* Richard Hamilton: Selected Prints from the Collection, 1970-2005 @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). You might know British artist Hamilton from his tiny mid-'50s collage "Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?", which more or less ushered in Pop Art. Guess what! That was over five decades ago and he is STILL doing his thing, collage, intaglio, digital techniques, even a series based 'round James Joyce's "Ulysses". This curated selection of two dozen works should bring us up to date w/ Hamilton's master printmaking.
* "Rebels of the Neon God" (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette, Ft Greene (D/M/NR to Pacific, 23/45/Q to Atlantic), 6:50/9:15p. The Taiwanese New Wave pioneer's debut film bears little resemblance to his later, sparser, tenser, dialogue-light works, but the ingredients for them are all in place here. Like: the enigmatic youthful lead Lee Kang-sheng, the friction b/w family, independence and love, and the hypnotic, techno-fueled pulse of the night city.
THURSDAY
* Small Black DJ set @ Insound Design Store / 303 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. So Insound is hosting a popup store for the holidays w/ special DJs and free booze every night for five nights. This is night one: 2009's glo-fi trend summed up in one impossibly wicked duo. Thank you, Insound, for deciding my Thursday night plans for me!
* "The Chelsea Girls" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1966) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. I may have seen Warhol's notorious dual-projection, lengthy psych-trip more times than anyone you know. And I want to see it again: Mary Wonorov and Ingrid Superstar mugging for the camera, Ondine's equally harsh and honeyed prosthelytizing, and Nico's tearful face against carousel lights.
* Future Islands @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Baltimore's Future Islands may sound a bit soft & fuzzy on album, but these guys rock exceedingly hard live. Their remix EP "Post Office Wave Chapel" release party also includes sets by glitterfied Pictureplane (playing a few dates in NYC) and Brooklyn's slightly trashy Javelin, who each contributed a remix.
* Pterodactyl @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Been too long since I've experienced Pterodactyl's white-hot frenzy, which always manages to be melodic despite the shrill guitars and trundling drums. w/ Julianna Barwick.
* Robert Longo, David Malijkovic, John Miller "Ongoing Projects" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Newly realized works from the respective artists' careers, incl. new prints from Longo's '70s-era 'Men in the Cities', a slew of photography from Miller's 'Middle of the Day' project', and Malijkovic's newest film 'Out of Projection'.
* "5000 Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). If you've not checked out the sensational samurai armor and armaments special exhibition, here's another tasty, albeit peaceful, bijoux. The Met unveils acquisitions of screen paintings, Buddhist scrolls, sliding door panels, sculptures, all sorts of stuff spanning from arcane times to the nineteenth century.
* Hélio Oiticica "Drawings 1954-1958" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. A rare showing of the Brazilian artist's minimalist works on paper.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/G/R to 9th St/4th Ave), $15 day or $40 pass (available @ the door Thursday or
FRIDAY
* Tanlines + Future Islands @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, L to Jefferson), 8p. Pick your poison. If you can't make DbA on Thursday and really, really want to see Future Islands (and Pictureplane), check out this extra lo-fi dance night, headlined by Brooklyn's always-reliable ketamine-house-inflected Tanlines.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / (see info above). Night two is HOT, as nullsleep (aka like the best known 8-bit musician, IMO) has a set. He is matched by duo Starscream and by Berlin's Patric C, whose breakcore is a bit like harsh Aphex Twin filtered through his NES.
SATURDAY
* Blank Dogs @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. In case you missed Blank Dogs' wall-of-sound set from last Sunday in Wsburg, you've got another great opportunity to lose yourself in their glammy distortion.
* The Babies + Gary War @ Ash's Place / 234 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Brooklyn swingy-indie The Babies (Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls, plus guys from Woods and Bossy) headline a pretty dope show of hot left-of-margin bands, incl. underwater Joy Division-ish Gary War and stripped-down surf duet Coasting.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / (see info above). Big closing night, thanks to NYC's Bubblyfish (I caught her soulful Gameboy set back in 2007) w/ Blip Festival co-curator Bit Shifter and more.
SUNDAY
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart DJ set @ Insound Design Store / 303 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. So Insound is hosting a popup store for the holidays w/ special DJs and free booze every night for five nights. This is night four: Brooklyn's finest twee-rockers on deck. Thank you, Insound, for deciding my Sunday night plans for me!
