street haunting

Couples coupling, hands groping, bodies in various states of undress. On benches, behind bushes, tangled and horizontal on the grass. I would have believed it on blind faith, sure, but Kohei Yoshiyuki's etheral black-and-whites certainly remove any doubt about the lively night scene of various Tokyo parks in the 1970s. Allegedly, after a gallery show in 1979, Yoshiyuki destroyed most of the photos and disappeared. (The plot thickens: supposedly Kohei Yoshiyuki is a pseudonym.) A first-rate sleuth at Yossi Milo gallery in Chelsea managed to track down the elusive artist and convince him to make a new set of prints. It's the first time these photographs have been publicly shown since disco died.

Bemused, dreamy-eyed, nostalgic for a decade in the way only someone who's never lived through it can be. Walking East on W. 25th Street, another instance of an unreal reality. Framed within the rolled-up gate of a corrugated steel facade, there's a man in an off-white lounge lizard's suit, playing a candy-apple red electric guitar, crooning that part of a song that isn't quite words but always builds up to something... He is standing on dirt, on a narrow lot, underneath a rusted section of the future-fab highline park, accompanied by a mic and an amp, a spotlight, and a theatrical grouping of forlorn-looking leafless tree props. A small sign says that he's an Icelandic performance artist, and he's going to play the same riffs in the same spotlight for six straight hours a day, ten days in a row. It's a project by CCS Bard, Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies (and Art in Contemporary Culture).

English Lit classes brainwashed me forever: I see forest, actual or allegorical, any shape or size—hell, you could say I see trees and I have flashbacks to scenes from King Lear, Walden, the Scarlet Letter. But there is something to it, the forest being a place apart from a society of likeness, apart from conventional rules, apart from judging, peering eyes. To find two such escapes in the middle of Manhattan yesterday felt good because I, for one, need to disappear sometimes and it's not easy here.

Post Script: I confess, I procrastinate. Meaning that the Yoshiyuki exhibit has closed and Kjartansson's sun has set. I wound down my day at a screening of Helvetica. It's an amazing documentary with the premise of being about a font but is really about the arc of graphic design ideology over the last fifty years (that I also blogged about in March). If you runrushgo!, you'll probably still be able to catch Helvetica at the IFC Center—although it's been there long enough that it's due to disappear any day.