Now the other thing I came away with was how much easier the pieces are to read in person. The texts tend to get reduced to illegibility and thus become decorative in reproduction… Like how cats in the fourties must have seen Japanese and Chinese calligraphy as they set it afire and shot it full of holes and internalized it on the road to victory and Ab Ex, but the guy had a great command of words. They should be read. The third crown is sculpture. I started to think about how important sculpture is to the work. Some are really great objects in the manner that Rauchenberg’s combines sort of exist between painting and sculpture (or art and reality)… I got the sense that samo was first recreating a wall and then painting on it, in order to have the same sort of bang as his on site grafitti poetry had. They become landscape fetishes.



Now the other thing I’v been thinking about is the sort of language of Brooklyn: Brooklynese. It is famed in hollywood movies… that sort of patois, but it occured to me that that patois is really Italian, Irish, Jewish and there is this new Brooklyn growing around me that includes Samo’s Hatian patois and the afro-carribean and Hispanic, and Sountern Black, and now the Chinese and Vietnamese. What will Brooklyn sound like in fifty years? This is becoming important as the more improv’s i do for Willoughby, Clark starts to sound real Brooklyn street…. maybe he should sound Chinese?



As you can see, Brooklyn already tends to look pretty Chinese on a good day.

Posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 1:21 pm.
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