* Post-Blip Showcase @ Public Assembly / 70 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p/$5. Or if you either can't be bothered to trek out to Gowanus-area Brooklyn and drop $15 on a night of hot 8-bit beats... Honestly this party sounds super cool, and super hard, thanks to headliners Anamanaguchi, the finest NES-punksters I know. w/ Starpause, IAYD, and visuals by the inexhaustible Jean Y. Kim.
MONDAY
* Knight School + Christmas Lights (aka Bright Lights) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$2. A two-dollar (!!) holiday show at Cake Shop, headlined by Brooklyn's Knight School, playing that brand of lo-fi catchy pop and playing it well. Nice.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Zhang's second solo show w/ the gallery is an overall calmer affair than last year's, though it maintains two of his signature recurring elements: monumental scale and ash. This time both figure into one piece, the 18'-tall "Rulai", an ash Buddha imbued w/ relics, copper dishes and unburned joss sticks. It's actually a few feet taller than his cowhide-composed "Giant No. 3", the woman-and-child sculpture from last year's show, but — and maybe this is b/c the subject matter is a Buddha — this compact-ash sculpture just seems more serene, blending in w/ the architecture and beams of the gallery instead of competing w/ it as a huge installation. Framing "Rulai" are Zhang's new large-scale ink and feather paintings on handmade mulberry paper, depictions of deer and landscapes in the manner of 17th c. calligrapher Bada Shanren and 7th c. Tang Dynasty tome "Tui Bei Tu". My final assessment: last year's debut grabbed our attention. This year's solidifies Zhang's oeuvre in our conscious.
* "Merlin James, Arturo Herrera, Matt Connors "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. A benefit of writing this LIST is my totally subjective approach to the art I cover. And though this is billed as a group show, I suggest you take it as James' highly experimental investigation and variation on landscape painting — leave it as that, a solo show, James', w/ Herrera's and Connors' respective works on the side for amusement. Hell, there's a great short film from Singapore video artist Sherman Ong in the back gallery, just to REALLY mix things up. But if you focus on this 'group show' as James' solo show, and take the layout in a clockwise fashion by heading straight back into the big main gallery space and then follow the wall (and smaller galleries) towards the entrance, tracing James' canvases of innocuous country vistas that suddenly transform into acrylic on translucent screens or jute fabric (like the show's titular work, recalling Joan Miro), literally throwing the traditional medium oil-on-canvas out the window, then returning to it @ the end — only by this point you'll second guess yourself and think the canvas is actually stretched vinyl, like some of his other pieces — and you've just experienced QUITE a show.
* Brian Calvin "Head" @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Canvas-filling heads of long-haired girls, simply situated against beach scenes or patterned wallpaper, sometimes clutching cans of beer.
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. OK picture the puppet-characters from a classic dark-hearted Jim Henson film, or perhaps better yet anything by Tim Burton. Now cross those w/ the tribal masks from the Met's Oceanic Arts dept, only cobble 'em together out of hardware store materials. Illuminate 'em all how you see fit, either incandescent or flickery fire bulbs. Actually, Pylypchuk's show is sort of like that Amex "don't take chances, take charge" commercial, where it's like a series of sad faces and happy faces. I am slightly embarrassed to even know this.
* Anthony McCall "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence)" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. McCall's yummy 'solid light' works are so pure and fascinating. The notion seems entirely simple: several beams of white light projected in a dark room, but when you watch the beams create ever-morphing elliptical forms on the wall, like greatly magnified amoebas, and THEN you stand inside the smoky beams...let's just call it a very warm, secure, personal experience. 'Transcendent', perhaps.
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. The gorg solo debut from the young NYC-based artist, feat. works on paper and sumptuous oils and graphite on wood panels. This is Kawasaki's strongest suit: she exercises a fair level of restraint w/ the paint, allowing the grain and natural scars and imperfections of the wood shine through her fantastical, fairytale-like, and Japanese-inspired renderings of young women. She incorporates backgrounds into her portraits, too, ranging from subtle color gradations that seem to follow the wood's natural pigments to lush rooms and natural environments.
