Utopia 2 (Chairs)

Omar dislikes chairs, doesn’t have any in his place in Havana and generally avoids them as much as he may. His rationale is that they remove us from the ground.

It’s true our lives would be much altered if we eliminated them (and their decadent cousin, the sofa) from our days and nights, and with them a lot of their associative furniture condiments, like side tables and their lamps, etc.

This would be a fundamental remapping of our days: What’s your living room look like without sitting casts? Image result for small richard serraWith what would you replace them? You might finally have room for your own, homemade R. Serra! A sans-chairs world would be a terrific benefit to our flexibility and lower our gravitational centers. People might be more included to make love, also, as presumably we’d already be or close to lying down, a big initial hurdle. It might even increase connection to our base chakras, which we will need for the journey ahead.

Please note, however, we won’t want to deep-six tables, as they are useful surfaces on which to work. Of course Hemingway, who had a place in Havana, wrote standing up, as did Virginia Woolf. I thought I read Rilke did, yet can’t corroborate that. I’ve never written formally in a standing position yet written many poems on the hoof or standing into notebooks or a recording device. It’s got a different dynamic, and I’ve found a more collaborative one relative to any environment in which you may find yourself.

We are thrilled to share that Rosemary Meyer’s estate has launched a website compiling information about her work, exhibitions, publications, and news! Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) was a prolific artist involved in the New York art scene beginning in the late 1960s. Most well-known for her large-scale sculptures using fabric as the primary material, she also created works on paper, artist books, and outdoor installations, exploring themes of temporality, history, and biography. She was also a writer, art critic, and translator. She was initially involved in conceptual art and writing, collaborating with her sister, poet Bernadette Mayer, and ex-husband, Vito Acconci, on the journal 0 TO 9. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first cooperative gallery for women in the U.S. and had one of the earliest shows there. During the 1970s and 1980s, her work was also shown at many New York alternative art spaces, including The Clocktower, Sculpture Center, and Franklin Furnace, and in university galleries throughout the country. In 1982, her translation of the diary of Mannerist artist Jacopo da Pontormo was published along with a catalogue of her work. In 2016, Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn exhibited a selection of Mayer’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first major exhibit of her work in over thirty years, it was reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, and artforum.com. A version of this show was exhibited at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 2017. Her work has also been included in several group exhibitions including at Nichelle Beauchene Gallery, Murray Guy Gallery, and Bridget Donahue. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art acquired some of Mayer’s drawings and artist books from the 1970s. For more information, visit www.rosemarymayer.com #AIRGallery #NewYorkArt #NewYorkArtist #NewYorkArtScene #ArtGallery #ContemporaryArt #Feminism #AIRArchives #ArtArchives #RosemaryMeyer #RosemaryMeyerEstateYet at Bernadette and Phil’s gathering yesterday (the Utopia post yesterday, citing link to its free PDF edition, noting that according its “Utopian Copyright” they all should be ) Marie Warsh, the daughter of Lewis Warsh and Bernadette, read from Utopia a section entitled “UTOPIA CHAIRS,” written by Rosemary Meyer.  As she writes (and Marie read, standing up), “In the last stages of declining capitalism in North American, chairs were often the topic of desirous conversation.”

Attached is the text for you to read (click and expand) silently or aloud lying around with friends—just like utopia!