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It was in a messenger bag I purchased yesterday.
It's not the original - just some swag, because the bag has one of Warhol's skull drawings screened on it. Maybe the idea is to make losers like me, that buy an arty messenger bag, feel a kinship to Warhol via the loser experience (rejection letter) network.
Hmm, seems to be working. Must go buy another Warhol product immediately.
I've written it before. Zoe Strauss can capture Philly like no one else can, ever.
She did it again.
This is exactly how I remember my life there.
As I was reading the Roberta Smith review of the latest Richard Prince retrospective, I began to have a feeling of déjà vu. Her line “in a sense his career has been a process of self-liberation by expanding upon an esoteric mode that he helped invent” reads like it was written by Greil Marcus describing one of Bob Dylan’s recent albums in any latter day copy of Rolling Stone.
And why not? Prince like Dylan is no longer a part of the counterculture. The golden sheen of acceptance and forgiveness by the establishment is beginning to engulf his projects. With its inherent moral judgements – women can be sluts – and its nod to the Left – poverty is fascinating, real men can be confused – his work now fits right in with the Boomer aesthetic.
Keeping with the music metaphor, Prince could be said to have started out like Jane’s Addiction (who have appeared in his work) – a band with a kind of mish mosh of styles and ideas performed with a jagged edge. But has morphed into Led Zeppelin, whose subsequent albums were each a more grandiose version of its own debut.
photo: Eric Doeringer
Two days ago, I was gushing over artist Dan Golden's rug project.
Yesterday, Tom Moody posted "A Short History of Carpet in Contemporary Art." Worth checking out.
title: Devotion is a thing that demands motives.
description: acrylic on canvas 48" x 52" 2007 signed on reverse.
A few folks I've talked to have accused the Oakland Art Gallery of offering an overly earnest program in a corporate looking space.
Whatever.
What they can be truly accused of is: being in downtown Oakland, and trying really hard to connect to the community.
Whether you believe your art should only be saturated with irony and exhibited in a soon be condemned store front or not, it's time to open your wallet and lend OAG your support. We're all in this together.
This year's fundraiser, 2x2, is up Oct 3-20. The list of sponsors for the Oct. 19 reception include a distillery and chocolatier - so booze-soaked and giddy could be the keyword for that Friday night. Many of the contributing artists fall into the canyon of the folky-crafty idiom - full list is here - but there are still treasures to be had.
Lawrence Rinder has only one memory of his grandfather.
In 1966, when he was 5, Lawrence and his family rushed across the country by airplane, from New York to California, to be with the dying cantor. “I didn’t meet him until the day he died. I had never been out of Manhattan before and ended up in San Francisco standing by my grandfather’s deathbed.”
But now, in a new exhibition at Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum, Lawrence Rinder, a nationally known curator of the visual arts, has brought his grandfather’s musical legacy out of the synagogue and into the Bay Area art world. Shahrokh Yadegari: Through Music is a kind of belated eulogy from a grateful grandson to the elder he hardly knew.
For nearly half of a century, Cantor Reuben Rinder, Lawrence’s grandfather, had been the celebrated cantor at Emanu-El, the landmark reform temple in San Francisco. A cantor, or hazzan, is the trained musician who leads his synagogue in songful prayers. Cantors with musical talent and rapport with the congregation sometimes become as important as the rabbi. This was Reuben’s fate, a destiny that he embraced as a teenager.
Reuben Rinder was born in Ukraine in 1887, immigrating at age 12 to the United States after the death of his parents. Shortly after his arrival he took up the cantorial profession, following a brief stint at the Hebrew Theological Seminary. After working in several New York temples, he accepted a position at Emanu-El in 1913, traveling across the continent to the city of San Francisco.
Reuben remained with Emanu-El until his death. “He was himself a composer and performer, but his greatness lay in his impact on others,” writes author and historian Fred Rosenbaum about Reuben Rinder, in Visions of Reform. “His penetrating mind discerned musical genius; his warm personality nurtured it; his generous friends financed it. No individual in the twentieth century did more to enrich the music of the synagogue.”
For nearly 40 years after his death, Reuben’s ideas have held sway over his grandson Lawrence Rinder, who has made his name as one of the brightest and most sought-after curators working in America today, known for his inclusive attitude towards contemporary art. Beginning in 1988 as the MATRIX curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, a bi-monthly project that introduces the Bay Area to new international artists, Lawrence has worked his way back and forth across America, founding the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, acting as curator for contemporary art at New York’s Whitney Museum and compiling their 2002 Bienniale, then returning to the Bay Area three years ago to become dean at Oakland’s California College of Art.
Lawrence, now 46, bears a striking resemblance to the Rueben seen in old photographs. From a kind face, intense eyes pull one’s attention into Lawrence’s verbal musings. “At some point I began to feel this uncanny sense of ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’—as the father so the son,” recalls Lawrence. “My grandfather saw that his position was to bring an aesthetic dimension to the practice of worship—by commissioning new work, by deciding what pieces would be sung or played, and through those particular choices creating an ambience that would assist the goals of the whole congregation. Being a curator is close to being a cantor.”