+ James Marshall (Dalek) "And There Was War in Heaven". A hard-edged slew of geometric bijoux to accompany Kawasaki's lovingly organic exhibition. Dalek's works are sort of like late-period Al Held (in palette and technique, but only straight lines) crossed w/ Imagination Station.
* Tim Gardner @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Lone figures in generally recognizable environments (UWS near the Lincoln Center, Central Park, Lake Louise which I grossly mistook for the Grand Canyon, oops...), and sometimes small groups, each rendered like soft photographs in watercolor.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really nice exhibition. Lockhart frames an ironworkers' union via indirect means: C-prints focused on their lunchboxes (check the woven-basket one), snack-food commons areas, and this super slo-mo tracking shot of the men at rest. This is executed quite well: we watch the camera slowly, slowwwwly move up this corridor to the din of heavy machinery, passing the workers' lockers and the odd boxy machine, and you probably can't help but gaze at this flanneled dude standing in the middle of the corridor, staring up at something. The guys around him move in and out of frame (albeit very slowly), rustling newspapers or drinking coffee, but this guy stands transfixed, captivated. Finally, once the camera nearly overtakes him, he reaches up, his hands going towards an unseen object, then we realize he was watching the microwave, and out comes a bag of popped corn, and off he goes, away from the camera's eye.
* Richard Hawkins @ Greene Naftali 508 W 26th St. This big show features a lot of Hawkins telltale studies, and it's sort of up to we, the viewers, to tie in all the elements. The Greek sculpture collages (where Hawkins muses on renderings of posteriors etc), crude triptych collages of Francis Bacon reproductions w/ either David Bowie or Slash (done in a Richard Prince sort of way), the vaguely sexual bright oil paintings and tangentially related 'Dragonfly' collages of fashiony Japanese dudes (funny: one of these spells out "bottom" in katakana; I wonder if that was intentional?).
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. The only way I sorted out the scale of these meticulously created carnivalesque C-prints is the one vitrined diorama that accompanies the lot. In fact, you see these prints in a magazine, you might think they're real, and not Ventura's painstakingly rendered, nostalgic world. The study drawings in the side gallery are a nice accompaniment.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
* Tracey Emin "Only God Knows I'm Good" @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. An extensive show of Emin's scratchy linoprint drawings and 'sewn' works on paper — which are really cool b/c they reference one another, and I have to wonder how hard it was to get the embroidery to so closely resemble her particular handwriting and line style. The art? Sexual, debasing, tongue-in-cheek. And don't miss upstairs, the only way to see the show title, rendered in Emin's handwriting in white-hot neon, like a beacon way up there.
* Teresita Fernandez @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. I really do dig Fernandez's graphite-only show, as the shimmery v. matte 'landscape' reliefs and soft v. rocky wall installation bear a meatier, dirtier aesthetic than her previous slick glass forays.
* Mark Manders @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The Dutch artist's last solo show (his first @ the gallery) was a thorough exercise in dread: windows papered over w/ freaky gibberish 'news', crumbling office-like installations, stolid clay-fired figures. This exhibition continues Manders' telltale unease but w/ a far sparer setup. The monumental set-pieces (w/ wild names like "Livingroom Scene with Enlarged Chairs" and "Large Figure with Book and Fake Dictionaries") often have an entire room to themselves, affording uninterrupted contemplation on such good-vibey stuff like bifurcated epoxy heads, threadbare clay-infused chairs, and iron towers. Proceed w/ caution!
* "The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the '60s, '70s and '80s" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. A solid collection of disquietingly beautiful (and sometimes just undeniably disquieting) works from a range of talent. We get the banal ingredients (a lovely look-twice Dieter Roth and several approachable Martin Kippenbergers), the brain-trust (blood-red Lucio Fontana, intriguing Joseph Beuys, epic Louise Bourgeois) and several stunning glassed display boxes from Arman — and I dare you to pick the more disturbing, the assortment of gas masks or the boozy detritus credited to Robert Rauschenberg.
