Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio

by Drew Martin

This past May, on a trip to Chișinău, Moldova my visit to the National Museum of Art was a bit of a let-down. All they had of their Romanian neighbor Brancusi was a small piece in the basement, covered in plastic. While I appreciated the Christo-wrap feel, I was hoping for more.

The universe has responded with an amazing Brancusi retrospective at MoMA: The Artist and His Studio, on view through February 27, 2027.

If you’re sensing I’m a big fan of Brancusi, let me back off a little. I’m not. Yes, some of his work is sublimely minimal, but some of his work is clunky and that isn’t a bad thing. I want to appreciate it as Romanian folk but I get unapologetic African appropriation vibes, which was all the rage when Brancusi was in Paris.

So while I have a broad spectrum of appreciation for this artist, the brilliance of the show is how it’s curated. The old film footage of him at work is fascinating, especially his timeless techniques of moving large slabs of stone around with ease in contrast with the brute force he also exerts. It’s the perfect show to bring a friend who doesn’t care for art but is into tools: a whole wall is dedicated to Brancusi’s tools, each with their own purpose and story.

Washed Up on Shore

by Drew Martin

With Netflix setting up a Hollywood level studio system at the Jersey shore, I think it is fitting to revisit some well-done Jersey shore films. This weekend I watched Colby (2016) for the first time. It is an independent drama directed by Jake Fuller and Alex Markman, and starring Stephanie Brait who plays Colby, a troubled young drifter. 

The movie starts with Colby leaving an apartment in New York City. We don't know how long she's been there and what the situation is. She's kind of being casually kicked out as we see her belongings tossed to her by someone off camera but it's not an active fight. She's always on the roam, trying to find a place to stay, which she initiates through pickups. When a guy she meets is taking her home, she is surprised he has a car and asks instead of taking her back to his place to drive her to the beach, which she says she has never been to. Like any beach, ever. He is not only game for it but takes it to another level by suggesting they break into a weekend beach house, which he claims to have done before. 

To make a long story, short...he gets caught while she is at the beach. He goes to jail and has his car impounded, which would be totally fine with Colby as she just met the guy, but her bag is in the trunk and that means the world to her. So she works her way into the life of the owner of that house, and his family, befriends the daughter and spends a few days in a tenuous dance with everyone because the wife and daughter do not know about the initial involvement with the husband/father. In fact, the husband never makes the connection that Colby was part of the original break-in. Deception all around, it's an uncomfortable arrangement.

Colby is primarily filmed in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and the beach is thematic. It's the end of the world, a division between before and after, a place of leisure but also of abandonment. Most importantly is the steady repetition of the waves, which Colby mimics, constantly returning to the scene of the crime, which she wants to call home, but is pulled away for one reason or another.

Colby definitely has one of the best movie endings I have ever seen. Ultimately, Colby returns to the household/family that she has disrupted. All we know of her own family is a mother who never picks up her calls. In the ultimate deception, Colby climbs into the bed of the daughter whose whereabouts we are unsure. The parents come in the daughter's room to apologize for all that has transpired. Colby covers herself with the bedding as the mother comes to console her, thinking it’s their daughter. It's a beautiful ending because it's what Colby really wants, an understanding family that will work through issues, and she just needs to hear at least once in her lifetime that everything is going to be ok. But of course it can't end nicely because in a matter of minutes or even seconds it will be known that Colby is back. We are spared of that reveal and its aftermath and simply soak in the moment with Colby.

Absolute Ninesense

by Drew Martin

My favorite word/concept is serendipity, and I am okay with a little nudging to induce it, like today I decided to walk down a different street than I had planned to see what might turn up. The result...I stumbled upon Nine, located in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Nine is an independent contemporary art space and curatorial collective shared by Bob’s Gallery, Curmudgeon, Mall, and Site Service. The gallery is tucked just below street level but I could see a few interesting works as I walked by so I stopped in.

The show is great but I am just going to focus on the two artists who caught my eye. The first is Seung-Jun Lee, simply because he is a drifter like me. I wasn't out for a walk when I passed Nine, but was returning from my bungalow after a morning of collecting driftwood and other objects from the beach. It's a problem because I had intended to put in more miles in preparation for the NYC marathon in a few weeks but could not help myself to what had washed up. Driftwood and reclaimed/upcycled objects are different from ready-mades in that they feel like instructional raw materials, often coming to you in an already altered form and a seasoned state.

I like Lee's smaller pieces better because they feel more natural, or maybe it's simply that I wish the largest work shown here did not have such new rope. That throws off the effect for me. I think it would have worked much better with weathered rope. There's barrels by me if he needs any.

