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When I go to Kansas City, I usually try to spend some time at the Kemper and Nelson-Atkins museums. I think in May I'll make the trip just to see these three shows (and eat at Jerusalem Café).
The Poetics of Space will run from April 10 until March 14, 2010 at the Kemper Museum. The exhibition is titled after Gaston Bachelard's 1958 classic treatise on the perception of space and will feature works by 17 photographers, including some of my favorites such as William Christenberry, Joel Meyerowitz, and Todd Hido.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum will show George Segal: Street Scenes between May 9 and August 2. The life-size sculptures in this traveling exhibit (curated by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art) were inspired by his walks around lower Manhattan. And a collection of street photos by Homer Page, taken when he lived in New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 and 1950, is already on display; the exhibition ends June 7.
My perception may be skewed due to years of research on urban space, psychogeography, maps, and the like, but I do get a sense that there is a renewed interest in images of the city and discussions of city space.
George Segal, Graffiti Wall (1990)
Photo: Donald Lakuta/George and Helen Segal Foundation
New York photographer Helen Levitt died on Sunday at the age of 95. After dropping out of high school, she trained with a commercial photographer. In 1935, she met Henri Cartier-Bresson; she also became friends with Walker Evans and James Agee. Levitt worked as a film director and editor before returning to photography in the late 1950s, when she was one of the first street photographers to focus on color (she switched back to black and white three decades later). The New York Times obituary mentions that she was born with Ménière's Disease; I wonder how that affected her many, many walks in the city.
Untitled photo c. 1942; linked with permission from Encyclopedia Britannica.
About four years ago I had a Eureka moment triggered by frustration with my original dissertation project. I realized that
... my favorite writers make the city one of their subjects
... art, especially photography, to me is at its most fascinating when it deals with city lives, sites, and faces (some of my favorite artists, such as Andy Goldsworthy or Richard Long, notwithstanding)
... I really like densely populated places (if I also get to look at an ocean or a couple of mountains every once in a while)
... I must have walked thousands of miles in cities over the years
... there's no point in spending a lot of time thinking and writing about something I'm not excited about.
Then I wrote an outline for a dissertation on city walking, space, and memory in the novels and non-fiction of Paul Auster, Peter Kurzeck, and Iain Sinclair. I'm almost done with it, and there are about half a dozen new projects I can't wait to start working on.
There's also photography, which started as a by-product of my walks and has turned into my "second hustle," with art shows and sales and a web site.
And there are many notes and thoughts that never found a place in the dissertation. Some of them will go here. I'm going to use this blog to share good stuff I come across and to try out some ideas. I'll keep a list of links to artworks, movies, music, and whatever else has a city/walking/space/psychogeography connection, which includes maps and labyrinths especially.
I'm naming the blog Of Cities, after the excellent DJ Signify album that came out around the time I set it up.
