WHEN COOL BUILDINGS AREN’T ENOUGH
Marcel Breuer’s epic/brutal 1971 addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
A Midwestern architectural leader since the Daniel Burnham Group Plan and the Terminal Tower, Cleveland has done an excellent job of integrating contemporary buildings into its cityscape as well as anywhere in the U.S. besides mega- and mega-rich metros. It’s particularly strong around the Euclid corridor and University Circle: the additions to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the new buildings at the Cleveland Clinic are perhaps the best examples; Case Western also has a Gehry if you prefer that sort of thing.
If you prefer that sort of thing.
The dispiriting thing for architecture buffs is that this hasn’t stopped the city’s depopulation—and to be honest, even as someone who hates driving, I’d find it easier to live in Columbus, where nobody remembers what a train is. Part of this is planning errors: the only public transport going along Euclid remains a bus (albeit a pretty good BRT by America’s low standards) when it really should’ve got the rail money that went to the failed Waterfront Line. But of course legitimate consumer preferences, along with yes acismray, have been much more important factors. Perhaps if, and yes this is a big perhaps if, Cleveland becomes the high-speed rail hub its location implies it should be, Cleveland will have the demand to develop the eerily empty patches along its transit corridors.
EXPRESSIONISM AND MEANING
Catharine Warren, Untitled (1979)
Currently at the Cincinnati Art Museum is American Painting: The Eighties Revisited, a re-mounting of the Grey Art Gallery’s allegedly seminal 1979 NYC exhibition of abstract art. It would be hard to guess a precise date for the original show from the mostly expressionist-leaning works presented, but it’s easy to guess that it isn’t right now even if one doesn’t do the math on the demographics of the painters from the impossibility of gleaning any social meaning from almost all of the works. I don’t think such meaning is necessary for any artist—though I’m all for trying to change the culture, even if your medium has the worst possible audience of aesthetes and plutocrats—it’s just hard to imagine a similarly apolitical exhibition happening today without prompting a dozen open letters against the curator, four or five of which might be justified.
Anselm Kiefer, Monsalvat (1996)
Obscuring of social meaning might help sometimes, though. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum each have a major work by major artist/edgelord Anselm Kiefer. Without Kiefer dressing up in a Wehrmacht uniform and yelling “ALL MY ART IS ABOUT HOW THE NAZIS WERE BAD” at you, it’s easier to appreciate his impasto and his outstanding composition sense. And then you might look at “Lot’s Wife” and find yourself haunted by the railroad tracks vanishing into oblivion. Or you might see the name “Parsifal” scrawled over Monsalvat and lament that Wagner didn’t have a fjucking editor.
CROCKERY
Ru(?) tripod, Cincinnati Art Museum (late 11th/early 12th Century.) It’s a lot more glowy in the museum’s picture.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is justly renowned for its holdings from the crucial 1860-1930 period (coinciding with Cleveland’s run as a top tier economic engine, offset by 30 years), including maybe the finest Picasso cluster outside of New York. The Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection is smaller, but it has the most important Gainsborough in the U.S. besides Blue Boy and a deep Dutch room. Yet perhaps most remarkable from a global perspective is that these are two of four American museums to claim a specimen of Ru ware. Since I have no specialist knowledge, the only reason I have to doubt the authenticity of Cincinnati’s tripod is that it seems too good to be true: a relatively large vessel (seven inches in diameter) in excellent condition. Cleveland’s washer, in contrast, is a more modest five inches, with a small black spot on its surface. Yet this imperfection, along with the crazing in the glaze, accentuates the beauty, fragility, and humanity of the piece. Cleveland also has examples from most of the other great Song kilns, so if you’re not going to make it to Asia (or to the heavyweight champ of colonialism, the British Museum) anytime soon, it’s as good a place as any to learn.
Fujino Sachiko, Interconnection 15-11
Both museums also display contemporary East Asian ceramics, with my favorite piece Fujino Sachiko’s Interconnection 15-11 in Cincinnati. The way that it turns in on itself evokes visible nature, and also the hidden nature of polypeptides and protein folding. There’s lots more here, though the work doesn’t have the same impact on a computer screen.
I ALSO WENT TO THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME
It was fine, I guess.
CONSUMABLES
Spicy at Hoyo’s means spicy, not Midwestern spicy.
Here are some things I ate or drank that were good.
North Market, Columbus. Every city needs its public food market for the guidebooks; the old school ones often remain decrepit while the ones with new money poured in often feel touristy-tacky. Columbus’s downtown North Market strikes a reasonable balance: bougie-leaning, but with some reflection of the diversity of the city that’s accessible without being watered down too much. I headed straight for Hoyo’s Kitchen for a Somali beef bowl; my ignorant self pegs the cuisine as spicier Ethiopian, with rice as an alternative if you don’t want to down a bunch of injera. No goat that day, so I’ll have to return on a weekend. For the liberal donor class, there’s also a Jeni’s. I was struck by how feminized their presentation was: you’d never see so many pink flavors at Humphry Slocombe. Whatever, moms and grandmas deserve Frosé all day regardless of whether it’s time for them to hand over power to a younger generation.
So Gong Dong Tofu and Korean BBQ, Columbus. Columbus likely has the best food scene in the state simply because it has the most immigration, and Northwest Columbus in particular has no shortage of interesting-looking ethnic restaurants in strip malls. SGD Tofu, part of a chain that has outposts in the New York, Chicago, and Boston burbs, is notable for banchan that all have distinctive tastes: the kimchi is spicy in a different way from the zucchini slices. And the tofu.
Rising Star Coffee Roasters, Cleveland. I was staying in the Arcade, so I went to the one there a couple of times; both cappuccino and brewed Sumatran compared favorably to the median for big city Third Wave flagships.
Goat Soup & Whiskey, Put-in-Bay. Much respect to a place that bothers to fry its perch sensitively for the bachelor, bachelorette, and divorcée parties stopping by via golf cart for lunch and several drinks.
BYE HARVEY
The Harvey Pekar desk at the Cleveland Heights Library.