Culturebox

We took Lefty up on his suggestion to visit the ICP, where we caught the Stephen Shore exhibit.

$12 seemed a little steep for a ticket but it was good stuff—in the aforementioned road trip journal, he recorded the TV shows he watched every night. Some titles are still familiar (60 Minutes), but others are deeply mysterious: What was, e.g., Room 222?

Also it made us start taking a lot of pictures—here is a skateboarder about to jump off some steps and narrowly avoid passersby on the sidewalk!

This reminded us of Little Children, how Patrick Wilson's character gets hypnotized en route to the library by the teens skateboarding. He had a very dopey look on his face but now we understand why!

* * *

It was a good day for gallery hopping as well—I really wanted to see Andy Goldsworthy's White Walls, which was ending its run. In my latest Astral Weeks column, I mention the reference to Goldsworthy in Kim Stanley Robinson's climate-change fiction Sixty Days and Counting. It didn't occur to me that White Walls in particular could be seen as a representation of the destruction of the polar ice sheets until reading Jerry Saltz's description in New York.


That's enough culture for today.

Endings

To continue with today's sermon: I just read, in the current Artforum (Summer 2007), Lynne Tillman's piece on Stephen Shore's 1973 roadtrip journal/artwork, in which he just entered the facts of the trip—photos with brief descriptions, credit card receipts, meals, etc.

More curious than Shore's goal of an objective diary is his last entry on the last page.

AUG 11 1973
MIL[E]AGE: 8268
BREAKFAST: GABRIELLE'S PANCAKE HOUSE,

Shore stopped after a comma. He stopped midthought. He just gave it up. [...] [H]is abruptness or falling away, his refusal to follow his routine to the last, is a mystery that recasts the entire project.

This most tentative of conclusions reminded me of Henry Darger's journal, which ended with "What will it be?—" "Darger's terminal dash now seems fraught with drama—as if he knew, all along, that his time would come," wrote someone in the PTSNBN.