Transitory Street Scenes Fixed in Photographs (20th century)

Arnold Newman
Red Wall, Green Door
ca. 1950
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Arthur Siegel
Green Building, Red Door
1950
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Saul Leiter
Walk with Soames
1958
silver dye bleach print
Art Institute of Chicago

Irving Penn
Antique Shop, Pine Street, Philadelphia
1938
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

W. Eugene Smith
Street in Pittsburgh
Downhill Houses on Either Side - Church at End of Street
1955
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Stephen Shore
Church Street & Second Street, Easton, Pennsylvania
1974
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

On the Weight of Dailiness

α.

On an afternoon when – today – noon is unannounced,
                       Yet divides the spheres of day into memory and waiting;

β.

In these hollow moments, when all flesh is found arbitrary,
                       And arbitrary all the details of regret or expectation –

γ.

One might imagine rain, but instead time rushes the window;
                       Again, wind at the window? – no, just a river of minutes.

δ.

In the green stasis of silence: an eclipse of intent.
                       The self, unmoored, slowly rides the camber of daylight.

ε.

Start again, try – rouse the idle machine of the body.
                       In the silence – perhaps: strange intimations of foreboding.

ζ.

What then, can reaffirm the just sovereignty of being?
                       The mind's logic: a bridge in the air that no step follows.

η.

You are suddenly patient with folly; tire of nostalgia.
                       The first human, the second: seeds sown in the wind's salt.

θ.

You dream of distraction, to drag you towards evening.
                       Outside, a squall, without intent or rancor, flails the trees.

ι.

Finally you would speak: pry open the vault of silence.
                       Your voice's clamor: the harsh laboring of a wooden bell.

κ.

In late afternoon, memory rises like carp from a muddied pool.
                       Memory escapes capture: the shadowy forms stay buried.

λ.

Daylight, once again vanquished, burns red on the far horizon.
                       The body – pierced by loneliness – would shed its flesh.

μ.

And the heart, distant – painfully remote – seemingly unused.
                       But in loyalty, practicing all afternoon its common work.

– Ellen Hinsey (The White Fire of Time, Wesleyan University Press, 2002)

Arthur Siegel
State Street, Rainy Day
1952
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Joel Sternfeld
518 101st Street, Love Canal Neighborhood, Niagara Falls, New York
1994
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Arnold Genthe
Twisted Streets, San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
1906
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Walker Evans
Wall Street Windows
ca. 1928-30
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Nickel
Untitled (Bayard Building, Upper Stories)
ca. 1955
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Nickel
Untitled (Bayard Building, Cornice and Windows)
ca. 1955
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Nickel
Untitled (Garrick Theater, Detail of Ornament)
ca. 1958
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Nickel
Untitled (Bayard Building, Ornament of Cornice)
ca. 1955
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Slices

Mabel Watson Payne slept later than usual in the afternoon on Friday. While she finished her nap I kept myself amused (and out of the way) by composing these narrow, stretched-out slices of urban scenery from a landscape of brick and wood that was put in place roughly a century ago (after the '06 Earthquake) and has remained blessedly unimproved since. Except there are more trees now. There was not much fervor for trees along the downtown San Francisco streets a hundred years ago. But trees are regarded with more veneration and planted everywhere possible in cities these days – as symbolic compensation for the human destruction of nature elsewhere. (Not that humans were less destructive a hundred years ago. They were destroying nature as fast as they could back then too, but they had not got so good at it yet and there were not so many of them.)

Ru

This piece of monochrome, unadorned pottery went up for auction at Sotheby's in Hong Kong on 4 April 2012. According to Apollo magazine, "eight bidders competed for over 15 minutes to secure it. The price tripled its pre-sale estimate to sell for HK$208m (US$26.7m), setting a new auction record for a Song ceramic."

Apollo explained that this bowl (probably a brush-washer) was "a rare and particularly refined example of Ru, the official ware of the famed kilns of the Northern Song dynasty. Ru was only produced for a period of about 30 years, from 1086 to 1127, when the Song court fled to Hangzhou in the south. These smooth, understated celadons are among the most revered of all Chinese porcelains." 

English collectors Mr and Mrs Alfred Clark acquired this bowl and its companion as a matched pair in the early part of the 20th century. They donated the companion to the British Museum in 1936. Mrs. Clark retained the bowl seen here until the 1970s, when it went up for sale and was purchased by a Japanese private collector. In the recent Hong Kong catalog, Sotheby's listed the piece as Ru from a Japanese Collection.

One of the most vivid memories of my life is the day I first encountered celadon-ware from the Song Dynasty (still then called the Sung Dynasty) at San Francisco's Avery Brundage Collection, housed at that time in a nondescript annex-block tacked onto one side of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Permanently installed at the Brundage was an entire dim room full of of Sung celadon, a hundred variations of jade-toned glazes, each piece a thousand years old, arranged by color in graduated variations. One wall was glass, revealing a bamboo forest outside. In my memory this gallery remained exquisite and unchanging throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s. After that it ceased to exist altogether.

