New York City, Chaos & Classicism.
November 2, 2010
It’s Nov 2nd, 2010, and I am sitting in my old Brooklyn apartment which I once lived in a little over ten years ago. It’s a strange feeling – the architecture of the space is exactly the same, my old house mate Adam is also still living here, but of course nothing remains static. The truth is, the suburb of Clinton Hill Brooklyn is now gentrified. As a 20-year-old student, I hated the fact the my neighborhood was borderline ghetto and now I am so happy to see it’s development the gourmet restaurants and trendy bars, but more importantly to feel the earth here again, albeit as a visitor.
This has been my third visit to New York city since relocating back to Melbourne. Every time I come here, I am reminded that New York is a city forever changing, constantly moving onwards and upwards. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to check out the current Guggenheim exhibition Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936. This show was truly fascinating for its sense of other worldly struggle and ideals. A complex exhibition both surveying the political origins of the period and its obsession with geometric abstraction but also the return to classicism as a of means for sanity, post World War One. I walked away from the exhibition with a sense of heroic humanity, and a healthy apreciation for art from the 1920′s & 30′s fuller than what I could have imagined… in particular a new-found love for the art of Balthus. (See “The Street”)
After the show I took a leisurely stroll down Central Park. You can never forget the bumpy cobble stones and watching the multi-colored leaves on the ground I remember what a stranger said to me once as a young man, ‘you haven’t lived until you see New York in the fall,’ – he was a wise man.