* Kristin Baker "Splitting Twilight" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The energy in Baker's troweled acrylic on PVC panels is palpable as usual, but the subject matter — her 'remixes' of landscape style — is way more my thing. Her signature collage-y, mixed textural technique is in high effect, and she operates across the entire color spectrum like James Rosenquist, but there's a serious depth to these ostensibly 'flat' works that draws you in. One resembles a mashup of Nouveau Soho (cascading prisms of grayscale glass) w/ meteoric blobs of yellow and violet (like the graffiti-covered building across the street from the gallery). Another drifts woozily in a red-tinted tropical landscape amid fat 'palm tree' columns. A third, the dealmaker, is a three-panel study of restless blue waves under a multitonal sunset.
* Eric Fischl "Corrida in Ronda" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Confession: bullfighting is like the furthest from my cup of tea, but I still find Fischl's typically large, center-lit canvases dazzling. Though I did sort of avert my eyes from the more violent lot (there's one solo canvas, at the entryway, feat. just the bull, no toreros, that is quite lovely).
* Marc Quinn "Iris" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. Quinn's massive circular canvases of the namesake eye-related body part harbor the potential of New Age-y-ness, meaning those strange crackling-lightning and bubbling spheres and pseudo-3D computer wallpaper shit circa '02 (you know, 640x480-pixel-sized). But they're nothing like that. In person, and specifically up close, Quinn's deftly rendered irises are incredibly unslick and painterly, which detracts exactly 0% from the work.
* Richard Mosse "The Fall" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Mosse's photojournalist record of his remotest travels, here a series of large C-prints, interrupt the respective snowy, deserted or otherwise forest-laden landscape w/ the carcass of a once-great metal beast. As in, the burned out, bullet-riddled frame of an automobile; the wingless body and nose of a jet, throwing forth its shadow like the maw of a prehistoric predator; the basically decayed wing of an airliner, tattooed w/ several decades' worth of graffiti.
* Blanca Muñoz "The Blue Dance" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Muñoz's lyrical perforated stainless steel sculpture (kissed here and there by mirrored cobalt blue steel) resemble plantlike alien lifeforms. Think visually weightless lilypads or some tropics-dwelling frond basking in the sunlight or wafting gently in a sea current. Even the massive pieces (Muñoz breaks up her sculpture by either small table-top or relief works — which execute especially well — or auto-sized beasts) retain a lightness belying their obviously heavy components, the perforations and screws magnified to extra-large dimensions.
+ Alejandro Corujeira "The Accessible, Dressed in Salts". I detect traces of fairly contemporary Brice Marden in some of Corujeira's wavy line acrylics, though I'm not sure the artist enacts the same sort of fierce attention and loving care that Marden does to his whiplike shapes.
* Kim Nam Pyo "Instant Landscapes" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. You read the gallery checklist just to confirm that Kim's large-scale works are 'just' charcoal drawings and not collages or like horsehair-brushed oils (Daliesque) — as they are so exactingly rendered, every bent tree-branch or bizarro zebra head or Barneys-quality accessory (the light sources on the croc bags and high heels are exquisite). Sure Kim adds faux fur to the lot, usually in the manner of equine tails or crests, but that blends in amid the extremely surreal, beautifully detailed landscapes.
* Liu Ye "Leave Me in the Dark" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. I love Ye's haunting, spare acrylics, which mostly capture a solitary doll-like girl in scenarios worth of Rene Magritte. She might be reading a book or standing, raincoated and w/ luggage but w/ her back turned to the viewer — and suddenly everything is just a bit less familiar. Ye's 'compositions', of bamboo, blocks and drugs, are rendered w/ a scalpel's clarity, but lack the gauzy beauty of his portraiture.
* Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St #3. A deceptively simple show, ostensibly three artists comfortable w/ wall art. But that's such a cop-out! Weiner's hot-pink "LAID OUT FLAT BENT [NOW] THIS WAY TURNED [NOW] THAT WAY (i.e. LOOPED OVER)" grounds the other two, the sunny yellow ruled and wobbly lines from LeWitt's circa-1971 wall piece (in contemporary terms, it looks a bit like Wolfgang Laib's hand-sifted pollen installations) and two very intriguing takes from Sonnier. The noisy one, feat. flickering lights, latex and a motor, feels more typical but the other, a wall-mounted trapezoid of flock w/ string, intrigues in its rawness.
