In Terms Of

Tag: Martin Scorsese

  • Building a Better Beehive

    Ron Breland
    Sacred Geometry and the Architecture of Well-Being
    Tuesday, July 29, 2014
    Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY

    Ron Breland’s dodecahedron beehive at the entrance to the exhibition (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Pioneer Works in Brooklyn hosted a lecture, titled “Sacred Geometry and the Architecture of Well-Being,” by the upstate New York gardener and apiarist Ron Breland in conjunction with The Six-Sided Force, an exhibition of drawings by Louise Despont that take their inspiration from the hexagon of the honeycomb.

    Sporting a white beard, a gray mullet, and the normcore outfit of a high school teacher, Breland clearly had the eccentric polymath look down, and his wide-ranging talk surveyed scientific knowledge and folk wisdom, pragmatic environmentalism and esoteric spiritualism. For over an hour he talked about sacred caves, Greek mythology, and the vesica piscis (the shape of the overlap of two circles in a Venn diagram). Breland also discussed the physics of Ernst Rutherford and Werner Heisenberg, the woman’s face in Henri Matisse’s famous The Large Bathers (1906) in Philadelphia, stories by the humanitarian author Barry Lopez, and the work of the environmental architect Jérôme Sperling. Above all Breland was there to promote the stewardship of bees—not necessarily the production of honey—with the goal of bringing the art of beekeeping to the artistic community.

    Ron Breland speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The shape of a hive is inconsequential to the activity of a bee colony, Breland said. Bees can create homes in dead tree stumps, hang them from tree branches, or build them in the boxy cabinets that humans use for efficient honey harvesting. The nineteenth-century American teacher and pastor Lorenzo L. Langstroth patented a modular hive in 1852, and the form hasn’t changed much since. These hives, in which rows of square frames can be removed, replaced, and manipulated for the ease of commercial honey production, result in a “mechanical relationship to the bees,” he said. “All amazingly logical.”

    Managed bee colonies in the United States, Breland told us, have decreased more than 50 percent since the late 1940s. He blames what scientists call colony collapse disorder on an unchecked military-industrial complex that has manufactured pesticides and fertilizer as well as bombs. He also faults a lack of communication between left- and right-brain worldviews. Breland said that fixing watches, building railroads, and waging war are all right-brain activities, and to illustrate this point he showed a clip from the Martin Scorsese film Hugo (2011), which highlights the importance of both heart and mind. Breland then showed a snippet from a video on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which in the context of the talk exemplified a refined combination of creativity and engineering—minus, of course, the cultural, economic, and political impact of the building. For Breland, this combination of art and science creates a quintessential relationship that a beekeeper needs “to get us out of this mess.”

    Running with the bees (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Many years ago Breland set out to invent a new hive that would reduce environmental stress on bees (when colonies are transported geographically) and to offer a structure for which harvesting honey was not its primary purpose. He had designed six-sided structures to resemble the honeycomb shape, but this direct correspondence didn’t feel right. What about five, since that’s the number of man? Some say the dodecahedron, a complex polyhedron that features twelve flat pentagonal faces, has mystical qualities. The ancient Greeks understood the notion, as this particular geometric figure has been associated with the five Platonic solids.

    So, in the late 1990s, Breland built a hive, which is about six or seven feet tall, that used the dodecahedron form. His creation intentionally resemble the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. Based on photographs of his self-described ecofriendly, sustainable, specialty nursery in West Nyack, New York, Breland has built about a dozen of them. “This hive is not for honey,” he stated. Anne Raver described the results in a 2001 New York Times profile, “In industrial beehives, the bees are regimented: they are given wax cells larger than they would build, and the queen is tricked into laying more eggs. In Mr. Breland’s hive, the bees build their own cells, and the queen moves freely among them.”

    Balancing consciousness with the vesica piscis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Breland articulated humanity purpose as a desire to express love, to understand beautiful, miraculous phenomenon, and to do meaningful work—not simply to chase the bottom line. “In commerce there’s no hope for a remedy,” he warned. While I generally agree, I’d like to see investors help Breland to mass-produce his hive—with quality, sustainable materials, of course—and help to spread them across the country. Perhaps doing so would help alleviate the need for professional apiarists to haul five hundred boxed hives on a flatbed truck around the Southern states, traveling up to 20,000 miles, in order to aid pollination in places where bees are lacking. And besides, these hives look really, really cool.

