely disappear into clouds as though seeking the release of heaven. The bridge was begun the same year he was born, but it is only four years old, like a younger brother.
International Orange is a reddish orange firmly associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. But it is abundant on earth. We find it in the clay soil of Georgia, in the heart of a peach, in marigolds and goldfish, butterflies and autumn leaves, Irish setters and redheads. We find it in flames. But the color really belongs to the sky, in the grace of the sun rising and setting.
But who could imagine dousing a monument of steel with such a fierce, celestial color. The future sculptor Mark di Suvero, first encountering America, was too young to formulate such questions. He was just a boy, and what he most likely thought was “Golly, look at that!” or, more likely, “Che meraviglia!” But that encounter, and that thought, would direct the rest of his life, shape the course of the lives of dozens if not hundreds of other artists, and heavily influence the landscape of a certain stretch of Vernon Boulevard in Astoria, New York.
Elizabeth Bales Frank 
Recent Comments