Overheard at First Saturday

In the quite literally mind-bending Devorah Sperber exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, in front of "After Picasso (Gertrude Stein)." Dramatis personæ: two older women, part of the First Saturday crowd.

Woman #1: Do you think she made that herself?
Woman #2: The artist?
Woman #1: Gertrude Stein.
Woman #2: (a bit nonplussed) No, that's not... Anyway, isn't she dead?
Woman #1: That doesn't mean she couldn't have made this.

At this point, I had to walk away.

In my almost-nonexistent standing as a Stein Expert, or at least a person who has read more Gertrude Stein than most, I think she would like the piece, as long as she saw it as a celebration of Picasso rather than a critique of him. I don't think the work necessarily takes a stand on Picasso either way. But I do that that Sperber's use of spools of sewing thread, the tools of a feminized craft, to revisit masterworks of the western art canon is a form of feminist critique about a billion times subtler and more interesting than most of what I saw in the Global Feminisms exhibit, which felt almost unbearably obvious and dated. (The Kara Walker wall being a notable exception - I always forget how tremendous her work is in person. Remind me next time, will you?)

Comments

[metaphorical]

Thanks for this because, as my mother would phrase it, I don't have enough to do without going to Brooklyn. (Now that I think about it, she might have said "schlepping.")

[Vicki]

Michele, I don't have your e-mail address! Paul and I will be in NYC Friday and we'd like to get some of the old gang together for dinner. (Angus and Casey for sure, other denizens of the Big Apple, I know not who.) Anyway, if you're a possible, send me an e-mail address and I'll include you in the Ccs! I'm still at vjrnts at xcski dot com.