The first piece I am showing below here is his best in the show. It's titled Map to my son. The folded slip of paper reminds me of kvitlech wedged in the Western Wall of Jerusalem or the omikuji of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. And the driftwood of course brings to mind a message in a bottle. What does it say? Who is it for? It's intimate and intriguing. The wedge of wood works like a roof above the space occupied by the two figures. The paper feels like smoke going up the chimney carrying their conversation into the sky.

This is a picture I took about two hours prior to stumbling upon Nine. It's in my sculpture garden. The painted sheds on the left and right are from reclaimed wood, detailed by the artist Melinda Beck. In the center are a few pieces I found recently, the bracing was from this morning. I haven't decided what to do with these pieces yet, but you can see why Lee's work felt so familiar. The picture below that is of me gathering the bracing and other pieces on this morning's run.

The other artist that I really enjoyed from the show for his wit, humor, weirdness, and resourcefulness is Aaron Nemec. His last name in Czech means German (as in, a German person), similar to the supermodel Petra Němcová. Nemec's medium of choice? Hot glue! And what he does with it in small clumpy figurines is fantastic.

You Can See Everything (That Elizabeth Holmes Wants You To See, And A Little More)

by Drew Martin

I stopped blogging five years, one month, and eleven days ago. The last post was about pre-trial, pre-prison Elizabeth Holmes. It's a little hard to read now. I was obviously incensed, mostly because so many people were negatively affected by her while she acted like she did nothing wrong. I was assuming she would get off but justice was served. And that doesn't actually feel good. It's still hard to see a mother separated from her kids, and a family split up by our legal system.

Yesterday I read Richard Brody's article He Said, She Said in the October 19, 2026 issue of The New Yorker about Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Holmes, called You Can See Everything, and today I went to a mid-morning matinee (10:15, it's almost three hours long, so it was good to get an early start). It was released yesterday, October 16, 2026.

The small theater (in a big complex, Cinemark in Hazlet, NJ) was pretty full. The audience was united in interest and awe but fundamentally divided going in. By that I don't mean for or against Holmes, it's clear she was guilty. I mean, there were older people like me who had followed the case closely about Holmes, Sunny Balwani and their company Theranos, listened to the podcasts, saw The Dropout, but weren't so familiar with Fielder. And then there were younger people who were big fans of Fielder and were there to see him do brain surgery on Holmes, without knowing much about the patient. The two groups reacted a little differently, the former gasping by Holmes' continued charade, and the latter appreciating the punches Fielder was able to land, like no other boxer...if this were a fight. But it's not a fight and Fielder is much more patient and respectful than he comes across in the trailer that makes your skin crawl. And Holmes breaks it down to basically god is love, and it is hard to find her at fault even if you think she's delusional.

Regarding the He Said, She Said title of Brody's piece, it's too sexually/politically charged in a Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton way. And You Can See Everything doesn't sit right. Everything should have been off limits after Jonathan Safran Foer published his debut novel in 2002 with the perfect title, Everything is Illuminated, and then exhausted by the wacky multiverse film, Everything Everywhere All At Once. I would have offered the title The Drop-In, if not for the film then a better choice for The New Yorker piece. And that's not only because it plays nicely with the The Dropout but because that's Fielder's role and talent, like the friend who just shows up and the guest who stays too long. The magic of this film is his access to Holmes and her husband Billy Evans and how comfortable he makes the uncomfortable in his special outsider awkward way. I really wanted to dislike Evans on so many levels but there is still something about this film that despite giving me all the more reasons to dislike him, I still walked away intrigued in a good way.

One of the early signs of my father getting dementia was his confusion in following plots that jumped around a little. I know Fielder is famous for multiple reveals but I found myself questioning my mental acuteness while considering how many levels deeper we were going. The appearance by Amanda Seyfried in a good portion of the movie takes it to another level, but the overlapping of roles made me wonder what was staged and what was actually being played out. Either way, it was done brilliantly. What anchors this film is the very real sentence in federal prison and Holmes being separated from her family. In the few two-minute phone calls we can listen in on, Holmes is very conscious of that time, reminding us on the outside that this is her reality. I learned from Evans that federal prison excludes partners from conjugal visits. Not one to be the first to tell a joke (that one-way street is mostly trafficked by Fielder), Evans says he's be spending time with Pamela Handerson, which Fielder explains to a confused Seyfried means masturbation. 

If you take for granted how up close we get with Holmes through the first part of the film, the intimate lens Fielder shares with us sinks in when she enters the Bryan Texas Prison Camp and we see all the photographers along the perimeter fence zooming in on her with gear that seem more like telescopes than cameras. It's a special comment on the documentary itself. Holmes and Evans invite Fielder into their rented beach house in San Diego to present a human side of the story in contrast to all we actually know of her from the media. The permission and trust at a human level is more revealing than the paparazzi style journalism.