Follies

30 - 31 January 2010

I'm on DEADLINE, of course. But before I entirely crash out -- a few notes from the last day or so. Saturday night saw openings at both See Line and Carl Berg Galleries, upstairs from the fair, as well as the usual reconnaissance. I missed half the X-TRA "1 Image 1 Minute" event organized by Micol Hebron -- which took off where Hebron's regular X-TRA magazine column/feature left off -- offbeat view/contemporary art history moment morphed into the equivalent of a 1-minute comedy stand-up or poetry reading, I couldn't decide which; but except for the three of the more entertaining stand-ups (Tim Ebner, I understand, was one; I have no doubt architect Benjamin Ball was another), I guess I didn't miss too much. (And where was Artillery Editor, Tulsa Kinney -- any of whose regular artist lecture features would have served handily for this purpose? That, I thought -- my own bias to one side -- was a glaring omission.) I thought Margaret Wappler's poem was quite wonderful (though I don't even remember the image she selected); and Shana Nys Dambrot managed to send up the whole thing while remaining remarkably pertinent and articulate about her subject -- a gritty Rodchenko photograph that retains a wonderfully sustained resonance for contemporary image-making. I wandered back to the fair where I returned to tempt myself with a few things just out of my reach.

This afternoon, I was back at the Pacific Design Center for Frank Escher's lecture in conjunction with the show the Escher-GuneWardena firm co-curated for MOCA, Folly.