    Toward the end of his talk Breland brought up the biological concept of the superorganism, which occurs when species such as bees, ants, and termites instinctively delegate responsibilities in order to accomplish a task—the collective transcends the efforts of the individuals. “Some say that is an image for mankind,” he observed.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

  • The Trashy Place Is a Happy Place

    Quijote Talks presents Naomi Fry, “Make Them Choke on It”
    Tuesday, February 25, 2014
    School of Visual Arts, 132 West 21st Street, Sixth Floor, New York

    Naomi Fry

    A recent talk by the Brooklyn-based critic Naomi Fry was as wide ranging—one could even say scattered—as both her cultural interests and her curriculum vitae. “I always have to remind myself that I’m a writer,” she said, reflecting on her roles as a professor who teaches writing at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York University and also as a copy editor for the New York Times. Like many critics Fry must do other things to earn a living, which creates a shaky self-perception. At a lecture for the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in art criticism, she didn’t have a paper to read, just notes, and thus spoke off the cuff for a small crowd of students, alumni, sympathizers, and friends.

    Asked beforehand to talk about her challenges and successes, Fry began by discussing a favorite piece of writing, her contribution to the series “See Something Say Something,” published by the Brooklyn-based journal Paper Monument in 2012. This five-hundred-word essay examined a photograph, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980, of the emerging actor Nicollette Sheridan at age seventeen with her then-boyfriend, the television and pop-music heartthrob Leif Garrett. This “check out my young girlfriend” photo, as Fry called it, “encapsulates everything that’s been interesting to me, ever … ever.” It was quite a surprise to hear this coming from a critic who has published in top art publications like Frieze and Artforum and other important cultural forums, such as the London Review of Books, T Magazine, n+1, and the Comics Journal. In both the essay and the lecture, Fry teased out what intrigued her about the image, which I understood to be celebrities, television, literature, sex, music, interior decorating, and politics. Putting the serious subject matter aside, how did she gravitate toward such vapid and vulgar things?

    An image of Leif Garrett snuggling with Nicollette Sheridan, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980 (photograph © Brad Elterman)

    Born in Israel to left-leaning academic parents, Fry spent a significant amount of time in the United States and grew up with American popular culture. She was also an educational product of the 1990s, a time when, she said, William Shakespeare and chewing gum wrappers were worthy objects of scholarly attention, and when books, movies, and art formed the core of interdisciplinary studies. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University, Fry studied literature at the PhD level until 2007, and since then has always tried to throw references to nineteenth-century novels into her writing. D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser make appearances in her Paper Monument article, and Honoré de Balzac and Horatio Alger are name-dropped in a recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece. The latter essay, “‘Till They Choke on It’: On Wolf of Wall Street,” rages against Martin Scorsese’s newest, much-maligned film about “the disgusting people of Wall Street,” a project that many criticized as being complicit with the 1 percent. “I’m this incredibly angry, bitter Marxist,” she snarled, who has “psychological problems with morally repugnant artifacts” such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Harmony Korine’s debaucherous 2013 flick Spring Breakers.

    After leaving Johns Hopkins, Fry worked as a fact checker for the glossy celebrity magazine Us Weekly from 2007 to 2011 while indulging her passion for writing. “You’re dancing with the devil,” people told her—or did she tell herself that? (My notes from the lecture are unclear.) At the time Fry was happy that someone had employed her, so when someone at an art opening asked her if she felt guilty about the real-world consequences of working at the gossip rag, she went ballistic on him. “By the time you read Us Weekly, you’re already fucked,” she explained. “I don’t feel like I was feeding babies poison.” Conversely, the work gave her endless material with which to work. “The trashy place is my happy place,” she said.

    springbreakers
    The cast of Spring Breakers on the set

    An audience member asked her about writing a “deliberately negative” review. Fry responded by saying she can be negative about things backed by money and power—such as books and films produced by publishing houses and production studios—but would hesitate for an exhibition, as long as that artist was “sincerely trying,” she said. I would argue that the work of any artist takes not an insignificant amount of capital—from purchasing artist’s supplies to paying rent on a storefront space—but her point was taken. My larger concern was what the questioner meant by “deliberately,” which would indicate a critic purposefully and nefariously trashing an artist.

    Naomi Fry wears many hats (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The writing process is hard for Fry, but she has a routine, a unit system, in which she writes for forty-five-minute chunks of time. During this time she’s offline—no Facebook, no Instagram—and doesn’t get up or talk to anyone. Fry briefly acknowledge that people write for little or no money these days, which makes it hard for critics who, as she mentioned at the lecture’s beginning, were not born wealthy and did not marry rich. Did she have advice for current SVA students? “I couldn’t really come up with anything,” she conceded. What makes her hopeful? Fry admitted that although she might sound like a “middle school art teacher, I think about being creative. The work—I told you I was a Marxist.”

    An audience member called Fry “intrepid” after the critic told a brief story on how she started getting assignments despite being a former academic without the usual writing clips. “The more things you put in your sack,” she said, “the more it grows. Before you know it, you’ve got a really big sack.”

    In Terms Of count: 0 (nice).