Barn almost finished

Construction on the barn is nearing completion. Here's the inside of the apple room (with a bit of husky tail). The walls are metal siding and we left the ceiling open wood, painted white. Flourescent lights. The room echoes quite a lot and I'm thinking about ways to quiet it a little more. We haven't moved the equipment from the garage yet, but I think that'll happen next week.

Below is the half of the barn that isn't finished, where we can park the tractor and keep the spraying supplies and feed and the like. It now has a nice gravel floor, which should keep it cleaner for at least a while.  

Yesterday we finished pruning all but two of the Rome trees. The wind was high and the tops were just too hard to reach. We still have work to do on the oversized trees, Jonathans, Red Delicious, and Winesap. I've abandoned the McIntosh, which are so big we can't possible reach even their middles. But it looks like we have the bulk of the pruning finished before everything blooms. So far our pruning time totals about 104 hours, 72 for me and 32 for Tom. He did most of the Romes.

Next week we're renting some bees to be sure the trees get pollinated. At 80 degrees, the trees may bloom pretty fast.

In the Yucatan, Mexico, earlier this month, we learned that beekeeping was an important commercial activity for the ancient Maya. They traded their especially sweet honey widely in Mesoamerica. The bees are stingless. I think we got a photo of one. Well, at least it's a bee...

And we bought some honey there, which is indeed very sweet and a little less viscous than the honey we usually get here.

Pruning apple trees and barn renovation continues

The apple-processing room is framed in the barn and Scott has started siding it. So here are pictures of the framing in process, the barn as it was and the barn today. There are two windows on the west side and one inside the barn on the east side. This view is from the east side looking into the apple room. Door is on the right.

Also, I had a comment about pruning and thought maybe it would be helpful to show a detail of pruning before and after. So here is a section of the tree before pruning and the same section after pruning. I think you could throw a cat through it after pruning, but before it would be impossible. I was only cutting off the obvious verticals above and below the branch, plus the twigs growing sideways or back toward the trunk. Last year Tom took off the the big branches that made the tree more dense with a chain saw.

I hope this is helpful and would welcome comments and corrections.

The Lost World of Old Europe

For several years now I have been aware that the most engaging and involving exhibitions are often the small shows that you tend to happen upon when you are trying to capture all the big arts events in any museum or city. This is clear to me as I reflect on the exhibitions we saw in New York last December. The real revelations came in exhibitions in places we had never visited, on subjects we had never addressed. Two of them are long closed - The Origins of El Greco: Icon Paiting in Venetian Crete  that was at the Onassis Cultural Center and Jain Images of Perfection  at the Rubin Museum of Art. Even though they are gone, I'll say a few words about them here.

We went to the Jain show first. When we were in Indian a couple of years ago, we were introduced to several religions and aspects of religions we had never experienced. One of them was the Jain Temple at Ranakpur, a immense structure with the most fabulously elaborate decoration we had seen anywhere in the world. While we knew a bit about the Jain religion from what our guide in India had told us, the exhibition at the Rubin included paintings and sculptures that elaborated on the stories of the Jain holy figures and provided history for the religion at the same time that it totally omitted any reference to the elaborate and extraordinarly temples built for the religion. We also visited the smaller exhibition of a few leaves from Jain manuscripts that the Metropolitan Museum had mounted in conjunction with the Rubin show. They also provided some background for the Jain religious figures but somehow avoided paying homage to the temples as well.

The Origins of El Greco was at the Onassis Cultural Center at 645 Fifth Avenue , but with an entrance on East 51st St. While the attraction was primarily the small number of remarkable early paitings by El Greco, before he went to Venice and way before he went to Spain, the exhibition really afforded the opportunity for a re-evaluation of the later icon painting that I was always taught in school was derivative and of little interest. On the contrary, these later icons from Crete demonstrated how their painters drew from sources in Italian painting at the same time they stayed true to the traditions of the icon, with the result that the paintings were both familiar and innovative. Painters like Angelos and Nikolaus Tzafouris from the 15th century and Michael Damaskenos from the 16th made works that we found engaging, intriguing, and powerful, appropriate sources and contemporaries for the young El Greco, whose early work is astounding even when fragmentary.

The third exhibition we found exciting continues on view until April 25. It is The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC at the relatively new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, associated with New York University and located in a townhouse at 15 East 84th Street.  Borrowing objects from Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova, the exhibition presents an amazingly sophisticated culture that flourished in southeastern Europe before ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. This was material and history completely unfamiliar to us and a revelation not only in the fact that such a civilization existed, but in the astounding beauty of the objects chosen to represent it in this display. Fortunately, I was able to photograph several of the objects and can show them here.

The exhibition was displayed in two modestly sized galleries, plus an introduction in the foyer that included a helpful map. In the smaller gallery were shown sculptures, most of them depicting the human form. Here is where the fired clay figure called "The Thinker" ( 5000-4600 BC, National History Museum of Romania, Bucharest) was shown with a related female figure. Naming it the "Thinker" forces one to think of Rodin's sculpture and I think detracts from the evocative humanity of the poses of the two figures, which look like a pair/couple.