The main de Young building and the Brundage annex were both demolished after the 1989 earthquake. Eventually a much-enlarged de Young Museum occupied the site alone in a flamboyant new building by Herzog & de Meuron. Miles away the Brundage collection became the core of the city's new freestanding Asian Art Museum housed in the former public library, also earthquake-damaged but gutted and successfully converted by Gae Aulenti. Almost everything about the new Asian Art Museum was an indisputable improvement over the old Brundage annex, EXCEPT for the display of Sung (now Song) celadon. In the new building, more sophisticated curatorial practices dictated a display arrangement governed by distinctions of geography and period and purpose. The old Brundage arrangement was, in effect, a decorative rather than a scientific arrangement, and so it had to be thrown out. It was too amateurish, too pretty. And I still miss it.

Formal Tribute

Great Kantō, 1923

It is midday and all over Japan
women are lighting charcoal stoves
to cook rice, a fish perhaps.

A typhoon gathers itself in Noto
and blows south. Water levels fall.
It is unseasonably hot.

In the mountain of northern Honshu
female macaques make alarm calls,
their young stop playing.

The great bronze Buddha at Kamakura
contemplates still
as the earth starts to shake.

In the hills above Hakone my mother hides
under the kitchen table
in a wood and paper house.

SUE LEIGH

from the Times Literary Supplement
16 Septemer 2011


Myself, I think the structure here is admirable, the way the stanzas echo and honor Japanese verse-forms without falling into the trap of pseudo-Japanese diction. And the restrained, minimal reporting makes long-ago emotions more rather than less vivid.

Portals

Another stop on yesterday's walking tour of Golden Gate Park was a famous lakeside monument, reached by crossing stepping stones at the base of this squat and turbulent artificial waterfall. On a curving path halfway around the lake, in surrealistic isolation, the curious visitor will find a white marble edifice, quaintly known as the Portals of the Past.









In the nineteenth century this architectural fragment was the entrance to a rich man's Nob Hill mansion. After all the houses in that part of town were destroyed in the great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 the rich man's widow offloaded this surviving bit onto the park, and in the park it has sat ever since, gently weathering.

Serra

I passed back and forth in front of Mission Dolores on my late-morning laundromat trips, keeping an eye on the unstable sky above San Francisco. It started out looking mild and empty, even faintly radiant, but before long this endless blanket of bruise-colored clouds started moving in and I started wondering if my bags of clean folded sheets and towels and socks and jeans might not get soaked or at least redampened on the walk home. However – to my great relief – the actual rain held off until after I was done.

Tourists take pictures mainly of the tall and florid steel-reinforced molded-concrete faux-baroque Basilica building (new-built after the 1906 Earthquake). For photographic purposes, they tend to ignore the squat little Mission alongside it (which survived the 1906 Earthquake and is in fact the oldest surviving building in the city). The Basilica is basically Disneyland architecture, with the vampire-style figure of missionary Junipero Serra brooding in his niche like some black-hearted wizard. (In 1780 – as cited here – Serra wrote: "that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.")

More Sculpture

Stenciled ceiling in the third floor Indian sculpture galleries at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. The painted beams were recreated from original designs that existed in this space under its first incarnation as the San Francisco Public Library. After the 1989 earthquake the building was declared uninhabitable. The public library eventually got a new building next door. The Asian Art Museum raised $160 million in contributions to restore this building and create the gorgeous museum we now have and in the process the architect, Gae Aulenti, took care to respect and commemorate the building's origins.

Chinese stone lion supporting the throne of a divinity.

Southeast Asian figure protected by remarkably friendly-looking cobras.

Ganesha, from India, enjoying the diffused San Francisco daylight at the top of the steel and glass escalator extension Aulenti introduced.

Gandhara statue from Northern India, with European-looking features. There has been speculation that the conquests of Alexander the Great, which reached to India, may have influenced this school.

Carved-stone burial vessel from the Philippines. One of my Filipino friends laments that this art object is one  of the few from the Philippines to be seen at the museum. He dislikes this burial vessel, says it is crude, and wishes it had more of the polish of Japanese art. We have had this discussion about six times, and I always express the opinion that this powerful presence carved with rough tools in rough stone is definitely the one single work of art that Picasso would have liked above everything else at the Asian Art Museum. My friend remains unconvinced.

Asian Art Museum

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, freshly conceived inside an old shell by Italian architect Gae Aulenti. 

Ceramic Survivors

This choice collection of ceramic creatures and objects dates to the 1980s, all made by one pair of hands belonging to a a girl born in 1976 who spent her entire childhood making small objects in three dimensions. She could not be stopped – and of course no one wanted to stop her. The garage at her mother's house today overflows with creative relics from that busy childhood. Even though many of the more fragile paper constructions disintegrated long ago, these glazed-and-fired pieces remain pristine. For 20 years and more they have been the last items I would pack when leaving an old place and the first to unpack in a new place. The shelf they sit on now sits under the window that lights the sewing table. It is a tall old sash window, uncurtained. And out the window at mid-summer, like now, all you see is birch leaves. In the winter it is birch twigs.

Back Row: Elephant, Dragon, Ocean Wave

Center: Salt & Pepper Shakers Masquerading as Lemons

Front: Jade on Ceramic Stand, Spotted Dog, Square Bowl with Crystal Ball