* Bill Viola "Bodies of Light" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Love or loathe Viola, his exhibitions, which tend around watery slo-mo video, draw insane crowds. Like this one, which is total eye-candy (try to NOT be visually arrested by "Incarnation" and "Acceptance", even though they're sort of like being filmed in the shower) but by no means insubstantial. In fact, the "Pneuma" installation (this grainy video on three of four gallery walls) is a super palate cleanser from the fussier shows on the block.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St + 32 E 57th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Hiroyuki Nakamura "The Sky Above" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Think of the bad guys from "The Hills Have Eyes", done up in Western duds. Or, if you will, a cross between Kabuki makeup and John Wayne.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
* Richard Serra "Blind Spot/Open Ended" @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. A thrilling pas de deux of Cor-Ten giants for W Chelsea. These related massive sculptures play off one another in form and function. "Blind Spot" is the scarier one, for me anyway, as it features odd little sharp right angles as you navigate the shell-like spiral, passing similar structures and you feel like you're walking in circles until suddenly the path truncates in this tight V deep w/in the sculpture. "Open Ended" has two entrance/exits (thankfully), but feels more dynamic in a way, as the sides rush up at you like waves of several-tonne steel as you loop up and cross back.
* Cy Twombly "Eight Sculptures" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. These stately bronzes, each bearing a plywood plinth save one totemic piece, residing on its own 'petrified' trunk, embody a resonating calm and maturity needed in the always-crowded gallery scene. Even in the labyrinthine uptown Gagosian, where such disparate couplings as Jeff Koons and Pablo Picasso are known to collide, you need a show like Twombly's to cut through the mania. That said, my favorite pieces, if pressed, are the two wedding cake-like structures, one neatly dwarfed by its base and the other enlarged to match it. But the entire lot is good and, in the stark gallery space, it feels as though you've stumbled upon something very special (hint: you have).
+ Roger Ballen "Boarding House". A massive exhibition of the photographer's latest b&w series, taken in a three-story occupied warehouse in Johannesburg. His generally idiosyncratic and unsettling portraiture is reduced to seemingly stage-set vignettes: limbs, mouths and the occasional cat moving about blanketed walls. Thing is, though, the 'actors' are all real, meaning they're the impoverished inhabitants of the Boarding House, posing for and interacting w/ Ballen's lens. And there's a strong proper Surrealism in his compositions, too, the stained sculptural busts and figure framing (concealed faces), plus the odd rose or apple, made me think he did his Rene Magritte homework.
* Kaz Oshiro "Setting Sun" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Oshiro takes his trompe l'oeil shaped and painted canvases to glorious heights, mainly in this wicked installation of 'Orange speaker cabinets'. If only Wata (and all of Boris, my fav Japanese stoner-rock trio) were present too! Plus slightly bent abstract canvases and 'rubbish bins'.
+ Robert Ryman. Lots going on w/ these three ostensibly Minimalist white paintings, from the late '60s and early '70s. The two larger canvases feat. a subtle banding and a yellowish tint (one seems to have heavier coats of paint near the bottom), and the smaller canvas has a waxy white chevron pattern, like Ryman taped the thing off to create the effect.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Tony Feher "Blossom" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The show title draws from Feher's latest venture: super-duper big yet ominously feather-light extruded-polystyrene 'fans'.
+ Yoshihiro Suda. Fun thing about Suda's discreet trompe l'oeil wood-carved, hand-painted plants is how, on a rainy day like this past weekend, when people would track like the odd leaf or whatever into the gallery space, you can't quite tell whether that leaf is from outdoors or is intentionally placed there by the artist — his sculpture is THAT realistic.
* Paul McCarthy "White Snow" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A deliciously dirty show of new works from the relentlessly deviant (yet always grandfatherly) artist — at massive 7x10' McCarthy-scale paper collages. Beyond his usual charcoal drawings and scribbly oil-stick, these works incl. tears from exhibition catalogues (Christie's bears sharp notice, esp. extended views of Jeff Koons' shows) and porn mags. Good old Paul! The bizarre titles ("GAP", "Michael Jackson", "100") generally come from some magazine element on the massive works and obscurely reference the on-page action. Though by the time we get to "Inside Her Ordeal", a personal fave, the aforementioned dense maelstroms wash away into a rather spare piece, w/ a glassy eyed Snow grinning out into oblivion.
