[Photographs, bibelots, postcards, blotters, bricks, posters, mugs, lanterns, pens, pencils, letter openers, baseball caps, tents, sweatshirts, and genuine mahogany veneer wall plaques with gold-leaf trim that bear the likenesses of Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Barbra Streisand, Rimbaud, Einstein, and Leonard Bernstein chatting with Woody Allen will be on sale in the lobby and in selected fine-foods markets throughout Cincinnati, and in midwestern states to be named.]
PLATO
“The enormity of the old tableau’s collapse cannot prepare us for that which will happen sometime next month.” So reads the entire text. The nicely designed placard informs us of other “things to come” as well, including the imminent arrival of Carter the Great, the World’s Weird Wonderful Wizard. The visitors, who may purchase logo ties and sweatshirts, as well as souvenir cups and other items that would seem to be nameless, are part of the missing tableau. Words not only make statements, but when tossed about on the page, make more, much more, than mere statements. Observe these words and their potential for scattering. One is tempted to inquire, and be done with it at last, “performance art?” But we will never, it appears, be done with that. There is one word in the corner of the placard, just blinking on, with the sense of total aliveness that it may soon have! (Scissors are available at the logo desk.)These words make a statement, of that there can be little doubt; oh, not the usual stale conceptualizations, but the usual stale reconceptualizations, or “the ticket.” Two of them, as a matter of fact, are at the far edge of another placard, over there. Dislodged from the shackles of the diachronic, if “dislodged” is the word, or, for that matter, a word, the letters may be readjusted to suggest, as they are currently being readjusted to suggest, up there near the ceiling, or what we have agreed to call the “ceiling,” as the glittering new millennium lurches into being: 1937: GERMANY’S FESTIVAL YEAR. It’s just a little too close, however, to the air duct, to be wholly satisfactory. And yet, and yet: the plain, functional duct seems, quite marvelously, to be.
POSIDONIUS
Maximus Valerius Posidonius, all of whose writings have been lost, yet whose theories of solar vital forces and rock-removal as a methodology for the prediction of the movements of large bodies of infantry, prefigured the contemporary strategies concerning the deployment of conscripted troops as assistants of various types in the preparation and serving of food, i.e., hot meals, and the maintenance of dining areas within the larger system of the order of battle, is thought to have conceived the notion of cosmic sympathy, and the employment of certain elements of post-Attic Stoicism, to hoist petards and launch Greek fire, shine Phoenician brass, and find the direction whence come and whither go sunbeams during extended thunderstorms, so as to better answer the questions of often surly travelers, stuffed, even bloated, with pita bread and roast lamb — at that time (ca. 94 BC) the only food available in the vast wastes of a particularly arid Syria (known, at that time, as “the Congo”) — is also thought to have taught his students the secrets of grinding eggshells for use as the basic component of a particularly fine spackle, corn flakes, ink, and heroin, secrets improbably locked into number theory and its attentions to the special properties of the integers, e.g.: unique factorization, primes, equations with integer coefficients, (biophantine equations), and congruences; and although earlier thinkers (Galen, Dombrowski, Galento, Fitts-Couggh, Gavilan) laid the groundwork for such discoveries with their invention of algebra, Posidonius’s work has about it a certain furtive elegance, an elegance much apparent in the exhibition of his astonishing solar-storm drypoints. The exhibition has, unfortunately, unexpectedly and abruptly closed, and its contents subsequently lost or destroyed.
PTOLEMAEUS
The histrionic and lyric firmament — brilliantly spangled with tinsel stars — hangs above the rose-tinted photo-collage of scenes from the Cincinnati Opera Festival’s celebrated production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. A letter from Jacques Offenbach, attesting to his fondness for Gay’s masterpiece, is quite beautifully yet simply framed in gentian eucalyptus, a wood known for its lustrous qualities and astonishing durability. Jenny Lind sang the wood’s praises in a lost aria from I Puritani, an unjustly neglected operetta by Anna Bolena, performed, for the first and only time, for Henry Ford, Ed Rafferty, and Grover Cleveland Alexander. Scenes from La Gioconda, digitally altered to include portrayals of Brünnhilde in unnatural congress with her stallion, Fritz, temper the dazzling (to some almost painfully so) light from the glowing firmament. Although some Christian Fundamentalist visitors are distressed, even appalled, by the activities of the Wagnerian heroine and her beloved charger, others — happily, the great majority — know that art’s function is to disturb, to question, to disgust, to bore, to nauseate, to make what General Tod Burlingame, Air Force, Retired, called “the big green.” The classic American diner booth, ca. 1949, that asserts its vinyl presence within a shallow alcove at a sudden turning of the wall, is flooded with a penetratingly vulgar orange light, and invites a bittersweet nostalgia in its contrast with the shifting of the erotic tableaux of the La Gioconda display. The whole diner “thing” permits one to recall a purer, more innocent era: of Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, Monte Cassino, Tarawa, Dresden, Hiroshima, and, of course, Auschwitz—“the good old days,” as they are wistfully called. The refreshments — cheeseburgers, French fries, bow ties, Mae Wests, and weak coffee — that crowd the formica-topped table of the diner booth are marvelously crafted of high-impact plastic, and look quite real. At precisely eighteen minutes past the hour, every hour, the pop hit made famous by Andy Warhol and his “gang,” “Bobino Josephine,” in the Boston Pops-Carly Simon version, is piped into the room, an aural complement to the “spectacle” of late-night variety show outtakes. Media critics, as well as their highbrow art-critic cousins, characterize the whole presentation as a profound example of “people’s art.”
PURBACH
New Departures, New Arrivals, Old Masters