Plenty of Nothing

Cow Birth

Whenever we're in Toronto we like to get to the Egyptology section of the Royal Ontario Museum and have a look at this unusually true to life carving from the Middle Kingdom.

Pine Tree by Nukina Kaioku

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, in British Columbia, has a large searchable online collection of art images, including a fine collection of Japanese art. I've only just learned about the place by coming across a mention of it in Joan Stanley-Baker's volume Japanese Art in the black-spined Thames & Hudson World of Art series. She was once Curator there.

Pines have been represented in Japanese art since the beginning. They are strongly identified with winter, and their gnarliness and individuality appeal to the skills of the ink painter/calligrapher. I've liked their company ever since I first lived amongst them on Pine Ridge in Kingston, Nova Scotia. D

About Nukina Kaioku.

Hockey Halls of Fame

The old Hockey Hall of Fame (1962-2005) on the CNE grounds in Toronto. Source: Toronto Modern.

British Columbia Hockey Hall of Fame, Penticton.

Das Eishockeymuseum und die Hall of Fame Deutschland, Augsburg, Germany.

Finnish Hockey Hall of Fame, Tampere, Finland.

Hockey Hall of Fame, Toronto, Ontario.

International Hockey Hall of Fame, Kingston, Ontario.

Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Newfoundland and Labrador Hockey Hall of Fame, Corner Brook.

The Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame will open in Swift Current this year.

Slovak Hockey Hall of Fame, Bratislava, Slovakia.

Sweden is just getting around to setting up a Hockey Hall of Fame.

US Hockey Hall of Fame, Eveleth, Minnesota.

Windsor Hockey Heritage Centre, Haliburton House, Nova Scotia.

Gimli, 1935

The Pavilion Museum in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg has a good collection of Walter J. Phillips' series of colour woodcuts depicting scenes from Gimli, Manitoba, in the 1930s. For a Depression Era town it's quite a charming little place. I think I like the one above best because it appears that Olive Oyl has taken up residence in the house on the right. D

DDR Museum

 

If in Berlin, don't hesitate to visit the DDR Museum. Dedicated to recreating the history and culture of the late German Democratic Republic, it might also be the institution most enthusiastically preserving the material culture of the 1970s.

Victoria and Albert Silk Designs

The author of Spitalfields Life has accomplished something Heather has always wanted to do -- go to the textile department of the Victoria and Albert museum and root around in the design books. These drawings were made in the year 1741/2.

For my money Spitalfields Life is everything a weblog should aspire to be. The writing is original, humane, humble, curious and local. The author posts daily about some aspect of life in his neighbourhood, and has committed to do so for ten thousand posts, or until 2037. By returning constantly to the particular, he is building up a picture of the universal. And after only a year and a half it is already a feast.

"Entartete Kunst" im Bombenschutt

If you're in Berlin head over to the newly reopened Neues Museum and check out the exhibition "Entartete Kunst" im Bombenschutt (Degenerate Art in the Bomb Debris). On display are early 20th-century sculptures that were recently excavated from the site of a bombed-out house in Berlin and have been identified as pieces from the Nazi's 1937 "Entartete Kunst" exhibition. Before it too was blown up in the war, the Neues Museum was the German state's repository of Egyptian and prehistoric art, the sort of artifacts that inspired the pieces in this show, so the exhibition has meaning on a number of levels. (Reuters photo.)

Energia Museum

If you ever secretly hankered for a giant garage full of vintage Soviet spacecraft, this photographic tour of the Energia Museum in Moscow is for you.  The place has replicas of all the gear from Sputnik to Kliper, plus a damned fine collection of charred reentry vehicles.  Pictured here are the Zond 5 and Soyuz 3 descent modules.  Zond 5, which flew 40 years ago this September, was the first vehicle to carry earth creatures to the moon and return them safely, three months before Apollo 8.  It's delightfully appropriate that the turtles won the race to the moon in one of these shells.  Douglas

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal

This enormous encrustation might be the most photographed site in Toronto right now.  I like it.  A lot of post-modern add-ons come across as abuses of the original building, but this one grows from the Royal Ontario Museum as if the stone building were its rock base.  It makes me think that the geology section has experienced sudden success.

Douglas

The Underside

It was a slow week for reading around here and several books went back to the library unfinished. From the portion I read, I’d say Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls Fat and Thin covers similar ground as Veronica in its exploration of two unlikely friends. The reworking of similar characters was part of why I wanted to read it. I may borrow it again when I’m in the mood to put up with the Ayn Rand character that drives the early parts of the plot.

The most interesting thing I did finish was Gather Beneath the Banner, a catalogue from a 1999 Textile Museum. The catalog is strong on the images; high-level on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and oddly light on the details of the construction of the banners. Not a single photo of the back of a banner. (Why, yes, I have made security guards nervous by trying to peep around at the backings of tapestries. Looking very closely is not touching.)

While my great-grandmother belonged to a temperance society (somewhere around here I have her pledge card), it’s unlikely that I’d ever pass muster. Even so, I’m curious about the contradictions at the heart of the nineteenth-century WCTU: I’d like to better understand how its members sustained the contradiction between arguments for equality when it came to female suffrage and arguments of difference with when it came to race and eugenics.

(Note to self: some research possibilities identified here.)

(Another note to self: wonder if there’s a text out there somewhere that talks about the way politics and textiles intersect in public spaces (banners, expedition flags, badges). Must be. )