It was moving day, or moving around day, anyway. Traded weeks of keyboard-based work for overhauling the art in our little NYC house. Out with Roe Ethridge’s landscapes (his great show just opened at Andrew Kreps Gallery, so we’ll ALL be seeing more of his work for a while.), Anne Chu’s watercolor landscapes, and Stephen Hendee’s ink/gouache futuristic landscapes (see a theme here?) In with Vern Dawson and Olafur Eliasson (now that winter’s over, it’s safe to put up pictures of Iceland). And the kicker: a Wade Guyton sculpture that has a table-like object as its base. Looks so much like a table, I’m typing at it right now, in fact, until Wade comes to help set up the mirrored plexiglass column element that sits on top.
Since it’s only table-LIKE, I stacked some books and magazines under the leg-LIKE elements to bring it to table height. Here’s the list:
Godel, Escher, Bach; The Invisible Man; the last two issues of Vogue; Air Guitar by Dave Hickey; First They Killed My Father : A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers; Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama; Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell (french version, which is hilarious, btw); Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges; Projects for Prada Part 1 by Rem Koolhaas’ publishing elves; an old Wallpaper*, a new Artforum, a Vanity Fair, Departures, an old art/text, and a beat-up New Yorker.
Then I looked at the finished piles, and I was reminded of the stylists at “shelter magazines” who artfully arrange erudite-seeming/trend-driven book spines for photoshoots (Remember that summer when everyone seemed to have Infinite Jest on his/her coffee table?). I couldn’t find any articles about it, meaning 1) such magazine machinations may be an urban myth (unlikely), 2) I’m not hip to the right stylist-related search terms, or 3)people in the shelter magazine world don’t use the internet for self-critique, just for hookin’ up. I did find this excerpt from Marjorie Garber’s Sex and Real Estate, which talks about the business of “propping” a for-sale house (using wood fires, apple pies, aromatherapy, flowers, etc.) to hit the prospective buyer’s “romantic soft spot.”
So what can we glean from our collection of titles? Is it the display window of my soul? I see two breakdowns: