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July 19, 2004

High Art, Low Life

This weekend, an old friend, Erica, visited me on a short hiatus from her life in Chicago. We’ve known each other for nine years (we figure in the tenth year we need to throw a party, celebrating the long-term kinship) and I forgot how great it can be to chat with someone who knows some of my past lives. When she arrived on Saturday, we wandered around the West Village only to decide on a one-stop shopping experience: Century 21. She found the integration of services more than pleasurable as we scrambled up and down the escalators, hitting different divisions of the store. When we finally sated out desire to shop, we went to Florent for an early evening dinner and more than one drink. Light-headed with martinis, I took Erica to Nasty Pig in Chelsea where I acquired accoutrement to tantalize Glenn upon his return to the Big Apple. Expecting the store to be a bit scandalous, I instead was entertained by the proprietor: a muscled bear with pretty, ice blue eyes, who greeted us merrily upon our entry. During our visit, he proved to be gracious and helpful, carefully informing me about how to wash my purchases (!); while he communicated about the care of my goods, his two little dogs skittered around the store and I eyed his screen saver, a picture of him and his boyfriend. Nasty pig, indeed! From there, Erica and I ended up Nowhere (in a good way), enjoying a few end-of-the-evening drinks.

The next day, we walked Museum mile, spending most of our time in the Met. I took her to a show I had already seen a few weeks earlier with Kieran and Glenn: an exhibit of August Sander’s photographs. I enjoyed it the first time I walked through the exhibit, but now another part of the show caught my attention. My eye lingered on the ways in which each group of pictures sorted by general categories (“Workers” or “Women”) always contained one or two photos that didn’t fit the scheme, skewering the logic of ‘types’ that Sander used as inspiration for the project. I liked that he eschewed clean categories of identity, since the little supplementary show to “contextualize” Sander demonstrated how photographs of social types were used by turn of the twentieth century eugenics to classify and condemn the mentally ill and to create criminal profiles. It was eerie, at times, to see these photographic types drained of Sander’s playfulness and filled with this zeal to contain or capture others. Most moving, though, were the final phase of Sander’s photos in which his son, Erich, was photographed in the ‘political prisoner’ category, detained for his resistance to the Nazi regime. Two portraits of Jews followed this sequence; most likely, Sander was hired by the subjects in these photos to take these pictures after the German government required Jews to register with the state. The most compelling feature of these portraits is how inscrutable their faces are: it is poignant that their feelings at this precipice of history are finally evanescent. Outside the show, a newly published collection of Diane Arbus’ work was on display, which mesmerized me. I’m a huge fan of her work and it was exciting to leaf through this book filled with pictures of hers I had never seen before, her contact sheets for certain pieces, and even the autopsy report filed after her suicide, an odd document to publish and then to read. Erica finally tore me away from the Arbus book and we wandered through the two displays of art deco furniture on display on the first floor. At first, I thought it dull to look at furniture, but the pieces quickly won me over: I now want the caramel-colored Elephant chair for reading, and beside it should sit the long diorite statue called “Javanese Panther.”

The remainder of the day saw us wandering through downtown, talking about our professional and personal lives, rounded off by a short bar tour, fueling me up for the final train ride home.

Posted by G at July 19, 2004 08:59 PM

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Posted by: kim at July 19, 2004 09:47 PM

Posted by: ashlee simpson pic gallery at November 27, 2004 09:41 PM