Duane had parked his car under a tree in Brooklyn (imagine that) and apparently pigeons like that tree so his car was covered with bird do do when we woke up. Fortunately he lives around the corner from Hollywood Lube & Wash, a 24 hour joint, so we took the car over and had them give it a bath. Chores attended to, we walked to the Ft. Hamilton subway stop and rode into lower Manhattan to gallery hop in Chelsea.
We spotted Bill Viola’s name on the door of a building on 26th Street and popped into a series of dark rooms filled with his l”Bodies of Light” videos. Our next stop was the David Hockney show of big bold paintings at Pace Wildenstein on 25th Street. There was a quote from Hockney on the wall that read, “I have taken to thinking of these recent canvases as figure paintings . . . you, the viewer, are the figure in them. If I was the figure in these paintings I would leave.
We continued to wander and found all sorts of fun stuff like the Warhol Polaroids of sports figures and a beautiful Bruce Davidson photo show. Before leaving Rochester, Brian Peterson had recommended a show by “Wallace Berman”, a friend of his Brian’s from his San Francisco days, so we tracked that show down. As luck would have it John Zorn, who had recorded a sound track to Berman’s 8 mm films was performing live in the gallery with Trevor Dunn bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums. The loose limbed Wollensen played with Bill Frisell at last years Jazz Fest. The film was projected on one of the gallery’s walls and the band set up facing the wall so they could play to the film. NY’s first couple, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, were seated in the front row.
We stopped at a green grocers on the way back and picked up a few things for as Duane termed it a “more hippy than Chinese” vegetable dish at Duane’s table and watched Duane’s and Howard Thompson‘s Suicide footage from Detich Galley in 02/02/02.
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Lou and Laurie appear rapt….in something….somewhere else…….