The exhibition labels describe several different figure types the are understood to be characteristic of different cultural groups and geographical locations. Some figures are far less human-looking than the two above, but nonetheless suggest not only figures, but possibly their status.

Several instances occur where several figures, generally female. were clustered within an architectural or other grouped context, suggesting societies or religious or other organizations. Apparently, because there ae so many sculptures of female figures in these groups, there is has been some thought that the society was in some way dominated by women, or at least matrilineal.

While these small figurines are very impressive, the most amazing work in the exhibition is the pottery. Pottery in a wide variety of beautiful shapes, some with close fitting lids, decorated with geometric designs or animal and human figures, suggests both a sophistication of decorative taste and a specialization in the use of the vessels. Most of the pottery dates from between 4200 and 3500 BC.

Some of the vessels are anthropomorphic and suggest the works found in ancient Meso- and South America, although the similarities are no doubt coincidental.

In this larger gallery there were quite a few gold objects in wall cases, attesting to the metal working ability of these Danube peoples. Large quantities of gold jewelry found in an area of multiple tombs led scholars to understand that the culture was a hierarchical one in which the rich people wore the gold. Also the labels describe their ability to smelt copper and use it to make axes, knives, and jewelry in large quantities They had extensive trade routes, enabling them to get precious Aegean spondylus shells for their jewelry and precious items.

Around 3500 BC this culture seems to have disappeared and scholars do not know why, although the usual ideas of invaders from other lands, climate change, deterioration of the farmland, internal strife, all may have played a role.

One of the things that makes this exhibition so exhilerating is the fact that it is shown in two galleries and in a townhouse, rather than a huge museum. The intimacy of the setting enables one to look more closely at the objects and, just because there's nothing you have to get to in this building, it is possible to concentract on this subject, which was a total revelation to me, and about which am still nearly completely ignorant. While I and others had doubts that it made sense to create this new Institute within New York University, this exhibition indicates the potential it has to bring new revelations to its audience. I am thankful that I saw a review of the show in the New York Times before our trip. Too bad it was in the Science rather than the Art section.

Farm - snow - pruning

The sun came out today for the first time we can remember, probably since mid-December. The ground is covered with fresh snow, but it's not too deep. After I checked out the barn progress, the dogs and I walked around the south side of the vineyard/orchard. Rosie follows right behind me and when she does that I always think "a girl and her dog," even though I haven't been a "girl" for many years. Here we are:

When it snowed a few days ago, I got a picture of Thunder in his element:

People often ask about pruning and  what it entails. A friend of ours, David Vertacnik, was featured in the local newspaper talking about pruning. He said you need to prune the tree so you can throw a cat through it, and that was in my mind today while I was pruning in the sun and snow. I tend to think of it as giving the trees a butch haircut. In any event, the snow afforded a good opportunity to silhouette a tree before and after pruning. The tree is an Earlygold, but they all work about the same.

Here it is before:

And after:

Notice all the prunes on the ground. We'll need to clear them away eventually.

Barn renovation 2 pouring cement

On February 4 the cement floor for the apple room was poured. They just managed to get it done between freezes and snowstorms and the new cement has been under a tarp since then. They say the mice crawl under the tarp to keep warm at night, as the cement gives off some heat as it cures.

I didn't get a photograph when Thunder found himself on the other side of the cement from us and decided he had to step through it to join us. He left not paw prints, but deep leg holes that had to be filled in and resurfaced. I washed most of the cement off his legs with no trouble, but Tom says there are cement footprints on our stairs in the house.


Photographs of the cement going in:

The truck arrives

This used to be a room

Getting ready

The pour

Just before Thunder struck

Feeding Champagne

Friday I was driving to town and saw a flock of small birds and a large bird in front of me on the road. I thought the small birds where chasing the large one, but it suddently turned, caught one in its claws, and soared away. A red-tailed hawk getting lunch.

This week they are framing the apple room and today we spent some time discussing window placement and ventilation. We've drawn up some plans, but every time we actually see the barn we decide to make changes.
There's snow in the orchard and I found tiny footprints in it, leading to holes. Probably voles. I need to prune some more so they'll have apple branches rather than tree bark to chew up.

Urs Fischer at the New Museum

After seeing the review and a rather jumbled photograph in the New York Times, I was very doubtful that the Urs Fischer exhibition (Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty) at the New Museum would have anything interesting at all. But it made sense to see the museum again. After a year, the building hasn't changed, but we felt a little more comfortable with it and welcomed the very accessible tables in the lobby where we could have a coffee and puzzle out the installation by the café. We did find it amusing, and a lesson for any building project, that everything is named, from the coat check and the museum shop to the water fountain and the ticket desk.

