Ian across America
Posted inArt

Ghosts of Disaster in New Orleans

by Ian Epstein

New Orleans — The captain’s flight-deck announcement that we were now making our final descent towards New Orleans jolted me from a very uneasy sleep. The three-hour flight was my first prolonged opportunity to get prolonged (i.e. 3-hours rest) after a late night train ride, to a later night Long Island Railroad Road ride, to a crack-of-dawn flight departure from the 24-hour nightmare microcity that is New York’s JFK airport.

Confused and groggy I peered out the window as we began our descent. With eyes as bleary as my thoughts, I decided that I was surveying Gulf waters from some 25,000 feet. What are those dark streaks? I thought. Is that oil? Oh my god, that’s oil. There’s still oil everywhere. Holy shit. Oh no. They ruined the Gulf.

Posted inArt

The Last Boom Palace of the Second Gilded Age: Las Vegas & Libeskind

by Ian Epstein

Daniel Libeskind, until recently, was one of the high-end architect’s of choice for war museums and somber memorials. Jagged, clean-faced metal-clad shapes torn by sharp little windows characterized a style that took trauma and produced memorial. The style was similar to Frank Gehry, but no curves to suggest the wry, playful smile of decadence at work — something I always see just beyond the magnificent and smooth sheet steel smiles of Gehry’s structures. And no 90 degree angles, either; everything is crooked, everything is asymmetrical, everything is torqued into the misshapen fragments that we piece together in turmoil to remember the parts of the past that are not pleasant. A friend who lives in Las Vegas said of the mall Libeskind designed for Las Vegas’s CityCenter: “I can never figure out how to walk around that building.”

Posted inArt

Wild Things Got Nothin’ on Matta (or Martin Renteria)

by Ian Epstein

Cambridge, MA — I set out from my couch of the moment for some coffee since I am one of those murmuring morning people, the kind who requires a habit and a burnt tongue to prove to myself that I am, in fact, awake. On the short walk down the cramped sidestreets of residential Cambridge, I come face to face with the broad glass windows of Meme Gallery — a storefront space with yellow strings like spokes suspending a purple totemic figure above a basin of water, placed in the middle of the gallery floor. Fabric contortions billowed and oozed along the walls, nightmares leaking through dawn and ceiling tiles, down the gallery walls. Am I awake? What the hell is this?

Posted inArt

Art + Sand = Taxidermy

by Ian Epstein

The similarities between contemporary art and taxidermy are more numerous and more humorous than I realized, and thanks to a slightly too smart, vaguely discomforting show called Whitetail Deer, A to Z by Rebecca Lieberman at Anthony Greaney Gallery in Boston this similarity has been brought to my attention in great depth and detail.

Posted inArt

Accidentally Forget your Weldon Kees?

by Ian Epstein

Cambridge, MA — The first thing I wanted to see, for reasons that will become clear in a few days, was a Walter Gropius building. Instead, the first thing I came across was the most talented Nebraskan you’ve never heard of.

I passed Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge on my way to look at an old Walter Gropius building, and the name, taken from a Borges story I’ve read and love, drew me in.

Posted inArt

Hyperallergic Escapes New York, Takes to the Clouds!

by Ian Epstein

From mid September through early October, I’ll be on an art-themed Odyssey across the United States in an attempt to be sensitive to different scenes from around the country and, of course, their discontents. I’ll bounce from JFK to ORD, LAX to MSY, SLC to IAD, SFO and beyond — as long as the “beyond” falls within the boundaries of the jetBlue network (thanks to my monthly unlimited metrocard to the sky).