Matthew’s company car, a hybrid, lost its charge in Syracuse so our bowling date was cancelled or rather postponed until last night. But the eight lanes at Park View Bowl were all occupied with a women’s league when we got there. The idea contained in the name of a view of the park (Durand Eastman) while you’re bowling is crazy. We had a drink at the bar and I returned Matthew’s “Speaking of Art: Four decades of art in conversation” book. I wanted to show Louise this quote from Nancy Spero, Leon Golub’s wife and one of the artists in the book, but there wasn’t enough light at the bar for her to see it.
“There’s a basic risk in the practice of art itself, in that it’s something that’s not wanted particularly by society. Only a few understand the need for this innocence in a culture, and yet it is the artifact of a culture in the final sense of the word.”
And I thought this one from Ed Ruscha was nice especially because he found common ground between his work and Morandi’s. “One of my favourite artists is Giorgio Morandi, and he painted the same picture for all of his life and did it very well. He fulfilled his destiny without doing any of this pushing into new frontiers. So pushing into a new frontier is not a necessity for any artist. But unless it’s done by someone, things end up at a standstill.”
The night was young so we moved down the road to the Reunion, another bar we had never set foot in. Sea Breeze apparently used to have a small shop that supplied the word with clown shoes and sure enough there was one over the bar. They have a print of Goya’s “Naked Maja” in an ornate frame and a sign that looked vintage but used contemporary jargon. “Wine. How classy people get wasted.” We pumped dollar bills into the juke box and played three games of 8-Ball on the pool table. We were both good and bad.
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