Author Archives: Linnea

Maine Interlude

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Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn’t know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two, and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand
And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung;
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it’s quite glorious.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock

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I stood in line the next to last day that Christian Marclay’s The Clock was screening at Lincoln Center, and I really lucked out. The line was only 2 and half hours. My friend from Georgia was suitably impressed by the lengths New Yorkers will go to for an experiential art film.

The film consists of thousands of spliced clips from cinema, put together so that each minute is filled with references to that minute, with clocks and watches, which is then played on that minute of the day, in a 24-hour cycle. The clips were largely English and French films, old black and white, last year’s blockbusters, and some b-cinema with a few Asian or Swedish film clips thrown in.

Remarkably, what ought to have been a disjointed, jarring experience by the very nature of it proceeded with some degree of flow and linearity, largely owing to the great sounds transitions, which were carefully managed. This makes sense; the person ahead of me in line shared some of the artist’s early sound work in the 80s. He spliced mechanically rather than digitally then.

I saw 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, always hyperaware of the time. The clips made me wonder “Is this what people do a 6:30? Miss trains? And do they eat soup at 8 o’clock? Is this life?” I enjoyed recognizing the clips. Immediately one knows so much even in never-before-seen clips–who the protagonist is, roughly when it was filmed, the mood of the piece. It’s remarkable and would create a magnifiscent time capsule for someone to discover in 1,000 years, so much of our common consciousness is bound up in it.

I enjoyed, or rather disenjoyed, the continual interruption of the narrative, which would begin to drag you in only to end. It harasses the viewer with his status as a viewer, never letting him forget what and where he is. Or, of course, when it is.

And naturally everything you can think to say about the nature or passage of time is relevant to this piece which makes you hyperaware of the passage of time as you live it.

Also, see twitter for a variety of bad or better puns and jokes on the meta-ness of having to wait for hours to see this film.

Ken Price’s “naturally erotic forms”

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Clay sculpture glazed or painted in a melange of color. While they may be “naturally erotic forms,” they remain firmly abstract. I found the colors of the speckled surface and the undulating curves much more playful and visually interesting than his flat drawings and prints on the wall.
The marbled surface of this reminds me ancient Roman pottery, but the colors are closer to neon and the material effect plasticy. This surreal disconnect and the lumpy shapes creates a disquieting secondary reaction to what seems innocent enough at first glance.