A little over a year ago, Alla Efimova, chief curator at the Magnes, approached Lawrence about curating a show as part of the museum’s ongoing “Revisions” series. “Revisions” are exhibitions where art world personalities and scholars are invited to create a show inspired by or drawn from the museum’s collection.
“I’ve known Lawrence and his work for a long time. When he became the dean at CCA we invited him to be on our advisory board. Shortly after this, while going through some paperwork I noticed that we housed Cantor Rinder’s archive—the Magnes has had a long relationship with Temple Emanu-El; we have a number of archives from their members. I asked Lawrence if Rueben was his grandfather.”
Not sure what to expect when he first encountered his grandfather’s archive, Lawrence thought maybe it would contain personal effects—a gold watch, a fur hat. When three legal-size cardboard storage boxes full of papers, mostly formal notes and missives, were presented as Rueben’s estate, his grandson was initially crestfallen. After an extended survey, though, Lawrence noticed correspondence with many important figures of his grandfather’s era—notes from Eleanor Roosevelt, messages from violinists Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin. He could have pulled these pieces out and installed them in the museum, establishing the importance of his grandfather as a cultural mover and reintroducing Rueben Rinder to younger generations. But then Lawrence came across a score that his grandfather composed for the “priestly benediction.” Long-forgotten memories returned to him.
The benediction, translated into English, says, “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace.” The prayer is recited at the end of services, on Yom Kippur, and at the Shabbat services at home.
“It has a very ancient feeling to me, very true and very beautiful. While living in San Francisco as a young adult, long after my grandfather’s death, I had only been to Temple Emanu-El a few times for services, but I remembered sitting there and hearing these words and thinking these were the words I could mostly easily accept. It was a wonderful sentiment,” Lawrence recalls. “I felt good. I was glad to be part of a congregation that was sitting together, hearing these words and feeling them together.”
Of all of Rueben’s archive, the benediction was what linked Lawrence emotionally to his grandfather. In fact, among Rueben’s papers were several scores for the prayer. One of them was a treatment that Reuben had written on the occasion of the 1955 Festival of Faith, a celebration in San Francisco commemorating the United Nations’ 10th anniversary. As part of the festivities, people of all faiths were getting together to talk about their religions, attempting to lessen the horrible animosities that were continuing to tear the world apart in the wake of World War II.
His grandfather, Lawrence believes, organized his life around two main goals. The first was to revivify the Jewish musical tradition. The second was to encourage ecumenical healing, reaching across the many religions. Rueben was constantly going to Christian churches and Buddhist temples, and bringing their members to his synagogue, talking about what the faiths had in common.
The way to reach across time and back to his grandfather, Lawrence realized, was to commission new music for the benediction, connecting traditions and continuing his grandfather’s work.
Lawrence contacted Sharokh Yadegari, one the founders of the Persian Arts Society and a professor at University of California, San Diego. Versed in traditional music, Yadegari is also active in the avant-garde, creating computer-generated algorithmic sound designs.
Yadegari took the simple melody that Rueben had written for the Festival of Faith and added elements of classical Persian and contemporary electronic music to create a layer of purely instrumental music. Next, he added a layer of singing in Hebrew, Farsi and English, including vocals by Siamak Shajarian, the most famous Persian singer living in the United States. Finally, Yadegari crafted a computer program to randomly mix the pieces together, creating an ever-changing sonic tapestry that plays through four speakers installed in the Magnes gallery.
“For many years, my work has been about connecting opposites to each other,” Yadegari says. “It’s kind of my heritage, having grown up Jewish in Iran, and bringing unity among opposites forms my musical world.”
To round out the installation, Lawrence has chosen two objects from the Magnes’ permanent collection: a brass bowl from 18th century Russia and a 19th century Persian miniature painting.
The painting, a rarely seen treasure from Iran, depicts the tale of Joseph, son of Jacob, interpreting the Egyptian Pharaoh’s dream—an Old Testament example of cross-cultural problem–solving. The bowl, engraved with a striking image of two hands with fingers splayed, was used by the priests, or kohen, to ritually wash their hands before reciting the priestly benediction at the Yom Kippur service.
Even though Lawrence met his grandfather only once, Rueben’s passion for nurturing culture has become part of Lawrence’s own curatorial style. “I suspect that some of that sensibility—,” he reflects, “looking for commonality and trying to find the best and the most peaceful aspirations in people and things; a passion for bringing things together—does connect my grandfather’s work with my life.”
Shahrokh Yadegari: Through Music runs through July 6, 2008, at the Judah L. Magnes Museum.
Over the years, I’ve written about my love of Dan Golden’s work, and some of our collaborations. I’ve included his work, last year, in my weekly online exhibitions of drawings. Just to prove my love even more, I’ve even had him as a guest curator of the show.
In case anyone missed it a few weeks back in the New York Times, Dan, partnering with Ford Lininger, has launched a collection of rugs based on Dan's drawings. The rugs are handmade in America by dedicated craftsmen (who once worked on the line in Detroit... just kidding) and come in two groups – hilarious figurative ones based on his cartoons (which were once rejected by the New Yorker, probably for being too funny) and more sedate ones that are designer-ish (in a good way, and pictured here).
Get over there and buy one.
06/09 thru 07/03.
