I’m off for a little vacation all on my own – two nights in New York city staying with a friend, then two nights in the Hudson River Valley staying with another friend.
Pictures first, words later.
I guess it’s later – Saturday on the train going up the Hudson River.
I got into the LaGuardia around noon on Thursday. I collected my bags and went looking for a taxi and got offered a way-too-expensive, but super easy, flat rate ride by a cell phone earpiece wearing guy wearing an Uber t-shirt. Which got me to Jenny’s apartment in something like 25 minutes. I checked in with her, and couldn’t get the apartment wifi to work, so walked to the closest Starbucks at Columbus & 86th and got an iced coffee and bought the tix for our Friday night adventure.
For my Thursday adventure, I took the subway to the new Whitney, and then planned to walk back on the Highline. The Whitney’s current exhibition, in celebration of its new building, is “America Is Hard To See“, all from its permanent collection.
It was a fun show – lots of works that I’d read about and heard about and seen in books or online but not in person. Like this Nam June Paik, that my friend & librarian colleague Howard Besser uses in public speaking as an example of a preservation problem. Paik’s dead, TV repairmen don’t exist anymore, and TVs are all flat screen, not cathode ray tubes anymore, so what happens when the TVs in the piece break?
Here’s the other stuff I looked at; old faves like Andy & Thiebaud; a Joseph Cornell I’d never seen before; water colors of California landscapes by a Japanese artist; not just movie but all the little animals and figures from Calder’s Circus. Jenny says it was always in the lobby at the Whitney in the old building but I don’t remember it from the one other time I was there.
I had my NYC celebrity sighting, too: Eric the vampire (actor Alexander Skarsgard). We looked at Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, that I’d just seen in the City show at AIC, together. I pointed out that it was really a work of archival research, tracing who owns what, and he said, “that’s fantastic”. I suppose he could’ve been making fun of me.
I walked back on the Highline, and that was fun too. New York did a much better job of creating usable public spaces than we are in Madison. Lots of wooden benches and pleasant places to sit, and people were using them. I liked the part where you can watch cars driving up the street. Like Jenny said, “New Yorkers are using it!” I thought about stopping for a beer or a glass of wine, but just walked. You come out at the Javits Center, and I took the subway back.
And the Whitney visit was free! While I was waiting in line a woman came up to me and gave me a free ticket that she couldn’t use. She said she wanted to give the ticket to an artist, and must’ve liked my look. She did a nice thing too, kind of walked me to the entrance and waited till the ticket scanned, confirming it was good. So maybe, like Rach said, Mr. Skarsgard thought he was getting inside information on those Haacke photos from a famous artist, and not making fun of me at all.
