Hanging Mom

All day hanging art, one of my favorite jobs. Sara changed a few things, she always does. We almost never start hanging a show the day that we 'set' it for that very reason. She visualizes (a curator has to be able to visualize) the walls after she gets home and has had a glass of wine, then, the next morning she knows exactly what she wants to change. Soon as we'd done that I started hanging. D teaches Monday and Wednesday at OU so I was on my own. Tricky front wall, seven pieces by Mark Chepp (The Seven Deadly Sins, all self-portraits) all exactly the same size; which, intuitively makes it sound simple, and the horizontal measurements are all the same, but the verticals have to be nearly perfect because they have to align. This is where you want D-rings, uniformly attached, and a laser level; but these were wired and required very precise measurement. I only had to re-hang two, which is actually quite good. Another aspect of hanging with D-rings, unless the piece is small, because you have to look behind, to see where the ring is, and where the anchored J-hook is located. If a painting is hung by a wire, which most of them are, you can hold the piece on bended knee with one hand, just reach around and conduct your business by feel. Both of the portraits of Carter's Mom are fairly large, life-size, and I get the hardware installed for one of them, but I need help hanging it, so I went upstairs to get Pegi, stuck my head in her door, and said that I needed help hanging Mom. A little preparator humor. A couple of other pieces I do the hardware for, but I don't want to hang them with anyone other than D or TR: too large, too awkward, too heavy, and too valuable. I got half the show hung, which ain't bad for an aging hippy janitor guy. The annual dinner board meeting is tomorrow night and D, who has to attend, had mentioned he would like to have the show hung, the show doesn't open until the end of next week, but never mind. It'll be hung. The mess of hanging a show will still be evident, which I think the board needs to see. What? Do these fucking shows spring fully-formed onto the walls? There are blankets and pieces of foam everywhere, cans of paint, roller trays, the detritus of reconstruction; blankets, pieces of cardboard, discreet piles of plaster dust. I can handle the hanging part of this, I am a hanging fool, after all. I love installing a show, it's so vibrant, it all falls together, I measure ten-thousand things. And leave the clean-up for later, there might have been a bar-fight, I was long gone, fuck a bunch of petty antagonism. I wouldn't be surprised if the alley ran thick with blood.