Good morning!
I’m typing this note from Paris, where I’m in town for a few days to attend the opening of the exhibition “Tina Barney: Family Ties” at the Jeu de Paume and to pay a visit to the new Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau location of L’École, School of Jewelry Arts, whose ongoing support of Time Sensitive has been and remains pivotal. (I’m excited to say Time Sensitive will surpass the heady milestone of two million downloads next month; to all of our listeners, and to L’École, thank you!)
Some of you may recall that I interviewed Tina about a year and a half ago for Time Sensitive, timed to the release of her book Tina Barney: The Beginning (Radius). This Jeu de Paume show is effectively a retrospective, featuring 55 large-scale photographs and spanning 40 years of her work. Also while here, I visited the sprawling, labyrinthian “Surréalisme” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (the Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning paintings were, for me, the absolute standouts; I was also pleasantly surprised to learn about the work of the Japanese poet and artist Shūzō Takiguchi), and I’m planning to see Tony Cragg’s “New Sculptures” exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, too.
When I get back to New York, one of the things I’m most looking forward to this fall is posting up at Clemente Bar, a collaboration between the chef Daniel Humm, the guest on Ep. 53 of Time Sensitive (who just this week was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Food Education) and the artist Francesco Clemente, the guest on this week’s show. Opening on Oct. 10 and located on the second floor of Humm’s Eleven Madison Park, the bar will serve as “yet another love song to New York City,” as Francesco put it to me.
I think it’s safe to say that the wholly original Clemente Bar experience could be called “poetic.” While another new bar with artistic allusions—the record bar Another Country, named after the 1962 James Baldwin novel—is just a few blocks south at Union Square, Clemente Bar isn’t just an allusion to art; it is art, a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, not entirely unlike the remarkable Kronenhalle Bar in Zurich with its Diego Giacometti light fixtures and works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.
Upon arriving in New York in the 1980s, following his upbringing in Italy and spending the better part of the ’70s in India, Francesco befriended and collaborated with the likes of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Throughout my conversation with him, there were moments when I felt as if Ginsberg were practically in the room with us. Which perhaps isn’t surprising: Ginsberg was a hero of Francesco’s in his adolescent years, and they later became close friends. As with Ginsberg’s poetry (if you aren’t familiar, read “Howl”), there’s something spacious, rigorous yet freewheeling, and larger-than-life about Francesco’s paintings, which indeed—or at least this is how I view them—have a poetic sensibility. There’s also a certain timeworn quality and a spiritual aura to his work. I have no doubt that, as a space and as an experience, Clemente Bar is going to sing.
Before I finish this week’s newsletter, a quick invitation I’d like to extend: If you’re in New York City next Wednesday, Oct. 2, and would like to attend a live conversation at 6:30 p.m. between myself and the architect Billie Tsien (the guest on Ep. 45 of Time Sensitive), please let The Slowdown team know by writing to us at info@slowdownmedia.com. If there are any spots remaining, we will add you to the guest list and send you a note of confirmation with the details.
—Spencer
