Lunar Follies

ALPS

Terrifying photographs, drawings, and poor collages of “Old Geordy Sime,” one of his era’s most famous pipers, alternate with miniature reproductions of the Alard Stradivarius, the installation, a word nicely borrowed from the Persian (like “peach”), creating a kind of frieze that dominates the small and warmly claustrophobic room. The title of this particular installation is “Welsh Harps,” an oblique hommage to Sime. The artist’s irrepressible sense of humor is everywhere apparent here. The portrayed women defend their actualities in no uncertain terms, here on the cutting edge. “They’ll no longer take ‘no’ for an answer,” would seem to be the essential rubric under which deft revolutions occur; and then there is “neon is their middle name,” another call to arms. The word “cunt” may not, of course, be used, save in the correct, life-affirming way. Indian drums are scattered about, if drums can ever be “scattered.” Yet scattered they joyously are, in the ineluctable ways of craft, and craft is all, when you get right down to it. It’s time that artists who aren’t pulling their own weight were given the bum’s rush. “The Bum’s Rush” is, fortuitously, the overall title of the whole exhibit. Over on the other wall is the interior profile of an English church organ, which completes the diorama — calling capitalism, once more, to account. Dioramas, as presented by certain fabled buildings at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, were sublimely vulgar and made kitsch into the “art of our time.” “At will’s Musical Establishment” was first seen in the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, but was withheld from this particular show by those few who know. A wild twangling daily issues forth from all corners of the “space”: at one, three, and five P.M. “Ring dem bells!” is the wonted cry from the poets who get five free tickets each day, starting at noon. (This is not the Director’s doing!) Poets are likely to do just about anything for a buck, as they say, or for publication in Zing, Edelweiss Review, Insomnia News, Hurdygurdy, Blotto, and The Tribes. “Their hurts healed for a few dollars” or two contributor’s copies. On Tuesdays, senior citizens are admitted at half-price, God love them.