The Fischer show occupied all three exhibition floors, each floor with very different content. On the top floor, huge blob shapes dominated the space. They are aluminum casts of small lumps of clay modeled by the artist. Not looking exactly like rocks or clouds or monsters or anything specific, they loomed over the visitors and I think we liked them just because they were so big. In their midst was a 19^th-century style drooping lamppost painted pink, very out of place. The oversized lumps and the drooping lamppost remind me of the work of Claes Oldenburg and Cossje van Bruggen, both their outsize monumental sculptures and their soft sculptures of everyday objects. But I didn't think Fischer intended to imitate them. I think the appeal of these works was their size and unlikeliness, especially in galleries that emphasized their size.

The floor below had a soft-looking (actually cast aluminum) collapsing lavender piano, which reminded me of the piano by Matt Johnson I saw at the Saatchi Collection in London last summer, a blue one, made from a large blue folded tarp. And both of them make one think of Oldenburg. There was also a hole in the wall from which a tongue would jut out if you walked close to it. Several people were gathered around it, trying to make the tongue come out. It was kind of amusing. The main object on this floor was the walls. Fischer had photographed the walls and ceiling of this floor in every detail and then papered the walls with the photographs, so that the walls were exact images of themselves, but for some reason in mauve. I tried to examine this and tried to get the point, but the walls were still just walls and not very interesting to look at.

The final floor had been featured in the Times review, which I had not found interesting. Here Fischer had installed many mirrored large box shapes, monoliths, with photographic images of various objects, each one seen from four or, if the top was visible, five sides. For example, a mirrored box about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide depicted a half pear from the front, sides, and back. Another box depicted what appeared to be the same half pear after it had started to rot. Apples, shoes, Tweety Bird were big, the Empire State Building was small (with King Kong on top), a British phone booth was about the right size; people weren't really people, but cardboard cutouts of people. Walking around these boxes I was forced to think about three-dimensionality. You saw the item from four sides, but it continued to be flat at the same time it suggested volume. The cutout people were disarming, since one expected a full side view of a person rather than one of cardboard. Besides having some of the amusement value of a funhouse exhibit, these also made me think about our habits of perception and assumptions about what we see. As a combination of three-dimensional sculpture and two-dimensional photographs, they emphasized the contrast between the three-dimensional objects being depicted and the two-dimensional views of them. This reminds me how Renaissance sculptures tended to have up to four main viewpoints until the sixteenth century, when Giovanni da Bologna created sculptures that encourage the viewer to walk around them in order to grasp the full composition, a full manifestation of the concept of figura serpentinata.
Photographs of the installation, because they do not give the viewer the opportunity to walk around the objects and respond to the different views, make it all look like kitsch.

To me some of Fischer's work seems facile or silly (the tongue, a floating cake I didn't mention, a hanging croissant with a blue butterfly) and some is striking just because it's huge, but these mirrored box sculpture/photographs, whether intentionally or not, made me think about what we see, what artists make, and what artists can make us see.

I was about to consider myself finished with the exhibition when I thought about the subtitle, "Marguerite de Ponty." All the reviews and New Museum press information provide about this subtitle is that this is one of the pseudonyms Stéphane Mallarmé used in his 1874 fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion). According to the exhibition curator, Fischer likes to use second names in his titles and perhaps this just appeals to his absurdist sensibility. The four huge monolithic forms on the top floor of the exhibition are titled after Mallarmé's Dernière Mode pseudonyms: Marguerite de Ponty, Ix, Miss Satin, and Zizi. A web search for more information was a bit frustrating because now when you search Mallarmé and Marguerite de Ponty, most of the items are about Urs Fischer; nonetheless, information is available and one useful reference is P.N. Furbank and A.M. Cain, Mallarmè on Fashion: A Translation of the Fashion Magazine La Dernière Mode with Commentary. Oxford and New York, 2004. Mallarmé produced 8 issues of the magazine and wrote almost all of them himself, discussing fashion, theater, railway stations and trips from Paris, food and other subjects of contemporary culture. He always began with an essay by Marguerite de Ponty on fashion, suggesting themes and principles of fashion and then describing current specific fashion elements – hats, jewelry, scarves, shoes, the bustle. She/he refers to the lack of a current real coherent style in Paris (empire being the last), to revivals of previous styles in specific items, and to society's tendency to stifle essential creativity, all possible themes for a contemporary art exhibition, and possible things to keep in mind when looking at Fischer's work. Since Fischer obviously owes a lot to previous artists, the fashion concept may relate more directly to his work than one might think at first.

Barn renovation begins

I noted a while ago that we had purchased a wonderful machine for washing and sorting apples. Last summer we installed it in the garage, but the plan was always to have it in the barn. The requires some renovation and this week we started. Most of the barn has been emptied of 30 years or so of accumulation. Before Tom could change his mind, the black pickup that had been in front for several years disappeared. Here's the front of the barn this morning:

Here's the inside of the barn, again this morning:

Here's the brush pile, with at least three years worth of apple prunes, a volunteer tree, and various contents of the barn:

We set it on fire and it took about an hour to finish it off:

Champagne, who is 37, seemed a little nonplussed by the activities of the past couple of days. She just stood there.: