An excellent benefit of VOLTA's solo-artist presentation is the wealth of space to work with, even if that space is a booth no larger than that at the Armory or other fairs (or smaller!). The VOLTA artist can customize their space into an environment that accentuates the art and, when placed adjacent to a gallery w/ the same notion — meaning creating a special space for their art, as no two booths look anything like, not at VOLTA — loads of interesting, kinetic relationships inevitably develop. To the point that the art interacts w/ the greater fair space and beyond.
This point is evident even before you take the lifts up to the fair floor. Jan Vormann (represented by Jarmuschek + Partner, Berlin, Booth V8 — and one of of the few double-artist instances, but since his art is not in the booth it works) has instances of his 'Dispatchwork New York', site-specific Lego brick interventions about the city and, lucky for us, on several panels of the lifts. Upstairs at VOLTA's entrance area, Misako Inaoka (Johansson Projects, Oakland, Booth C8) converted one of the structural pillars into a trunk for her fantasy woodland creatures and fungi. Whitish plaster-colored birds, mushrooms, branches, and fantastical chimeras (like this unicorn w/ bird-wings and a squirrel tail) extend out into space and, in a few cases, move about and chirp. There's another thing you might have noticed when exiting the lifts and deciding where you'd like to proceed into VOLTA: this persistent hammering sound amid the hum of human voices and ambient noise. That's from Todd Pavilsko's "Centerpiece" (samsøn, Boston, E2), which I've written about before. If you've seen this bracing, 13min video of the artist methodically driving a nail through his foot, then the recurring sound of the hammer is no longer a static, anonymous sound in the din: you'll give pause, maybe feel a shiver down your spine as you recall those 10+ minutes of agony and then Pavlisko's steady limp away off-camera, and the discomfort you were feeling as a passive participant in the ritual by watching his piece.
Many of the booths have gone to various lengths to customize their space. Sometimes a simple paint-job, converting a white cube into something else very different, is all it takes. I found Sverre Bjertnes' space, at Galleri K in Oslo (Booth F9) rather like a lucid dream in the deep gray wall color, which works quite well w/ his enormous, illusory oil paintings. Priska C. Juska's booth (D9, NYC) did a knockout job on creating the impression of a library for Dannielle Tegeder's suite of geometric works on paper, each uniquely framed and lined on several bookshelves running the length of two walls. I also thought the cardboard tower at the Schuebbe Projects space (Booth F9, Dusseldorf) was the perfect match for Franz Burkhardt's vintage-y representational works on paper, that the weathered look of the various papers played so nicely off the cardboard backing.
I think the tastiest interaction b/w galleries is most readily seen in this sort of 'grove' square bisecting Thomas Erben Gallery (NYC/D11) and Charest-Weinberg (Miami/D10). Erben is showing Dona Nelson's wicked largish, dynamic abstract paintings, including a standout canvas in her intriguing double-sided style. The deep greens in these works echoes so perfectly w/ the action across the hall, a 'Garden of Eden' vitrine by Richard Dupont, he of the polyurethane resin humanoids modeled from computer renderings of his own body. This graphite-toned female and male interact w/ wavy nylon-composed trees (which look like deliciously green seaweed, if you somehow suspended the motion of that plant in mid-drift). This installation, plus Dupont's large C-prints of enlarged leaves from Central Park, plays so well off the green vibes coming from Nelson's works that the booths enhance one another. There is a lot of this shared energy at this fair, I think to the benefit of all.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
VOLTA NY: A Take on the Figure
The notion of the figure and representational works is a theory worth further exploration at VOLTA NY. There is, of course, the literal self-portrait (seen in performance artists Maria José Arjona of Galerie Anita Beckers, Booth G3, and Andrea Bianconi, of Furini Arte Contemporanea, Booth E7 — and Nicholas Buffon, of Callicoon Fine Arts, Booth A1, who marries performance w/ his abstract paintings — and if I may, Buffon creates an interesting dialogue w/ the figure in his performances as, in drawing out a series of semi-awkward poses and extended gestures, he makes us aware of OUR OWN bodies and OUR OWN mild discomfort). Then there are Alison Erika Forde's dreamlike paintings, show at The International 3's booth (based in Manchester, Booth E3). None of these are explicitly self-portrait, but Forde so deftly infuses the lot w/ childhood memories, daydreams and the like that we can be forgiven for wondering — esp. in a three-panel work of a girl sprawled across various easychairs — how much of this IS the artist.
Valérie Blass, of the Montreal-based Parisian Laundry (Booth G10), has an interesting commentary on the body in her sculpture, where an essence of the human figure is all that remains. However, you stare at these mostly vertical pieces long enough, like the knockout newish 'Untitled', whose dermis resembles green moss covering an askew ladder (replete, however, with a gray running shoe), and it's got so much swagger and attitude that the human within it is practically THERE.
Ben Turnbull, showing with the London gallery Eleven (Booth F6), manages two immediately recognizable images in each of his collaged works, simultaneously culling from and representing heroism. He cut up his own collection of vintage Marvel and DC comics and collaged the heroes (Spiderman, Batman, what have you) into graphic representations of a NY firefighter and the logos FDNY and NYPD. And while VOLTA NY's theme this year is 'No Guts, No Glory', Turnbull had been working on this NY-themed series independently, so it is a brilliantly auspicious fit. To further this, permitting the heroes to emerge off the 'page', the backgrounds are slews of speech-balloons from the comics, each containing only the heros' dialogues.
Alexander Tinei's stirring oil paintings — mostly featuring one central figure against an inky black backdrop — captivated me each time I got off the lifts, but I couldn't help myself b/c they were w/in my line of sight each time. They pull you in magnetically. I am pleased w/ his dual-gallery showing here (VOGES of Frankfurt and Ana Cristea in NYC, both Booth D2) and that he just had a proper solo show in NY at Cristea's gallery a few months ago. There is a certain drama to Tinei's characters, in their intense fixed gazes, their relative gender ambiguit, and the bluish markings covering their arms or winding up their otherwise rather lifelike bodies. We wonder, what's the story with this person, is that guy in a rock-band, did I just see that girl at a party the other weekend? OK, so the feeling, our interpretation, is subjective, and this dialogue is an essential part of the viewing experience.
Valérie Blass, of the Montreal-based Parisian Laundry (Booth G10), has an interesting commentary on the body in her sculpture, where an essence of the human figure is all that remains. However, you stare at these mostly vertical pieces long enough, like the knockout newish 'Untitled', whose dermis resembles green moss covering an askew ladder (replete, however, with a gray running shoe), and it's got so much swagger and attitude that the human within it is practically THERE.
Ben Turnbull, showing with the London gallery Eleven (Booth F6), manages two immediately recognizable images in each of his collaged works, simultaneously culling from and representing heroism. He cut up his own collection of vintage Marvel and DC comics and collaged the heroes (Spiderman, Batman, what have you) into graphic representations of a NY firefighter and the logos FDNY and NYPD. And while VOLTA NY's theme this year is 'No Guts, No Glory', Turnbull had been working on this NY-themed series independently, so it is a brilliantly auspicious fit. To further this, permitting the heroes to emerge off the 'page', the backgrounds are slews of speech-balloons from the comics, each containing only the heros' dialogues.
Alexander Tinei's stirring oil paintings — mostly featuring one central figure against an inky black backdrop — captivated me each time I got off the lifts, but I couldn't help myself b/c they were w/in my line of sight each time. They pull you in magnetically. I am pleased w/ his dual-gallery showing here (VOGES of Frankfurt and Ana Cristea in NYC, both Booth D2) and that he just had a proper solo show in NY at Cristea's gallery a few months ago. There is a certain drama to Tinei's characters, in their intense fixed gazes, their relative gender ambiguit, and the bluish markings covering their arms or winding up their otherwise rather lifelike bodies. We wonder, what's the story with this person, is that guy in a rock-band, did I just see that girl at a party the other weekend? OK, so the feeling, our interpretation, is subjective, and this dialogue is an essential part of the viewing experience.
VOLTA NY: A Take on Abstraction
There is a wealth of abstraction at this year's VOLTA NY, both in the sense of nonrepresentational art and in the way that the figurative is 'abstracted', and how that presence emerges from the beautiful chaos.
Take a look at the Wohnmaschine booth (D1), out of Berlin, and their American-born video artist Holly Zausner. She took her 2007 film 'Unseen', shot at and around Bode-Museum in Berlin, created like a million screen-grabs of the scenes, then hand-cut and positioned the lot into brilliant mosaics. From a few feet back they resemble anything from shimmering fabric to b&w shadows of tree branches (or a topographical map from way above), depending on the scene. But draw near and the images emerge: the hubbub of the Turkish marketplace in Berlin, smears of color and movement, v. the artist interacting with very live, very dangerous tigers in the sculpture garden of Neue Natioinalgalerie — a mix of full-lengths of Zausner and close-ups of the tiger's face. Up close to her art, we are unable to be just a stoic spectator. We can practically FEEL the hum of the city, the peril of the tigers, the movement of Berlin.
I contrast Zausner w/ Canadian photographer Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, showing in the Montreal-based Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Booth V10). His work show here is carbon ink printed onto layers of mylar and suspended, to great 3D effect. About half the works are composed of rows and rows of postage-stamp-sized cuts of mylar, maquette-style and similar in scale to Zausner's. These up close are total abstraction, blurs of translucent grayish-black ink or enlarged black pixels. But from a distance, the most gorgeous forms emerge, all of them flora-related. Tree branches, fields, an absolutely stunningly massive tree-leaf, captured on several sheets of layered mylar. Here the viewer must adopt an active relation with Pellegrinuzzi's art, as with Zausner, in order to 'feel' the forms in the abstraction.
Jen Liu, based in Brooklyn and showing with her gallery Ceri Hand (Liverpool/Booth F2), is currently fascinating with the stripe. She etches them into her Constructivist-style works, scenes from Tom of Finland and chain-gangs printed on heavy blueprint paper, incising the paper with diagonal slashes or half-concealing the figures with searing pink lines. Think of Rene Magritte's famous late work "The Blank Check" (1965), of a woman on horseback in the woods as, if by illusion, they are partially hidden by the surrounding foliage. That's the effect of Liu's new works, abstracting the scene with stripes but permitting that image to recede and expose itself via the eye's path.
I dug Jered Sprecher's new-wave abstracts at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Booth G1), out of Boston. His basis in screenprinting is evident in these layered geometric works and, after he was awarded the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, it seems his canvases have enlarged to outsized proportions. Perhaps it is a dialogue on the Abstract Expressionists of the '60s and their penchant for bigger and bigger canvases. But Sprecher's newer works also immerse you in these deep cascades of translucent colors and fractured shapes. Dannielle Tegeder, showing at W. Chelsea's Priska C. Juschka Fine Art (Booth D9), presents a library-like installation of smaller geometric works on paper, each w/ its own unique frame chosen by the artist. I'm caught in a deep pool of adjectives when surrounded by these jewels, but think of bits of Joan Miró's fascinating forms and Vassily Kandinsky's shapes (plus both artists' vibrant color choices), and the intimate scale of these works reminds me of Tomma Abts' small-scale geometric abstracts — though I find Tegeder's even more readily accessible.
Danny Rolph's (Poppy Sebire Gallery, London, Booth B3) mixed media works on doubled polycarbonate sheets are like symphonic explosions of color, history, pop culture. Think of the singularity, that second before the Big Bang when all the universe's matter was condensed into a single infinitely tiny point. Then picture that w/ '80s references, children's coloring book pages, show ads, and all the colors of the visible spectrum, in all sorts of geometries and textures. That Rolph is able to suspend this vibe in a dual-layered work that embodies tremendous depth is totally wicked, and probably why I cannot pull my eyes from them.
And then we have Rafaël Rozendaal, the young Dutch artist represented by Paris' extra joker/onestar press (Booth A7) (check his totally ace site for reference). Rozendaal's web-based animations and interventions are, on the one hand, impossibly abstract, meaning the source code of these files, lots and lots of dense javascript etc. And yet...the emotional response these unique pieces convey, like the stunning gradient cycle "into time (2010)", where each mouse-click divides the screen into more and more color swatches, is anything but abstract. It is intuitive, spontaneous, authentic emotional reaction. Which, when you think about it, should be the goal of looking at any artwork.
Take a look at the Wohnmaschine booth (D1), out of Berlin, and their American-born video artist Holly Zausner. She took her 2007 film 'Unseen', shot at and around Bode-Museum in Berlin, created like a million screen-grabs of the scenes, then hand-cut and positioned the lot into brilliant mosaics. From a few feet back they resemble anything from shimmering fabric to b&w shadows of tree branches (or a topographical map from way above), depending on the scene. But draw near and the images emerge: the hubbub of the Turkish marketplace in Berlin, smears of color and movement, v. the artist interacting with very live, very dangerous tigers in the sculpture garden of Neue Natioinalgalerie — a mix of full-lengths of Zausner and close-ups of the tiger's face. Up close to her art, we are unable to be just a stoic spectator. We can practically FEEL the hum of the city, the peril of the tigers, the movement of Berlin.
I contrast Zausner w/ Canadian photographer Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, showing in the Montreal-based Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Booth V10). His work show here is carbon ink printed onto layers of mylar and suspended, to great 3D effect. About half the works are composed of rows and rows of postage-stamp-sized cuts of mylar, maquette-style and similar in scale to Zausner's. These up close are total abstraction, blurs of translucent grayish-black ink or enlarged black pixels. But from a distance, the most gorgeous forms emerge, all of them flora-related. Tree branches, fields, an absolutely stunningly massive tree-leaf, captured on several sheets of layered mylar. Here the viewer must adopt an active relation with Pellegrinuzzi's art, as with Zausner, in order to 'feel' the forms in the abstraction.
Jen Liu, based in Brooklyn and showing with her gallery Ceri Hand (Liverpool/Booth F2), is currently fascinating with the stripe. She etches them into her Constructivist-style works, scenes from Tom of Finland and chain-gangs printed on heavy blueprint paper, incising the paper with diagonal slashes or half-concealing the figures with searing pink lines. Think of Rene Magritte's famous late work "The Blank Check" (1965), of a woman on horseback in the woods as, if by illusion, they are partially hidden by the surrounding foliage. That's the effect of Liu's new works, abstracting the scene with stripes but permitting that image to recede and expose itself via the eye's path.
I dug Jered Sprecher's new-wave abstracts at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Booth G1), out of Boston. His basis in screenprinting is evident in these layered geometric works and, after he was awarded the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, it seems his canvases have enlarged to outsized proportions. Perhaps it is a dialogue on the Abstract Expressionists of the '60s and their penchant for bigger and bigger canvases. But Sprecher's newer works also immerse you in these deep cascades of translucent colors and fractured shapes. Dannielle Tegeder, showing at W. Chelsea's Priska C. Juschka Fine Art (Booth D9), presents a library-like installation of smaller geometric works on paper, each w/ its own unique frame chosen by the artist. I'm caught in a deep pool of adjectives when surrounded by these jewels, but think of bits of Joan Miró's fascinating forms and Vassily Kandinsky's shapes (plus both artists' vibrant color choices), and the intimate scale of these works reminds me of Tomma Abts' small-scale geometric abstracts — though I find Tegeder's even more readily accessible.
Danny Rolph's (Poppy Sebire Gallery, London, Booth B3) mixed media works on doubled polycarbonate sheets are like symphonic explosions of color, history, pop culture. Think of the singularity, that second before the Big Bang when all the universe's matter was condensed into a single infinitely tiny point. Then picture that w/ '80s references, children's coloring book pages, show ads, and all the colors of the visible spectrum, in all sorts of geometries and textures. That Rolph is able to suspend this vibe in a dual-layered work that embodies tremendous depth is totally wicked, and probably why I cannot pull my eyes from them.
And then we have Rafaël Rozendaal, the young Dutch artist represented by Paris' extra joker/onestar press (Booth A7) (check his totally ace site for reference). Rozendaal's web-based animations and interventions are, on the one hand, impossibly abstract, meaning the source code of these files, lots and lots of dense javascript etc. And yet...the emotional response these unique pieces convey, like the stunning gradient cycle "into time (2010)", where each mouse-click divides the screen into more and more color swatches, is anything but abstract. It is intuitive, spontaneous, authentic emotional reaction. Which, when you think about it, should be the goal of looking at any artwork.
VOLTA NY: A Take on Transformation
I observed a palpable sense of transformation running through many of the booths at VOLTA. This could mean transformation in time, throughout history (specific to art and in general) and in brief durations, transformation from comfort to pain and vice versa, physical and interventional transformation. This idea spanned mediums and artistic intent, so I am interested in investigating this further.
Mathias Kessler, the German artist showing at Galerie Heike Strelow (Booth V9), presents a literal sense of this changing based on the environment. Photography from his expeditions to Ilulissat, Greenland — the epitome of remote in an overpopulated world — and those experiences led to his attempt at capturing that essence and presenting it to us. Installed is a freezing mirror, etched with the world from the POV of the Arctic Circle, and a heat exchanger attuned to the climate of the booth. We sense the cold of this environment whilst contributing to its melting; the more of us viewing it, the faster it melts. It is a visceral interpretation of global warming, the melting at the poles, and a trip to a location that we may never be able to take ourselves. "Nowhere to be Found" is an arresting scene: a human skull suspended in a saltwater tank, bearing growths of sea life. Over several years this will transform into a coral reef. I find this piece incredibly fascinating. There seems to be a dialogue of human activity on deliberate transformation, to the downfall of the environment and to us as a people. However, "Nowhere to be Found", though manufactured by Kessler, is different. This time human intervention (the artist) is supporting life (fragile coral reefs), and by doing so on the surface of a human skull feels somehow terribly appropriate.
Ádám Szabó, of Inda Gallery (Budapest), Booth G9, intervenes in fruit, creating 'perfect' objects. By cutting and sewing — literally — a banana and apple, removing blemishes by grafting a new half or piece, the end results 'should' be glossy and appealing, ready for a food magazine photo shoot and then some high-end supermarket. But these Frankensteinian creations are botched plastic surgery. Szabó shows that an overemphasis on spotless perfection is detrimental and horrific. One wonders too if the produce needed an intervention in the first place, of if it were perfectly nutritious as is.
The economy and transformation figures in both Máximo González's (Galeria Valle Ortí/Valencia/Booth F7) and Thomas Palme's (Teapot/Cologne/Booth G7) works. González uses outdated currency — beginning with that of his native Argentina — in wild works on paper that range from torn and woven abstracts to, lately, more figurative works, of the old money and the faces contained within them interacting with and enacting upon one another. Palme's large graphite works on paper are amalgam figures, men of history (John Berryman, Walt Whitman) with whores' bodies, children with cow-skulls for heads, altogether surrounded by catchphrases from the current economic climate (Caterpillar, Dubai World, Pfizer, Alcoa). The world is a mess.
Todd Pavlisko, showing at the Boston gallery samsøn (Booth E2), delivers a literal sensation of transformation, i.e. incredible pain, via "Centerpiece", where he is filmed hammering a straight-nail through his foot, then pulling his foot up through the nail, over a span of several minutes. It is a wince-inducing cycle of pain, and we hope that is relief he is feeling upon removing himself from the nail, despite the agony of what he just accomplished. His "Still Life" is more complex, combining a self-portrait severed head in marble with Baltic honey amber (the sort that preserves fossils) and tektite meteorites coming out the mouth. The historical references — the prehistoric amber and meteorite, the classical medium of marble — w/ the figuration of his head changes Pavlisko into a point in the timeline of art and the world. The Columbian performance artist Maria José Arjona, represented here by Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt/Booth G3), produced haunting, laborious physical transformations in many of her sustained sculptural pieces. Standing on blocks of ice containing nails for several hours, against the cold and the eventual threat of the sharp objects within creates the secondary transformation, offsetting the pain of the cold with internal body heat, which I am not sure is something that can be willed as much as it is developed over time. The inclusion of transparencies — drawings by Arjona of moments in her performances — allows us to mix and match these scenes, interacting with a performance as we layer one image over another, personalising them. I am excited to see Arjona's contribution to Marina Abramović's upcoming performance at MoMA beginning later this month, as it should produce a special sort of transformation: the cyclical energy from proximity to an audience and, when appropriate, mutual eye contact.
Mathias Kessler, the German artist showing at Galerie Heike Strelow (Booth V9), presents a literal sense of this changing based on the environment. Photography from his expeditions to Ilulissat, Greenland — the epitome of remote in an overpopulated world — and those experiences led to his attempt at capturing that essence and presenting it to us. Installed is a freezing mirror, etched with the world from the POV of the Arctic Circle, and a heat exchanger attuned to the climate of the booth. We sense the cold of this environment whilst contributing to its melting; the more of us viewing it, the faster it melts. It is a visceral interpretation of global warming, the melting at the poles, and a trip to a location that we may never be able to take ourselves. "Nowhere to be Found" is an arresting scene: a human skull suspended in a saltwater tank, bearing growths of sea life. Over several years this will transform into a coral reef. I find this piece incredibly fascinating. There seems to be a dialogue of human activity on deliberate transformation, to the downfall of the environment and to us as a people. However, "Nowhere to be Found", though manufactured by Kessler, is different. This time human intervention (the artist) is supporting life (fragile coral reefs), and by doing so on the surface of a human skull feels somehow terribly appropriate.
Ádám Szabó, of Inda Gallery (Budapest), Booth G9, intervenes in fruit, creating 'perfect' objects. By cutting and sewing — literally — a banana and apple, removing blemishes by grafting a new half or piece, the end results 'should' be glossy and appealing, ready for a food magazine photo shoot and then some high-end supermarket. But these Frankensteinian creations are botched plastic surgery. Szabó shows that an overemphasis on spotless perfection is detrimental and horrific. One wonders too if the produce needed an intervention in the first place, of if it were perfectly nutritious as is.
The economy and transformation figures in both Máximo González's (Galeria Valle Ortí/Valencia/Booth F7) and Thomas Palme's (Teapot/Cologne/Booth G7) works. González uses outdated currency — beginning with that of his native Argentina — in wild works on paper that range from torn and woven abstracts to, lately, more figurative works, of the old money and the faces contained within them interacting with and enacting upon one another. Palme's large graphite works on paper are amalgam figures, men of history (John Berryman, Walt Whitman) with whores' bodies, children with cow-skulls for heads, altogether surrounded by catchphrases from the current economic climate (Caterpillar, Dubai World, Pfizer, Alcoa). The world is a mess.
Todd Pavlisko, showing at the Boston gallery samsøn (Booth E2), delivers a literal sensation of transformation, i.e. incredible pain, via "Centerpiece", where he is filmed hammering a straight-nail through his foot, then pulling his foot up through the nail, over a span of several minutes. It is a wince-inducing cycle of pain, and we hope that is relief he is feeling upon removing himself from the nail, despite the agony of what he just accomplished. His "Still Life" is more complex, combining a self-portrait severed head in marble with Baltic honey amber (the sort that preserves fossils) and tektite meteorites coming out the mouth. The historical references — the prehistoric amber and meteorite, the classical medium of marble — w/ the figuration of his head changes Pavlisko into a point in the timeline of art and the world. The Columbian performance artist Maria José Arjona, represented here by Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt/Booth G3), produced haunting, laborious physical transformations in many of her sustained sculptural pieces. Standing on blocks of ice containing nails for several hours, against the cold and the eventual threat of the sharp objects within creates the secondary transformation, offsetting the pain of the cold with internal body heat, which I am not sure is something that can be willed as much as it is developed over time. The inclusion of transparencies — drawings by Arjona of moments in her performances — allows us to mix and match these scenes, interacting with a performance as we layer one image over another, personalising them. I am excited to see Arjona's contribution to Marina Abramović's upcoming performance at MoMA beginning later this month, as it should produce a special sort of transformation: the cyclical energy from proximity to an audience and, when appropriate, mutual eye contact.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
fee's LIST (through 3/9)
You like art, and art likes you.
ART FAIR OVERLOAD
=
* The Armory Show / Pier 92/94 aka 55th St + 12th Ave (CE to 50th St or take shuttle from VOLTA)
* VOLTA / 7 W 34th St (BDFV/NRW to 34th St, 6 to 33rd St, or take shuttle from The Armory Show)
* ADAA / Park Ave Armory aka 67th St + Park Ave (6 to 68th St)
* Korean Art Show / 608 W 28th St (CE to 23rd St)
* Scope / Pavillion @ Lincoln Center Damrosch Park, 62nd St & Amsterdam (1 to 66th St)
* Pulse / 330 W St @ Houston (1 to Houston)
* Independent / 548 W 22nd St aka the former X (CE to 23rd St)
* Fountain / Pier 66 aka W 26th St + 12th Ave (CE to 23rd St)
+ loads else
My main base of operations is VOLTA (+ the Armory, when I can get there), though I will try to hit Korean Art Show and Independent (since they're in my neighborhood) and at least Scope (since I dug it last year), and ideally I'll make it up to ADAA. You'd better believe I've got a lot to say re: these art fairs, so follow my talking-points on #voltany, #armoryshow and all that.
WEDNESDAY
* "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, curated by Jeff Koons" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave). It is times like this when I am pleased to be writing such a piece where words like DOPE and MAYJAH come like totally naturally, b/c my review of this exhibition will no doubt be inundated w/ the aforementioned adjectives and all their variations (DOPER, the adverb MAYJAHLY). OK, so how does the New Museum one-up trickster Urs Fischer (which, if you recall, won a spot on my Top Ten LIST-related Cultural Events of 2009), their awesome gallery-wide exhibition? Why, by featuring a swath of the Athens-based Joannou Collection, one of the leading in contemporary art, who hasn't shown this stuff in the states YET, and having Koons curate the whole thing. Oh, and by naming it "Skin Fruit" (I used to have the working title "Invisible Museum" for the longest time...). Feat. Robert Gober, Nathalie Djurberg, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Kara Walker, Christopher Wool, loads others, and of course Koons himself (Joannou owns the classic "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank" from wayyy back when). Essential?? Dope?? This is what my LIST is all about!
N.B.: I saw the show, it is indeed essential/dope. Still processing, review to come next week (or sooner, in a blog post).
* "Bluebeard/Barbe Bleue", (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2009) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7:30p. NICE, Anthology gets the jump on the proper run (opening at IFC late this month) of Breillat's adaptation of that classic psychosexual fairy tale, the brutish, otherworldly noblemen who murders his wives, and the young Marie-Catherine who confronts him.
* Akron/Family @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/SOLD OUT (oops!). A very trippy, very intimate experience, no matter how many people are on stage performing w/ Akron/Family, no matter what the venue. The fact Warpaint and Please the Trees are on the bill, both psychedelic in their own ways, should add to the experience.
* TIX ON SALE for "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). This festival — one of the chicest film festivals to go through the city every year — actually begins next Wednesday, spanning about 20 films and concluding on Mar 21. But tix go on sale today (Wednesday) and it wouldn't hurt, if you're like me and addicted to contemporary French cinema, to have an early look and start reserving what you want. BECAUSE Film Society members have been reserving their tix since last week! Full festival here, and a few I'm eyeing:
- "Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser)", dir. Christophe Honore, 2009. w/ Chiara Mastrioianni
- "Le Refuge", dir. François Ozon, 2009. NEW Ozon!
- "Restless (Le Bel âge)", dir. Laurent Perreau, 2009.
THURSDAY
* William Kentridge: "I am not me, the horse is not mine" (Performance 8) @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E,V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p. See my review on Kentridge's retrospective under CURRENT SHOWS. This is Kentridge's solo performance adaptatioin of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose", a rather trippy short-story about class distinction and a nose on the lam. Feat. Kentridge's own video animation w/ monologue, in his exhibition-designed installation.
* Miao Xiaochun "Microcosm" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St 2nd Fl. Picture Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delight' but done via 3D rendering and feat. a bunch of same-ish naked guys. Maximalist to the extreme.
* Yojiro Imasaka + Jun Ahn "Perspectives" @ Onishi Gallery / 515 W 26th St. Two young photographers and two takes on their respective urban environments. Anh's are in color and from high elevation, Imasaka's in b&w and from street-level, pointed skyward.
* Zhao Bo "Vibrant City" + Zhang Gong "Miss Panda" @ Eli Klein Fine Art / 462 W Broadway, 6-9p. Hypercolor from two of China's contemporary artists. Zhao's high-contrast figures strike poses in advert-engulfed landscapes while Zhang's laces crowds of familiar animated cartoons in unlikely settings.
* Rosson Crow "Bowery Boys" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. Deitch is in its final months, so what better way than get Crow's particular brand of large-scale hallucinogenic abstracts, as she takes on NYC's 'bad boys'? This includes opium dens, the Standard's Boom Boom Room and Keith Haring's Pop Shop, plus lots of Deitch-referentiality (Dash Snow and Dan Colen's NEST; an overall Deitch palette).
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 519 W 19th St. Perhaps you recall like four years ago when underground comix legend Crumb (he of buxom vixens like Devil Girl and lascivious Fritz the Cat) began illustrating the Book of Genesis from the Bible. He published it late last autumn, an extensive series of his lush pen & ink on paper woodcut-like drawings, to rousing acclaim. And that, those 207 drawings, is this exhibit.
* Silk Flowers + Prince Rama @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/$7. Chill out w/ two of the lo-fi set's dreamiest: Prince Rama pairs Hindu devotional w/ electronics and Silk Flowers is sort of like Joy Division on codeine. And the New Yorker gave this show props, if that encourages you.
FRIDAY
* Joseph Beuys "Make the Secrets Productive" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. Mary Boone Gallery ushered in 2010 w/ a fab, info-packed survey of Beuys' popular multiples and related media — to overall critical acclaim (this writer was a fan). So PW takes it a step further w/ a suite of twelve rare sculptures from Beuys, as in works many probably have never seen before, and photography from Ute Klophaus documenting Beuys' 'Aktion's.
* Boris Hoppek + Alex Diamond "Damage:Control" @ Factory Fresh / 1053 Flushing Ave, E Williamsburg (L to Morgan), opening 8-11p. The gallery partners w/ Hamburg's heliumcowboy artspace in featuring mega-Graf artist Hoppek (who has an installation in this year's VOLTA), contributing a series of watercolors and an 'upskirt installation', and Diamond's Vaughn Bode-ish fantasy creatures — plus collaborative ink drawings from the two artists.
* Adult. + The Depreciation Guild @ Fountain / Pier 66 aka W 26th St + 12th Ave (CE to 23rd St), 7p. NY's decidedly avant-garde art fair gets major brownie points from yrstruly w/ its public opening night bash, feat. Detroit's electro-couple Adult. (remember when electroclash was FIRST happening, like in the late '90s? Adult. was part of that original wave. w/ Brooklyn's ultra-heartthrobs The Depreciation Guild, who meld shoegaze and NES programming so seamlessly you'd think they were a charmed pair from the start.
* Amananaguchi + Sabrepulse @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/. The 8-Bit Alliance tour kicks off here, led by UK's Sabrepulse (you know, the guy who rocks out on a Gameboy) and NY's Anamanaguchi (you know, the punks who shred over programmed NES melodies). Is America ready??
* Tanlines + Lemonade @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. I'm digging Brooklyn duo Tanlines' new atmospheric single 'Real Life'. This is their EP release party, paired w/ dancey Lemonade, which seems totally appropriate.
SATURDAY
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).
* Titus Andronicus + Parts & Labor @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/$15. You know I only advise these big venues if the lineup is dope. And here it is: Titus Andronicus...an experience, live. Parts & Labor's latest album may be more melodic but these Brooklyn guys play a fierce math-rock-fueled set. Add to that Babies (feat. Cassie of Vivian Girls and some Woods guys) + the heavy-ish Cloud Nothings and you've got quite a night for just $15.
* Golden Triangle + Coasting @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. G.T.'s dual lead vocalists do it for me every time. This is their album release party, so expect a lot of debauchery-related fun, incl. the one-two thump of Coasting.
SUNDAY
* Summer Cats @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. True, despite my outward appearance I am a big Slumberland Records fan (have you SEEN me at a Pains of Being Pure at Heart show??). So I'm pumped about twee-poppy Summer Cats, who traveled all the way from Melbourne.
TUESDAY
* Aa + Screens @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. The percussive menagerie Aa sound like old Boredoms (speed-punk) crossed w/ new Boredoms (tribal drumming), after a tab of ecstasy.
CURRENT SHOWS
* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). Much has been made, preemptively and post-opening gala, about the no-frills, unthemed, smaller-scale 2010 Biennial. That this year's show features less artists, less spectacle, and is contained entirely w/in the museum and its immediate environs (as opposed to the Park Ave Armory and elsewhere, viruslike, two years ago) is not an outlandish idea. All the museums have been doing it, being more sensible, crafting smaller but still thought-provoking exhibitions, tighter-like. That's the deal here, and by my watch it is a success. I enjoyed the 2006 Biennial for all its seam-busting array but 2008 rubbed me the wrong way. This one works, and while it's an overall spartan affair, there are plenty of moments of interest and even great shock. And it totally whetted my palate for this week's very busy Armory Arts Week. A few personal highlights:
Photo series (not a new thing but in full force @ this Biennial): Nina Berman's 'Marine Wedding', which you may have seen before in '06, broadened by an updated look at the young man and his current situation. And photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair's cringe-inducing series of badly burned Afghani women, protesting their marriages.
Installation: Robert Grosvenor splits his room very nicely + I'm coming around to digging his newer pieces. Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa w/ ceramics and David Adamo's just-happened split wood scattering (these two artists are both featured in the Armory), and if I may the room of Charles Ray's ink-drawn flowers, mutant-'Avatar'-world dandelions, childishly conceived but so perfectly rendered, and in such an array that they produce a much-needed calming effect (they share the floor w/ Sinclair's photography).
Video: loads (and loads of press on them), incl. The Bruce High Quality Foundation (the collective whose NY-themed piece, projected on the windshield of a car, somehow combines the vibe of Youtube clips w/ poetic narrative, to captivating results); Ari Marcopolous (I'm a noise-head, what can I say, and this super-bright video, like Luis Gispert channelled through distortion pedals, is great); Josephine Meckseper (her red/blue-tinted 'Mall of America' piece would work well against Superflex's "Flooded McDonalds" @ Peter Blum Chelsea).
Painting: yes, lots of it! Jim Lutes masks his portraits in smoky swaths of colorful egg tempera (check 'Piece of Barbara', those eyes...); Tauba Auerbach's masterful 'wrinkled' Op-art canvases work double-time w/ their odd color choices; and Roland Flexner's ink-inundated works are determined by gravity and his breath, rather than a brush (think Max Ernst's decalcomania landscapes).
But like all Biennials, you can't do it all at once. Hence, the performances by Aki Sasamoto (incl one this Saturday, Rashaad Nesome, Martin Kersels, plus noise artists curated by Ari Marcopolous (in late March) and others.
* William Kentridge "Five Themes" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). It is a most delightful feeling to go into an exhibition (here, a three-decade survey of the S. African's sociopolitically-themed oeuvre) w/o expectations and even w/ tangential knowledge of their art (he does charcoal-drawing animations) and then be TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY. I very much enjoyed the trip, both Kentridge's superior dreamlike animated narratives and his drawings/works on paper/set designs. One thing, taking the title of that awesome Olafur Eliasson exhibition two years ago: take your time. You need to watch at least some of Kentridge's vignettes (preferably all nine of his early "9 Drawings" series (feat. sort-of personas Soho Eckstein, the wealthy white industrialist and alter-ego Felix Teitelbaum) to 'get it'. They screen in pairs of three (ranging from like 3 to 9 min each, so you CAN see them all). Eckstein is evil incarnate, all pinstripe-suited and cackling against streams of miners and laborers, watching his empire grow and erecting a monument to an indentured worker (who, incidentally, is chained to said monument). Teitelbaum, nude throughout, steals away Eckstein's wife and the fat-cat falls into depression, bombing his factories and standing sullenly in a room flooded w/ his tears (Kentridge notably uses charcoal and blue pastels almost exclusively). Eckstein gets his wife back and, in the mesmerizing 'Felix in Exile', the alter-ego pines for Nandi, a surveyor of a landscape strewn with bodies. She soon joins this scene. I was riveted. The suites of drawings are like 'best-of' moments from these films, Eckstein in a flooded room, Eckstein and his wife seated back to back, Nandi against a starry night sky. The installation for "Magic Flute" is brilliant, mainly b/c I am a sucker for Mozart, but Kentridge's adaptation for Dmitri Shostakovich's "The Nose" (based on Nikolai Gogol's psychedelic class-study) is better. This is a seven-projection installation w/ Shostakovich's soundtrack and clips of Kentridge's performance interspersed w/ protest and Constructivist lettering, a teasing out for the full-on show at the Met Opera this month.
* Tala Madani "Pictograms" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. The spraypaint additions to Madani's figurative canvases (usually w/ black backgrounds) add a searing glowing effect. Her usual all-male cast pose like stylized letters, from an eye-chart to an amalgam 'leviathan'. Also, three short animations that end in variously hilarious disasters.
* J Shih Chieh Huang @ Virgil de Voldere Gallery / 526 W 26th St #416. Huang's new installation of mixed media electronic critters, w/ their light-up screens, neon glow and waving plastic-bag tendrils, look sort of like deep-sea dwellers in a contained environment. Or, like my first impression, something bioluminescent out of "Avatar".
* "Animate Matter" Group Show @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Four gallery artists 'activate' their mediums, to varying effects and successes. I dug VOLTA showcase artist Dona Nelson, whose sparsely painted abstract canvases either flip over to show the wild action on the reverse side, or are traumatized by painted yarn and cut fabric. Also: Richard Staub's free-form junk-assemblage is a bit shocking at first, these hanging, draped plastic bags, but I think a strong reaction is part of the point.
* Pieter Hugo "Nollywood" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. The S. African photographer returns w/ his lens focused on the Nigerian film industry and its special self-representation. The result is a lush and at times unsettling selection of prints, rivaling the intensity of his 'Hyena' show a few years ago. A man holding a huge cut of red flesh next to a trussed water buffalo w/ its throat cut out necessarily = shock. Also: nude woman in bed w/ a 'dagger' through her chest, the blanket around her soaked through red = shock. But there's loveliness to be had here, too, like the reclining woman in a sailor shirt and the kids. And, unintentionally funny moment: muscular naked guy wearing a Darth Vader mask.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. VERY successful pairing by these two painters. Bradley's stoically clean canvases (some w/ just painted frames) prepare the eyes b/w Martin's breathlessly maximalist mixed media paintings, like the massive 'Hemlock' (complete w/ fungi seed packets) and the self-referential 'Big Glitter Painting' (which, if you didn't get it, is both gigantic and glittery).
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. An intense multilinear solo offering from the artist, incl. enlarged X-ray images bordered w/ ink-covered shoes, ink-stained church pews modded into like a divided wheelchair, an entire ambulance w/ whited-out signage and fogged up windows. The more subtle works include vintage photography that Ward recontextualized w/ black ink and the short-film 'Fathers and Sons', which creates a palpable tension b/w its long silences and layered, rushed dialogue. Ward contributes to the gallery's booth @ Armory + he gives a talk @ the gallery SAT 1:30p.
* Debra Hampton "Twenty Paces" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Wildly realized warrior-heroines of some near-future apocalyptic world, composed of lots of fashion-mag collages and minimal paint — think Wangechi Mutu crossed w/ early 'Heavy Metal'.
* Alexander Calder @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. So there IS a mobile here, a soaring black thing, like a pterosaur, in addition to several massive land-dwelling steel pieces that all manage to carry Calder's typical lightness. Even the really big one, spread out like a 15-ft-tall black lobster, appears that, if if could move, it would do so w/ an unnerving grace.
* David Smith @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. I can take Smith's signature cubular steel sculpture in small dosages, but this five-piece exhibit of his late works is incredibly good, in a quiet, contemplative way. Only one stacked giftbox-style sculpture here. The other four steels incl two Joan Miro-like formless painted abstracts and two conglomerates, one like the ribcage of a large extinct lizard and the other, w/ the ominous addition of wheels that makes it somehow both alienesque and like a precursor to an obscure torture mechanism.
* Five Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. One immediate takeaway from this 3doz.-strong group show, nearly the entire gallery roster, + some special guests, is that figurative/realist painting is NOT dead. Many of these artists (Andy Kehoe, Jim Houser, Xiaoqing Ding, Tara McPherson) have excellent control of the brush. Add to it the cultural-mindedness of Doze Green, Jeff Soto and WK Interact (+ the requisite lovelies of Ray Caesar, Invader and Souther Salazar) and you'd better cast that term 'low art' wayyy off to the side. This is dope.
* Stefan Bruggemann "Headlines & Last Line in the Movies" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. A mirrored, well-lit chamber, where said mirrors are covered in spraypainted words, the end dialogue of films + current headlines. It's when you read them and can't quite determine which came from where that it gets really interesting.
* Mike Nelson @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. OK picture the 'period rooms' of the Met museum (or the Brooklyn Museum), you know those like colonial, Victorian etc rooms. So it's like that, only a bunch of camper-trailers welded together, creating a slightly unsettling white-trash romp. And keeping it freaky, Nelson adds a busted mirror, low ceilings and odd mood lighting to the experience.
* Peter Halley @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Tasty geometric abstracts in furious, yet complementary, Day-glo paint, a textural mix of canvas and 'roll-a-tex' (think magnified sponge), rendered in Halley's unique vocab = 'prisons' (boxy horizontal bars, like Dan Walsh only hardedge) and 'conduits' (Mario Bros pipes, but hardedge again). Chiptune bands would have a field-day here.
* Jacco Olivier @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. We have got a stunning, all-encompassing environment right here, courtesy of the Dutch artist's immaculately rendered painted animations. Before you even get to the centerpiece, 'Revolution', you'll be taken aback by his effectively emotive works. 'Bath' (recalling proper post-Impressionists) and 'Stumble' (an abstract seashore, complete w/ the sound of crashing waves) sets the scene for the brilliant 'Transition', an inland cove set around rock walls and fluttering petals. A figure slowly emerges from the distance, trudging through a jewel-like pool of water before plunging into it and swimming away. The effect is both "Avatar" and that scene from Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" (that Sardinia-set dream sequence when Monica Vitti is w/ her sick son). Then we have 'Revolution', like staring into either magma or, more appropriately, some colored-gas nebula in deep space, as worlds form and float by us. Cosmically trippy.
* "In Standard Time" Group Show @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Marc Straus curates this tight, youngish/international 10-artist showcase. We have several fine takes on still-life (Adam Stennett's pristinely composed trippy lot; Roland Horvath's gauzily Morandi-esque) and intriguing portraiture (Tim Eitel's chilling entry, which from a short distance looks like a duotone minimalist piece; Richard Wathen's exquisite Old World-style, Andrew Sendor's cheekily realized), plus the extra treat from Michael Brown (melted LPs into trompe l'oeil sculpture and Marc Bijl's Gagosian signage.
* Dan Walsh "Days and Nights" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. 1st off, Walsh's titular multipanel work/installation, created especially for the gallery, is a show-stopper: think blinking lights through a haze of urban night and day. The other new works are fairly subdued in tone and palette, but the diagonally glowing 'Facility' is quite nice.
* Céleste Boursier-Mougenot "harmonichaos" @ Paula Cooper 'Boutique' / 465 W 23rd St. The full arsenal of Boursier-Mougenot's awe-inspiring sound installation, which I saw at the 21st St gallery back in '06, involving old-school vacuum cleaners outfitted w/ harmonicas, motion sensors and lights.
* Lian Gillick @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. The immediately apparent 1/2 of Gillick's great two-tone show is the installation of his signature colored-plexiglass frames (like roofs, here) and painted aluminum benches. These act as open-airs contemplation booths ('Discussion Benches') for the 2nd 1/2 of the show, an amusing and intriguing array of text- and woodblock-derived prints. It begins rather funnily:
Alberto: "What can I get you?"
Frank: "What's on tap?"
Alberto: "Old beer."
Frank: "Old beer?"
Alberto: "I've also got Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Breezers or Red Strip in bottles with a straw."
But then, in subsequent frames, becomes increasingly surreal. That + the juxtaposition w/ the woodblock prints reminded me of the double world in Haruki Murakami's "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World".
LAST CHANCE
* Damien Hirst "End of An Era" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Hirst's last solo show at the gallery was nearly five years ago and didn't include any formaldehyde tanks. Don't worry: they're back. Actually, he's provided several flavours of viewing-experience, so if you're more into the luxe, aesthetic Hirst, check the 4th fl. Beyond his dot paintings (the grayscale immemorially titled "Acetaldehye" is especially off-putting) and medicine cabinets are a series of wildly colored, wildly effective butterfly paintings. Indeed, Hirst combines household gloss and actual butterflies (either just the wings or the entire insect) into brilliant, super-trippy mosaics. Check them from different POVs to get the iridescent effect. It's like Philip Taaffe's mandala drawings only way more intense, like comparing shroom tea to a double-hit of acid. Fancy the de-luxe Hirst? Hit the 6th fl, ideally up the spiraling staircase instead of the lifts, and blind yourself w/ "Forgotten Promises" (he always names his art well), a room-filling gold-plated mirrored vitrine, its shelves lined w/ like a thousand cubic zirconia. The next-door gallery contains the aforementioned show-stopper: surrounded by photorealistic renderings of precious gemstones, and an even bigger wall-lining gold-plated mirrored vitrine ("Judgement Day", housing like a million manufactured diamonds) is "End of an Era", a gold-horned bull's head, in formaldehyde, on a marble plinth. If you fear being even remotely offended by said installation, I advise you to give wide berth to the neck-end of the vitrine (the bull is, after all, decapitated). But seen from a front or side view (and more effectively from a short distance, w/ the glittering wall of diamonds in the background, it's a stirring piece. And a highly recommended, very dope exhibition.
+ Elisa Sighicelli "The Party is Over". Sighicelli's forte is light. Her array of backlit lightbox C-prints of spare urban spaces (empty billboards, construction sites) glow with this energy, but there wasn't a lot of variety to hold my attention. Luckily she included two video works, the titular piece (this 7.5 hour beast, which obviously you don't have to stay the whole while to get it, a silent number w/ reverse fireworks against a night sky, quite mesmerizing) and the standout, called 'Phil Building', a very Electric Company-ish light show against an office tower, accompanied Paolo Campana's spacey soundtrack, veering from theremin-laden mood-scapes to light bossa-nova like from a YHC Heavy Industries piece. It's dope.
* Ida Applebroog "MONALISA" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The hook to this vibrant new installation from Applebroog lies in an extensive series of self-portrait vagina drawings from '69. This project was rediscovered only last year, and the artist scanned and digitally augmented the drawings (sometimes w/ the addition of light color washes) and hung the updated vellum prints to nearly totally cover a wood-scaffolding structure, the show's titular piece. The chamber itself is blocked by a ladder (adorned with an ambiguously gendered visage who I am honored to write shares my surname), and beyond that is the massive doll-like portrait 'Monalisa', swimming in a field of red. It's a bracingly energetic experience.
* Leonardo Drew @ Sikkema Jenkins @ Co / 530 W 22nd St. Attend Drew's wood-relief sculpture show and you'll see how my mind works when crafting these LISTs. Here's what I was thinking: the blackened wood pieces (incl. the MASSIVE one at the entryway) echo Louise Nevelson, and the inclusion of cubbyhole dividers practically scream her name; the spinier structures look sort of like Ursula von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn wood sculpture, only they're cut against the grain and suspended from the wall; the large cartography pieces (one spans an entire wall) resemble Mark Bradford's scorched urban mapmaking; and the behind-glass organic shapes are a bit like Anselm Reyle but w/o the new-car paint job. See, it's fun!
+ Vik Muniz, in the project room. Three more of his junk sculpture C-prints and one dirt-drawn C-print, everything has to do w/ skulls or skeletons and they look like woodcuts from a great distance but up close, when you decipher the scale Muniz used (a shoe here, a petrol can there) you realize these things are pretty fantastically big (except for the dirt-drawn skull, that's true to scale but no less impressive).
* David Reed "Works on Paper" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. Absolutely essential viewing for Reed buffs (self included) or anyone remotely interested in the workings of one of contemporary art's more intriguing abstract painters. I am totally serious here. Check it: Reed paints these ribbon-y, otherworldly, color-saturated abstracts in either skinny verticals or subway-graf style horizontals. I have no idea how he does it, but his mastery and control of the paint is top-notch. This expansive show features his work-sheets (enlarged diary entries, almost, sketches, paint swatches and his draftsman's lettering covering graph paper) and color studies. Read through a suitably detailed work-sheet (they all are, just pick one), get the gist of 'layering', 'transparency', 'removal' etc, then check one of the rough color studies and you will still have NO idea how point A goes to point B — but you'll have some insight into the artist's workings. The suite of color studies in the front gallery, which I strongly suggest you check LAST, are an eye-popping green and dayglo orange mix from this year, progress towards some dope paintings, no doubt.
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Three fantastic vintage works from the industrial 'assemblage' artist, composed of his heavy signature materials (sheet metal, cinderblocks, concrete slabs). The earliest piece on display, from '86, is like an archaeological site, only the fossil is a concrete wall and the canopy a bunch of crudely-cut, welded steel. The latest, from '94,includes a welded surfboard/UFO object resting atop a row of lashed-together poles.
ART FAIR OVERLOAD
=
* The Armory Show / Pier 92/94 aka 55th St + 12th Ave (CE to 50th St or take shuttle from VOLTA)
* VOLTA / 7 W 34th St (BDFV/NRW to 34th St, 6 to 33rd St, or take shuttle from The Armory Show)
* ADAA / Park Ave Armory aka 67th St + Park Ave (6 to 68th St)
* Korean Art Show / 608 W 28th St (CE to 23rd St)
* Scope / Pavillion @ Lincoln Center Damrosch Park, 62nd St & Amsterdam (1 to 66th St)
* Pulse / 330 W St @ Houston (1 to Houston)
* Independent / 548 W 22nd St aka the former X (CE to 23rd St)
* Fountain / Pier 66 aka W 26th St + 12th Ave (CE to 23rd St)
+ loads else
My main base of operations is VOLTA (+ the Armory, when I can get there), though I will try to hit Korean Art Show and Independent (since they're in my neighborhood) and at least Scope (since I dug it last year), and ideally I'll make it up to ADAA. You'd better believe I've got a lot to say re: these art fairs, so follow my talking-points on #voltany, #armoryshow and all that.
WEDNESDAY
* "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, curated by Jeff Koons" @ New Museum / 235 Bowery (FV to 2nd Ave). It is times like this when I am pleased to be writing such a piece where words like DOPE and MAYJAH come like totally naturally, b/c my review of this exhibition will no doubt be inundated w/ the aforementioned adjectives and all their variations (DOPER, the adverb MAYJAHLY). OK, so how does the New Museum one-up trickster Urs Fischer (which, if you recall, won a spot on my Top Ten LIST-related Cultural Events of 2009), their awesome gallery-wide exhibition? Why, by featuring a swath of the Athens-based Joannou Collection, one of the leading in contemporary art, who hasn't shown this stuff in the states YET, and having Koons curate the whole thing. Oh, and by naming it "Skin Fruit" (I used to have the working title "Invisible Museum" for the longest time...). Feat. Robert Gober, Nathalie Djurberg, Terence Koh, Mark Manders, Kara Walker, Christopher Wool, loads others, and of course Koons himself (Joannou owns the classic "One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank" from wayyy back when). Essential?? Dope?? This is what my LIST is all about!
N.B.: I saw the show, it is indeed essential/dope. Still processing, review to come next week (or sooner, in a blog post).
* "Bluebeard/Barbe Bleue", (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2009) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7:30p. NICE, Anthology gets the jump on the proper run (opening at IFC late this month) of Breillat's adaptation of that classic psychosexual fairy tale, the brutish, otherworldly noblemen who murders his wives, and the young Marie-Catherine who confronts him.
* Akron/Family @ Music Hall of Williamsburg / 66 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/SOLD OUT (oops!). A very trippy, very intimate experience, no matter how many people are on stage performing w/ Akron/Family, no matter what the venue. The fact Warpaint and Please the Trees are on the bill, both psychedelic in their own ways, should add to the experience.
* TIX ON SALE for "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St). This festival — one of the chicest film festivals to go through the city every year — actually begins next Wednesday, spanning about 20 films and concluding on Mar 21. But tix go on sale today (Wednesday) and it wouldn't hurt, if you're like me and addicted to contemporary French cinema, to have an early look and start reserving what you want. BECAUSE Film Society members have been reserving their tix since last week! Full festival here, and a few I'm eyeing:
- "Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser)", dir. Christophe Honore, 2009. w/ Chiara Mastrioianni
- "Le Refuge", dir. François Ozon, 2009. NEW Ozon!
- "Restless (Le Bel âge)", dir. Laurent Perreau, 2009.
THURSDAY
* William Kentridge: "I am not me, the horse is not mine" (Performance 8) @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E,V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 7:30p. See my review on Kentridge's retrospective under CURRENT SHOWS. This is Kentridge's solo performance adaptatioin of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose", a rather trippy short-story about class distinction and a nose on the lam. Feat. Kentridge's own video animation w/ monologue, in his exhibition-designed installation.
* Miao Xiaochun "Microcosm" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St 2nd Fl. Picture Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delight' but done via 3D rendering and feat. a bunch of same-ish naked guys. Maximalist to the extreme.
* Yojiro Imasaka + Jun Ahn "Perspectives" @ Onishi Gallery / 515 W 26th St. Two young photographers and two takes on their respective urban environments. Anh's are in color and from high elevation, Imasaka's in b&w and from street-level, pointed skyward.
* Zhao Bo "Vibrant City" + Zhang Gong "Miss Panda" @ Eli Klein Fine Art / 462 W Broadway, 6-9p. Hypercolor from two of China's contemporary artists. Zhao's high-contrast figures strike poses in advert-engulfed landscapes while Zhang's laces crowds of familiar animated cartoons in unlikely settings.
* Rosson Crow "Bowery Boys" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. Deitch is in its final months, so what better way than get Crow's particular brand of large-scale hallucinogenic abstracts, as she takes on NYC's 'bad boys'? This includes opium dens, the Standard's Boom Boom Room and Keith Haring's Pop Shop, plus lots of Deitch-referentiality (Dash Snow and Dan Colen's NEST; an overall Deitch palette).
* R. Crumb "The Bible Illuminated" @ David Zwirner Gallery / 519 W 19th St. Perhaps you recall like four years ago when underground comix legend Crumb (he of buxom vixens like Devil Girl and lascivious Fritz the Cat) began illustrating the Book of Genesis from the Bible. He published it late last autumn, an extensive series of his lush pen & ink on paper woodcut-like drawings, to rousing acclaim. And that, those 207 drawings, is this exhibit.
* Silk Flowers + Prince Rama @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/$7. Chill out w/ two of the lo-fi set's dreamiest: Prince Rama pairs Hindu devotional w/ electronics and Silk Flowers is sort of like Joy Division on codeine. And the New Yorker gave this show props, if that encourages you.
FRIDAY
* Joseph Beuys "Make the Secrets Productive" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St. Mary Boone Gallery ushered in 2010 w/ a fab, info-packed survey of Beuys' popular multiples and related media — to overall critical acclaim (this writer was a fan). So PW takes it a step further w/ a suite of twelve rare sculptures from Beuys, as in works many probably have never seen before, and photography from Ute Klophaus documenting Beuys' 'Aktion's.
* Boris Hoppek + Alex Diamond "Damage:Control" @ Factory Fresh / 1053 Flushing Ave, E Williamsburg (L to Morgan), opening 8-11p. The gallery partners w/ Hamburg's heliumcowboy artspace in featuring mega-Graf artist Hoppek (who has an installation in this year's VOLTA), contributing a series of watercolors and an 'upskirt installation', and Diamond's Vaughn Bode-ish fantasy creatures — plus collaborative ink drawings from the two artists.
* Adult. + The Depreciation Guild @ Fountain / Pier 66 aka W 26th St + 12th Ave (CE to 23rd St), 7p. NY's decidedly avant-garde art fair gets major brownie points from yrstruly w/ its public opening night bash, feat. Detroit's electro-couple Adult. (remember when electroclash was FIRST happening, like in the late '90s? Adult. was part of that original wave. w/ Brooklyn's ultra-heartthrobs The Depreciation Guild, who meld shoegaze and NES programming so seamlessly you'd think they were a charmed pair from the start.
* Amananaguchi + Sabrepulse @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle), 8p/. The 8-Bit Alliance tour kicks off here, led by UK's Sabrepulse (you know, the guy who rocks out on a Gameboy) and NY's Anamanaguchi (you know, the punks who shred over programmed NES melodies). Is America ready??
* Tanlines + Lemonade @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$10. I'm digging Brooklyn duo Tanlines' new atmospheric single 'Real Life'. This is their EP release party, paired w/ dancey Lemonade, which seems totally appropriate.
SATURDAY
* Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" @ Whitney Museum (part of 2010 Whitney Biennial), 4p. I caught Sasamoto last year at Zach Feuer and I was hooked. I have this vision in my head about Joseph Beuys' chalkboard 'teaching' performances, and to me Sasamoto's stream-of-consciousness forays into the sociopolitical, the mathematical and the mundane (somehow she balances all this, coherently) is, to me, like a Beuys. Her lair @ the Whitney, astrewn w/ video cameras and hanging net bags containing microphones and water glasses, is the site of her shows, performed at 4p on dates incl the numerals '6' and '9' (so if you can't make this one you've other chances).
* Titus Andronicus + Parts & Labor @ Bowery Ballroom / 6 Delancey St (F/JMZ to Delancey/Essex), 8p/$15. You know I only advise these big venues if the lineup is dope. And here it is: Titus Andronicus...an experience, live. Parts & Labor's latest album may be more melodic but these Brooklyn guys play a fierce math-rock-fueled set. Add to that Babies (feat. Cassie of Vivian Girls and some Woods guys) + the heavy-ish Cloud Nothings and you've got quite a night for just $15.
* Golden Triangle + Coasting @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. G.T.'s dual lead vocalists do it for me every time. This is their album release party, so expect a lot of debauchery-related fun, incl. the one-two thump of Coasting.
SUNDAY
* Summer Cats @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/FREE. True, despite my outward appearance I am a big Slumberland Records fan (have you SEEN me at a Pains of Being Pure at Heart show??). So I'm pumped about twee-poppy Summer Cats, who traveled all the way from Melbourne.
TUESDAY
* Aa + Screens @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. The percussive menagerie Aa sound like old Boredoms (speed-punk) crossed w/ new Boredoms (tribal drumming), after a tab of ecstasy.
CURRENT SHOWS
* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). Much has been made, preemptively and post-opening gala, about the no-frills, unthemed, smaller-scale 2010 Biennial. That this year's show features less artists, less spectacle, and is contained entirely w/in the museum and its immediate environs (as opposed to the Park Ave Armory and elsewhere, viruslike, two years ago) is not an outlandish idea. All the museums have been doing it, being more sensible, crafting smaller but still thought-provoking exhibitions, tighter-like. That's the deal here, and by my watch it is a success. I enjoyed the 2006 Biennial for all its seam-busting array but 2008 rubbed me the wrong way. This one works, and while it's an overall spartan affair, there are plenty of moments of interest and even great shock. And it totally whetted my palate for this week's very busy Armory Arts Week. A few personal highlights:
Photo series (not a new thing but in full force @ this Biennial): Nina Berman's 'Marine Wedding', which you may have seen before in '06, broadened by an updated look at the young man and his current situation. And photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair's cringe-inducing series of badly burned Afghani women, protesting their marriages.
Installation: Robert Grosvenor splits his room very nicely + I'm coming around to digging his newer pieces. Jessica Jackson Hutchins' Pres. Obama-newspapered sofa w/ ceramics and David Adamo's just-happened split wood scattering (these two artists are both featured in the Armory), and if I may the room of Charles Ray's ink-drawn flowers, mutant-'Avatar'-world dandelions, childishly conceived but so perfectly rendered, and in such an array that they produce a much-needed calming effect (they share the floor w/ Sinclair's photography).
Video: loads (and loads of press on them), incl. The Bruce High Quality Foundation (the collective whose NY-themed piece, projected on the windshield of a car, somehow combines the vibe of Youtube clips w/ poetic narrative, to captivating results); Ari Marcopolous (I'm a noise-head, what can I say, and this super-bright video, like Luis Gispert channelled through distortion pedals, is great); Josephine Meckseper (her red/blue-tinted 'Mall of America' piece would work well against Superflex's "Flooded McDonalds" @ Peter Blum Chelsea).
Painting: yes, lots of it! Jim Lutes masks his portraits in smoky swaths of colorful egg tempera (check 'Piece of Barbara', those eyes...); Tauba Auerbach's masterful 'wrinkled' Op-art canvases work double-time w/ their odd color choices; and Roland Flexner's ink-inundated works are determined by gravity and his breath, rather than a brush (think Max Ernst's decalcomania landscapes).
But like all Biennials, you can't do it all at once. Hence, the performances by Aki Sasamoto (incl one this Saturday, Rashaad Nesome, Martin Kersels, plus noise artists curated by Ari Marcopolous (in late March) and others.
* William Kentridge "Five Themes" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). It is a most delightful feeling to go into an exhibition (here, a three-decade survey of the S. African's sociopolitically-themed oeuvre) w/o expectations and even w/ tangential knowledge of their art (he does charcoal-drawing animations) and then be TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY. I very much enjoyed the trip, both Kentridge's superior dreamlike animated narratives and his drawings/works on paper/set designs. One thing, taking the title of that awesome Olafur Eliasson exhibition two years ago: take your time. You need to watch at least some of Kentridge's vignettes (preferably all nine of his early "9 Drawings" series (feat. sort-of personas Soho Eckstein, the wealthy white industrialist and alter-ego Felix Teitelbaum) to 'get it'. They screen in pairs of three (ranging from like 3 to 9 min each, so you CAN see them all). Eckstein is evil incarnate, all pinstripe-suited and cackling against streams of miners and laborers, watching his empire grow and erecting a monument to an indentured worker (who, incidentally, is chained to said monument). Teitelbaum, nude throughout, steals away Eckstein's wife and the fat-cat falls into depression, bombing his factories and standing sullenly in a room flooded w/ his tears (Kentridge notably uses charcoal and blue pastels almost exclusively). Eckstein gets his wife back and, in the mesmerizing 'Felix in Exile', the alter-ego pines for Nandi, a surveyor of a landscape strewn with bodies. She soon joins this scene. I was riveted. The suites of drawings are like 'best-of' moments from these films, Eckstein in a flooded room, Eckstein and his wife seated back to back, Nandi against a starry night sky. The installation for "Magic Flute" is brilliant, mainly b/c I am a sucker for Mozart, but Kentridge's adaptation for Dmitri Shostakovich's "The Nose" (based on Nikolai Gogol's psychedelic class-study) is better. This is a seven-projection installation w/ Shostakovich's soundtrack and clips of Kentridge's performance interspersed w/ protest and Constructivist lettering, a teasing out for the full-on show at the Met Opera this month.
* Tala Madani "Pictograms" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. The spraypaint additions to Madani's figurative canvases (usually w/ black backgrounds) add a searing glowing effect. Her usual all-male cast pose like stylized letters, from an eye-chart to an amalgam 'leviathan'. Also, three short animations that end in variously hilarious disasters.
* J Shih Chieh Huang @ Virgil de Voldere Gallery / 526 W 26th St #416. Huang's new installation of mixed media electronic critters, w/ their light-up screens, neon glow and waving plastic-bag tendrils, look sort of like deep-sea dwellers in a contained environment. Or, like my first impression, something bioluminescent out of "Avatar".
* "Animate Matter" Group Show @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Four gallery artists 'activate' their mediums, to varying effects and successes. I dug VOLTA showcase artist Dona Nelson, whose sparsely painted abstract canvases either flip over to show the wild action on the reverse side, or are traumatized by painted yarn and cut fabric. Also: Richard Staub's free-form junk-assemblage is a bit shocking at first, these hanging, draped plastic bags, but I think a strong reaction is part of the point.
* Pieter Hugo "Nollywood" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. The S. African photographer returns w/ his lens focused on the Nigerian film industry and its special self-representation. The result is a lush and at times unsettling selection of prints, rivaling the intensity of his 'Hyena' show a few years ago. A man holding a huge cut of red flesh next to a trussed water buffalo w/ its throat cut out necessarily = shock. Also: nude woman in bed w/ a 'dagger' through her chest, the blanket around her soaked through red = shock. But there's loveliness to be had here, too, like the reclining woman in a sailor shirt and the kids. And, unintentionally funny moment: muscular naked guy wearing a Darth Vader mask.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. VERY successful pairing by these two painters. Bradley's stoically clean canvases (some w/ just painted frames) prepare the eyes b/w Martin's breathlessly maximalist mixed media paintings, like the massive 'Hemlock' (complete w/ fungi seed packets) and the self-referential 'Big Glitter Painting' (which, if you didn't get it, is both gigantic and glittery).
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. An intense multilinear solo offering from the artist, incl. enlarged X-ray images bordered w/ ink-covered shoes, ink-stained church pews modded into like a divided wheelchair, an entire ambulance w/ whited-out signage and fogged up windows. The more subtle works include vintage photography that Ward recontextualized w/ black ink and the short-film 'Fathers and Sons', which creates a palpable tension b/w its long silences and layered, rushed dialogue. Ward contributes to the gallery's booth @ Armory + he gives a talk @ the gallery SAT 1:30p.
* Debra Hampton "Twenty Paces" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Wildly realized warrior-heroines of some near-future apocalyptic world, composed of lots of fashion-mag collages and minimal paint — think Wangechi Mutu crossed w/ early 'Heavy Metal'.
* Alexander Calder @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. So there IS a mobile here, a soaring black thing, like a pterosaur, in addition to several massive land-dwelling steel pieces that all manage to carry Calder's typical lightness. Even the really big one, spread out like a 15-ft-tall black lobster, appears that, if if could move, it would do so w/ an unnerving grace.
* David Smith @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. I can take Smith's signature cubular steel sculpture in small dosages, but this five-piece exhibit of his late works is incredibly good, in a quiet, contemplative way. Only one stacked giftbox-style sculpture here. The other four steels incl two Joan Miro-like formless painted abstracts and two conglomerates, one like the ribcage of a large extinct lizard and the other, w/ the ominous addition of wheels that makes it somehow both alienesque and like a precursor to an obscure torture mechanism.
* Five Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. One immediate takeaway from this 3doz.-strong group show, nearly the entire gallery roster, + some special guests, is that figurative/realist painting is NOT dead. Many of these artists (Andy Kehoe, Jim Houser, Xiaoqing Ding, Tara McPherson) have excellent control of the brush. Add to it the cultural-mindedness of Doze Green, Jeff Soto and WK Interact (+ the requisite lovelies of Ray Caesar, Invader and Souther Salazar) and you'd better cast that term 'low art' wayyy off to the side. This is dope.
* Stefan Bruggemann "Headlines & Last Line in the Movies" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. A mirrored, well-lit chamber, where said mirrors are covered in spraypainted words, the end dialogue of films + current headlines. It's when you read them and can't quite determine which came from where that it gets really interesting.
* Mike Nelson @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. OK picture the 'period rooms' of the Met museum (or the Brooklyn Museum), you know those like colonial, Victorian etc rooms. So it's like that, only a bunch of camper-trailers welded together, creating a slightly unsettling white-trash romp. And keeping it freaky, Nelson adds a busted mirror, low ceilings and odd mood lighting to the experience.
* Peter Halley @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Tasty geometric abstracts in furious, yet complementary, Day-glo paint, a textural mix of canvas and 'roll-a-tex' (think magnified sponge), rendered in Halley's unique vocab = 'prisons' (boxy horizontal bars, like Dan Walsh only hardedge) and 'conduits' (Mario Bros pipes, but hardedge again). Chiptune bands would have a field-day here.
* Jacco Olivier @ Marianne Boesky Gallery / 509 W 24th St. We have got a stunning, all-encompassing environment right here, courtesy of the Dutch artist's immaculately rendered painted animations. Before you even get to the centerpiece, 'Revolution', you'll be taken aback by his effectively emotive works. 'Bath' (recalling proper post-Impressionists) and 'Stumble' (an abstract seashore, complete w/ the sound of crashing waves) sets the scene for the brilliant 'Transition', an inland cove set around rock walls and fluttering petals. A figure slowly emerges from the distance, trudging through a jewel-like pool of water before plunging into it and swimming away. The effect is both "Avatar" and that scene from Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" (that Sardinia-set dream sequence when Monica Vitti is w/ her sick son). Then we have 'Revolution', like staring into either magma or, more appropriately, some colored-gas nebula in deep space, as worlds form and float by us. Cosmically trippy.
* "In Standard Time" Group Show @ Ana Cristea Gallery / 521 W 26th St. Marc Straus curates this tight, youngish/international 10-artist showcase. We have several fine takes on still-life (Adam Stennett's pristinely composed trippy lot; Roland Horvath's gauzily Morandi-esque) and intriguing portraiture (Tim Eitel's chilling entry, which from a short distance looks like a duotone minimalist piece; Richard Wathen's exquisite Old World-style, Andrew Sendor's cheekily realized), plus the extra treat from Michael Brown (melted LPs into trompe l'oeil sculpture and Marc Bijl's Gagosian signage.
* Dan Walsh "Days and Nights" @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 521 W 21st St. 1st off, Walsh's titular multipanel work/installation, created especially for the gallery, is a show-stopper: think blinking lights through a haze of urban night and day. The other new works are fairly subdued in tone and palette, but the diagonally glowing 'Facility' is quite nice.
* Céleste Boursier-Mougenot "harmonichaos" @ Paula Cooper 'Boutique' / 465 W 23rd St. The full arsenal of Boursier-Mougenot's awe-inspiring sound installation, which I saw at the 21st St gallery back in '06, involving old-school vacuum cleaners outfitted w/ harmonicas, motion sensors and lights.
* Lian Gillick @ Casey Kaplan / 525 W 21st St. The immediately apparent 1/2 of Gillick's great two-tone show is the installation of his signature colored-plexiglass frames (like roofs, here) and painted aluminum benches. These act as open-airs contemplation booths ('Discussion Benches') for the 2nd 1/2 of the show, an amusing and intriguing array of text- and woodblock-derived prints. It begins rather funnily:
Alberto: "What can I get you?"
Frank: "What's on tap?"
Alberto: "Old beer."
Frank: "Old beer?"
Alberto: "I've also got Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Breezers or Red Strip in bottles with a straw."
But then, in subsequent frames, becomes increasingly surreal. That + the juxtaposition w/ the woodblock prints reminded me of the double world in Haruki Murakami's "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World".
LAST CHANCE
* Damien Hirst "End of An Era" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. Hirst's last solo show at the gallery was nearly five years ago and didn't include any formaldehyde tanks. Don't worry: they're back. Actually, he's provided several flavours of viewing-experience, so if you're more into the luxe, aesthetic Hirst, check the 4th fl. Beyond his dot paintings (the grayscale immemorially titled "Acetaldehye" is especially off-putting) and medicine cabinets are a series of wildly colored, wildly effective butterfly paintings. Indeed, Hirst combines household gloss and actual butterflies (either just the wings or the entire insect) into brilliant, super-trippy mosaics. Check them from different POVs to get the iridescent effect. It's like Philip Taaffe's mandala drawings only way more intense, like comparing shroom tea to a double-hit of acid. Fancy the de-luxe Hirst? Hit the 6th fl, ideally up the spiraling staircase instead of the lifts, and blind yourself w/ "Forgotten Promises" (he always names his art well), a room-filling gold-plated mirrored vitrine, its shelves lined w/ like a thousand cubic zirconia. The next-door gallery contains the aforementioned show-stopper: surrounded by photorealistic renderings of precious gemstones, and an even bigger wall-lining gold-plated mirrored vitrine ("Judgement Day", housing like a million manufactured diamonds) is "End of an Era", a gold-horned bull's head, in formaldehyde, on a marble plinth. If you fear being even remotely offended by said installation, I advise you to give wide berth to the neck-end of the vitrine (the bull is, after all, decapitated). But seen from a front or side view (and more effectively from a short distance, w/ the glittering wall of diamonds in the background, it's a stirring piece. And a highly recommended, very dope exhibition.
+ Elisa Sighicelli "The Party is Over". Sighicelli's forte is light. Her array of backlit lightbox C-prints of spare urban spaces (empty billboards, construction sites) glow with this energy, but there wasn't a lot of variety to hold my attention. Luckily she included two video works, the titular piece (this 7.5 hour beast, which obviously you don't have to stay the whole while to get it, a silent number w/ reverse fireworks against a night sky, quite mesmerizing) and the standout, called 'Phil Building', a very Electric Company-ish light show against an office tower, accompanied Paolo Campana's spacey soundtrack, veering from theremin-laden mood-scapes to light bossa-nova like from a YHC Heavy Industries piece. It's dope.
* Ida Applebroog "MONALISA" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. The hook to this vibrant new installation from Applebroog lies in an extensive series of self-portrait vagina drawings from '69. This project was rediscovered only last year, and the artist scanned and digitally augmented the drawings (sometimes w/ the addition of light color washes) and hung the updated vellum prints to nearly totally cover a wood-scaffolding structure, the show's titular piece. The chamber itself is blocked by a ladder (adorned with an ambiguously gendered visage who I am honored to write shares my surname), and beyond that is the massive doll-like portrait 'Monalisa', swimming in a field of red. It's a bracingly energetic experience.
* Leonardo Drew @ Sikkema Jenkins @ Co / 530 W 22nd St. Attend Drew's wood-relief sculpture show and you'll see how my mind works when crafting these LISTs. Here's what I was thinking: the blackened wood pieces (incl. the MASSIVE one at the entryway) echo Louise Nevelson, and the inclusion of cubbyhole dividers practically scream her name; the spinier structures look sort of like Ursula von Rydingsvard's rough-hewn wood sculpture, only they're cut against the grain and suspended from the wall; the large cartography pieces (one spans an entire wall) resemble Mark Bradford's scorched urban mapmaking; and the behind-glass organic shapes are a bit like Anselm Reyle but w/o the new-car paint job. See, it's fun!
+ Vik Muniz, in the project room. Three more of his junk sculpture C-prints and one dirt-drawn C-print, everything has to do w/ skulls or skeletons and they look like woodcuts from a great distance but up close, when you decipher the scale Muniz used (a shoe here, a petrol can there) you realize these things are pretty fantastically big (except for the dirt-drawn skull, that's true to scale but no less impressive).
* David Reed "Works on Paper" @ Peter Blum Soho / 99 Wooster St. Absolutely essential viewing for Reed buffs (self included) or anyone remotely interested in the workings of one of contemporary art's more intriguing abstract painters. I am totally serious here. Check it: Reed paints these ribbon-y, otherworldly, color-saturated abstracts in either skinny verticals or subway-graf style horizontals. I have no idea how he does it, but his mastery and control of the paint is top-notch. This expansive show features his work-sheets (enlarged diary entries, almost, sketches, paint swatches and his draftsman's lettering covering graph paper) and color studies. Read through a suitably detailed work-sheet (they all are, just pick one), get the gist of 'layering', 'transparency', 'removal' etc, then check one of the rough color studies and you will still have NO idea how point A goes to point B — but you'll have some insight into the artist's workings. The suite of color studies in the front gallery, which I strongly suggest you check LAST, are an eye-popping green and dayglo orange mix from this year, progress towards some dope paintings, no doubt.
* Robert Grosvenor @ Paula Cooper Gallery / 534 W 21st St. Three fantastic vintage works from the industrial 'assemblage' artist, composed of his heavy signature materials (sheet metal, cinderblocks, concrete slabs). The earliest piece on display, from '86, is like an archaeological site, only the fossil is a concrete wall and the canopy a bunch of crudely-cut, welded steel. The latest, from '94,includes a welded surfboard/UFO object resting atop a row of lashed-together poles.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
fee's LIST (through 3/2)
WEDNESDAY
* William Kentridge "Five Themes" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave). A three-decade survey of the S. African artist, encompassing his charcoal-drawing animations (which is how I know him best), prints, works on paper, sculpture etc, in his continuing dialogue w/ apartheid, colonialism and cultural events both unique to S. Africa but applicable to contemporary society. Plus he's been working on a stage adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's satire "The Nose", led by Dmitri Shostakovich and debuting @ the Met Opera next month.
+ Yin Xiuzhen. Large site-specific installation by the Chinese artist, adapting a minibus into a corridor-like chamber for chitchat.
THURSDAY
* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). The mighty Whitney has the distinction of leading off the ecstatic wave of impending art events (the Armory Show + VOLTA and its satellites and the Dakis Joannou show @ New Museum, happening next week). So it's to the museum's benefit that this smaller, focused gathering (55 international artists, based in the museum itself instead of bleeding out into the city) has the potential to be something very good. I mean, two years is a LONG time. Much has happened since the last sprawling Biennial. Let's see what they've done to better it.
* Tala Madani "Pictograms" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. Madani is running a strong cool-wave now, w/ her strong solo show at the gallery in '08, her powerful output @ the New Museum's "Younger Than Jesus" inaugural Triennial, and an assortment of group shows. Her new exhibition, augmented by spraypaint on canvas, utilizes her characteristic all-male cast, only this time they resemble letters, to dual representational effect.
* "Animate Matter" Group Show @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Four gallery artists 'activate' their mediums in various methods, incl. VOLTA showcase artist Dona Nelson (whose cloth-covered abstract paintings hang freeform), Pia Maria Martin's animations, Richard Staub's signature stylized junk-assemblage and works on paper by Rose Wylie.
* Pieter Hugo "Nollywood" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. He riveted us a few years back w/ the unparalleled 'The Hyena and Other Men', and the S. African photographer returns w/ his lens focused on the Nigerian film industry and its special self-representation.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. I would have been satisfied w/ just a Martin show, he of the colorful mixed media abstract paintings, but this show was conceived as a dialogue b/w the two NY-based artists, and Bradley's streamlined work should pair well against Martin's maximalist canvases.
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Ward's 1st solo show in the gallery should cut to the quick in two ways: his junk-assemblage installations recalling violence and disarray and his reedited vintage photography. Ward's work will also be part of the gallery's booth at this year's Armory Show.
* Debra Hampton "Twenty Paces" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Wildly realized warrior-heroines of some near-future apocalyptic world, composed of very NOW materials (like fashion mag collages) — think sort of a cross b/w Wangechi Mutu and early 'Heavy Metal'.
* Anya Kielar "Face" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This looks cool: Kielar assembles these pigmented-sand-covered relief sculptures of various materials on masonite board in such a way that, abstractly, they resemble part of a human face.
* Toro y Moi + Twin Sister @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. Two very different, very trippy takes on dream-pop. I am completely enraptured by Twin Sister's trip-hop-ish live set, and Toro (aka SC's Chaz Bundick) croons over sun-drenched electronics.
* "Monsters & Murderers: The Films of Bong Joon-ho" @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (D/M/NR to Pacific, 23/45/B/Q to Atlantic). The mini-festival title is a bit silly if you think of monsters in the conventional beastly sense — of which, Bong's "The Host" is nonpareil in its mastery of that genre — but if you add to it the monstrous human element, that WE can take this horrid form, then the meaning becomes way more clear. SO, in celebration of the full-on debut of Bong's latest film "Mother" (premiered here @ the NY Film Festival), a look back at his other three films, plus a selection of shorts.
* "Memories of Murder" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2003) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7:30p. Bong made it big w/ this one, based on S. Korea's 1st serial killer. And it's ace seeing the incredibly versatile Song Kang-ho as an earnest detective in this grueling feature.
FRIDAY
* Robert Morris @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St. I always dug Morris' scatter pieces more than his felt (though, admittedly, no one can do felt quite like Morris). This seminal piece, recreated from his original 1969 solo show at the gallery, contains that signature felt, plus metal and is augmented by nine original work drawings related to the piece.
* Alexander Calder @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. W Chelsea just got inundated w/ a lot of fine sculpture. What w/ the fab small-scale stuff of Beverly Pepper (Marlborough) and Ken Price (Matthew Marks), now we've large-scale sculptures by Calder from 1957-64 (and classics by David Smith, a few blocks away). And though there are no mobiles here, I somehow expect these works to carry that deceivingly light, kinetic mannerism of his smaller works.
* David Smith @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Five of Smith's final major large-scale cubular sculpture before his premature death. Pair w/ the Calder show a few blocks away.
* Eemyun Kang "Dozing River" @ Tina Kim Gallery / 545 W 25th St 3rd Fl. Large-scale sleepy abstract landscape paintings, tending toward one large central floral element against a hazy colored background.
* Lucas Ajemian + Julien Bismuth "Les Tristes" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. The duo is making a film, which will be staged in and around the gallery, and a publication of sorts. The 2nd part of that reminded me a bit of Alexandra Mir's 'newsroom' installation at Mary Boone back in 2007, crossed w/ the live readings of On Kawara's 'One Million Years' at David Zwirner in early 2009, only...you can actually BE in Ajemian and Bismuth's film.
* Noveller + Sisters + Knight School @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. Bruar is going to be crowded tonight! An investigation into noise, segueing from the clean pop of Knight School to the garage-thump duo Sisters to Noveller's wailing, multi-textured solo drone guitar.
* "Persecution" (dir. Patrice Chéreau, France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:40p (part of Film Comment Selects). AKA Romain Duris + Charlotte Gainsbourg's new film, a destructive path of romantic distress and torment, which Chéreau knows VERY well how to depict (anybody see "Gabrielle"?). ALSO SAT 6p
* "Mother" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7p + Q&A w/ Bong. Dude hard-up on his luck possibly framed for murder, and his tough-as-nails mom goes to bat for him on an inexhaustible quest to prove his innocence.
SATURDAY
* Five Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. Excellent primer for those new to 'Pop Surrealism' (or Street Art, if you've actually never heard of that before, and obvs you're not from NY) or those who want to catch up w/ the gallery's fine roster of artists. Expect poetically beautiful representational works, wildly colored abstracts, and viscerally disturbing paintings.
* Joan Jonas "Reading Dante III" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Jonas furthers her investigation into Dante's "Divine Comedy", which you may have seen at Performa 09, by a reinterpreted multimedia installation, melding the characters w/ her own personal journeys.
+ Stefan Bruggemann "Headlines & Last Line in the Movies". I know Bruggemann's site-specific installations best for their heavy textual context — he's VERY good at creating lively character-based works. Though at a group show last year @ the gallery, he flipped a mirror and called that his piece. This time, he spraypaints mirrors w/ final dialogue from films, which just sounds dope.
* Mike Nelson @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Nelson's disquietingly familiar installations remind me a bit like Ed Kienholz's works but absent of people, which is perhaps creepier.
* Thomas Nozkowski "Works on Paper 1991-2008" @ Senior & Shopmaker Gallery / 210 11th Ave. The gallery inaugurates its new space in a big way, w/ a survey of the dots+bars artist's printmaking techniques and varied output.
* Esko Männikkö "Harmony Sisters" @ Yancey Richardson Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 3rd Fl. I am digging this influx of Finnish art, both here and at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery a few blocks north (and at the upcoming Armory Show, via Galerie Forsblom + Galerie Anhava). This exhibit features Mannikkö's super-sharp portraits of wild and domesticated animals.
* "The Helsinki School: Seven Approaches" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. Seven artists who use photography as a conceptual device. Members of the School include Joonas Ahlava, Ola Kolehmainen and Niko Luoma.
* "Celebration: The Birthday in Chinese Art" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). w/ the lovely Cinnabar (the Chinese art of carved lacquer) recently closed, I felt this gaping loss in Chinese decorative arts that I did not even realize I HAD. Luckily, this exhibition of auspicious occasions, feat. embroidered hanging scrolls, lacquered screens and loads else from the Ming and Qing dynasties, should satisfy this new-found crazy craving.
* "The Host" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2006) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 6:30/9:30p. Outrageously good, breathtakingly thrilling. Bong takes the worn-out CGI'ed notion of the blockbuster monster movie and turned it on its ear. Not only are the effects and the beasty absolutely ACE, but just beneath the surface is Bong's main point: a bittersweet, fractured family drama, w/ Song Kang-ho as the bumbling young dad and Bae Doona as the emotionally distant athletic sister. Gets my LIST's seal of approval.
* Surfer Blood + Beach Fossils @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p/$10. Those Florida boys Surfer Blood rock really hard, and though their show tomorrow night @ Mercury Lounge sold out, THIS one should be wayyy better. Though both share biilling w/ Nashville's Turbo Fruits (think The Guess Who), Market Hotel also hosts Greenpoint's Beach Fossils, whose surf-inflected live show is (somehow) more energetic than ever, riling the crowd into a happy frenzy, and the sludgy Grooms. NICE.
* pow wow! @ Fort Useless / 36 Ditmars St, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p/. I missed the Nazareno Bros & crew during CMJ and only now realize they've augmented their good-vibey retro-pop w/ a lead guitarist/singer named Amanda. I dig it! w/ Mama Bear. (and, incidentally, this venue is located like a block from Market Hotel)
SUNDAY
* "A Brighter Summer Day" (dir. Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 1:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). Yang's four-hour coming-of-age opus, set in early '60s Taiwan and feat. a cast of extras numbering in the thousands, I think. I'm like many Westerners, unfortunately, who know Yang only for his masterpiece "Yi Yi", completed before his premature death, but as a member of Taiwanese New Wave he had many films before, only they never had proper billing stateside. This is one of them.
* "Barking Dogs Never Bite" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2000) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 6:50/9:15p. Bong's debut, which never got proper billing stateside, about a socially-challenged young college professor who begins kidnapping dogs around his apartment complex and an equally young dreamer (Bae Doona) who investigates the disappearances.
* Pterodactyl + Shooting Spires @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$7. Dig: the messily melodic punks Pterodactyl v. Parts & Labor's BJ Warshaw, AKA Shooting Spires, his amped-up solo project.
MONDAY
* Bong Joon-ho Shorts (dir. Bong Joon-ho, various) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7p. Including his contribution to "Tokyo!", Bong's afflicting portrait of Teruyuki Kagawa as a hikkikomori in 'Shaking Tokyo', plus 'Sink and Rise' and 'Influenza' (both from 2004, who each contain ingredients that reappear in 'The Host'). Essential!
* "Morphia" (dir. Alexei Balabanov, Russia, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6p (part of Film Comment Selects). AKA 'Morphine', the good young doctor in a rural hospital during the Revolution, who becomes addicted to said drug and entangled w/ the nurse.
* Purim Party @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Jewish Halloween? PopJew hosts a fab lineup, feat. Beachniks, Sundelles, Tough Knuckles and headliners So So Glows, urging us all to 'get down'.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Robert Ryman "Large/Small, Thick/Thin, Light Reflecting, Light Absorbing" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. An exhibition rich in Ryman's particular aesthetic vocabulary, both in media (varnish, enamel, epoxy, graphite) and surface (wood, MDF, Tyvek, cotton). In my opinion one of THE MOST important shows on right now, and an excellent primer for anyone who 1) wants to 'get' this painter's message and 2) might think just because he uses only white paint his stuff all looks the same and boring. Guess again!
* Ross Bleckner @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Bleckner gives us huge square-ish abstracts of submerged flowers in two flavours: shiny phantomic arrays on shiny photographic paper (not my favorite) and fuzzy soft-focus renderings on linen incorporating digital numbers. These work especially well, and I'd love to see a bench or two installed in the gallery's main room, so we can contemplate these a bit more thoroughly, like a good Monet, allowing the petals and numbers to emerge and subsume one another over their dark backings.
* Keith Haring @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. The 20th Anniv. of the downtown NY icon. You can't hate on Haring unless you're an absolute Philistine, but if you are you're probably not reading this LIST. Shafrazi created a career-spanning exhibition of Haring's oeuvre, the Day-Glo paintings, the silkscreens and works on paper, the graffiti, Haring's bent-metal sculpture — and despite the fact I've seen a lot of this stuff (and probably you have too, if you followed Haring), there are some nice additions. One: the totemic carved-wood monoliths, painted in searing Day-Glo orange or yellow, and two: the black-light room. Oh yes, a black-light room, way out on the north gallery, outfitted w/ several of Haring's particularly psychedelic works and an '80s techno soundtrack, interspersed w/ Haring's commentary. But beware: you enter the black-light room, you might spend 15+ minutes in there like me b/c, even though I was born in the 80s and missed much of this stuff, it still acted as a sudden flashback.
* George Segal @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. It is a treat to see Segal's plaster-cast figures in situ, in their 'natural urban habitats'. The gallery was transformed into their playground, NYC-ish park benches, a truncated subway car and the like. While Segal isn't nearly as unsettling as Ed Kienholz's installations, there is a strong sense of quiet, sad nostalgia in some of the characters: a seated woman in profile a la James McNeill Whistler, and a nude woman, cleaved just above the knees, contemplating her reflection in a stained bathroom mirror.
* Baron Adolph de Meyer @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A lavish, discernibly chic survey of the preeminent fashion photographer's body of work, from early portraits of his wife and muse to his later projects with Conde Nast and screen/stage actresses. There is a LOT to see here, so a few highlights: the unmissable reddish pigment print of Baroness Olga de Meyer (1897), Natica Nast, replete w/ beaded necklaces, against this glowingly ethereal stand (1920), a debonair self-portrait w/ a cigarette and a wall of screen beauties, each one in a fiercer feathered hat than the last. Repeat visits are necessary.
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Gorgeous not-large abstract paintings and works on paper. You get Jensen's Taoist background more readily from the b&w works, perhaps, w/ their snaking brushstrokes, but the saturated-color lot really come alive, all resonating red-oranges and other 'hot' colors. In fact, the textural nature of these, the sort of static-y, roughly applied color intermixed w/ solid drips and pours, reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter's signature (de)application style. But what keeps it firmly Jensen's own are the color bands, tributaries for the eyes.
* Beverly Pepper "Metamorphoses" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Ahhhh this is dope!! I MUCH prefer Pepper's smaller works, like this blocky selection rendered in delicious media like onyx, Zimbabwe granite and marble. The variations on angles, crypto-portals and bent triangles lends itself to like this slightly sci-fi futuristic vibe, like said objet were ephemeral forms discovered on Mars or whatnot, so they embody a prescience that requires further contemplation. I could stare at them for hours.
+ George Rickey. Classic works from Rickey's estate, lighter-than-air steel cubes and rods (and in the case of the 'Nebula' sculptures, schools of fish) that wave or undulate via fans and ambient airflow. A mesmerizing accompaniment to Pepper's weightier offering and a very satisfying dual-sculpture exhibition.
* Gary Simmons "Midnight Matinee" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Simmons makes vintage cinema signage ghostly and frightening by hazing it out like cold flames on spare, black backgrounds. This works most effectively on the massive wall painting, effectively matte-ing the black and permitting the divided image to be sucked up the top and bottom edges.
* Jaehyo Lee @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. I was absolutely riveted by Lee's first environmental-intervention sculpture show in 2008, from the leaves-curtain onward. This one is a bit 'fancier', like the designer furniture fashioned smoothly from logs or the obelisk of nail-formed letters (looking something like Jasper Johns' stamped encaustics, only in heavy metal). But mate that w/ this dorsal column of logs, like a massive sea-beast rising from the gallery floor, and an array of twig curtains, and it's impossible to ignore Lee's unique artistic prowess.
* James Rosenquist "The Hole in the Middle of Time" @ Acquavella / 18 E 79th St. The American Pop legend, and a personal hero of yours truly, has a history of adding 'movement' to his epic paintings — which goes beyond the obvious dynamism of his increasingly abstract works, I mean like physical moving parts like laser clocks and conveyor belts. But Rosenquist takes it a step further w/ the installation 'The Hole in the Wallpaper', 14 spinning laser-print reproductions of his classic works, each inscribed w/ a static mirror reflecting us and the greater room. This piece accompanies the titular exhibition, large works of melting cosmic clocks and silly string fireworks explosions, augmented by either spinning painted clock-face mirrors or outsized colored pencils.
* William Bailey @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. I am VERY impressed w/ Bailey's exhibition. Though I'm familiar w/ his from-memory still-lifes (meaning he has a collection of objects he uses, but he pairs them in his head, adjusting the lighting and so on and then paints the image), I've never seen his portraiture before. And these, a mix of oil paintings and works on paper, are somehow both dreamlike and physically immediate — thanks especially to the models' intense gazes.
* Theresa Chong @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. Chong's new series of pencil and gouaches on paper (either a midnight blue backdrop or a whitish rice paper) are named for snowy Arctic Circle scenes, which makes sense as her constellations of lines and tiny blocks sort of resemble ice crystals.
* Park Jihyun "Incense Series: Weightlessness" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Park composes — 'paints' or 'erases' if that helps — his works on paper w/ fire, marking them w/ burning incense to create cloudy subtracted forms. The show opens w/ a very effective installation of 'trees', nighttime on one side and daytime on the other. There are also several that look like breaks in a forest canopy, looking up into a night sky aswirl w/ stars. Another daytime work is a cloudbank framed by a window. Another thing: all these are impossibly abstract up close, which adds to the laboriousness of Park's process, effectively burning in just the right spots so, when viewed from a dozen feet back, the image becomes crystal sharp.
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. The majority of Moser's new abstracts feature a sunnier palette (think the goldenrods, yellows and pinks of Joan Mitchell) instead of her blue-green algaeish earlier works. They're still sparsely colorful, but they're loads warmer now.
LAST CHANCE
* "The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl. Shahenn Merali has curated one of the most important group exhibitions that I've experienced in a good long while. First try to name even two contemporary Iranian artists, then throw all your didacticism out and catch this show, feat. more than a dozen artists based in Iran and abroad, from people 20 years my senior to several years younger than I, working in a broad variety of media. The lavish painting by Vienna-based duo Asgar/Gabriel echoes the 'Twitter Generation' protests following the June 2009 elections in Iran — a piece specially created for this show, as the duo claim to rarely be so overtly political. This particular painting sets the tone, created by a Tehran-born man and an Austrian woman, for the ideas coming from the multiple participants in the exhibition. Vancouver-based Babak Golkar pairs traditional nomad carpet w/ futuristic high-rise architecture, whose extruded shape mimics the patterns in the weave. Samira Abbassy takes elements of formal miniaturist painting in her multi-panel treatises on war and gender. Mandana Moghaddam's scene-stealing installation of a concrete trough (full of bubbling fluid), surrounded by empty gasoline containers and blinking green fluorescent bars, recalls the largest cemetery in Tehran. And that's just a bit of the art for viewing.
* William Kentridge "Five Themes" @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave). A three-decade survey of the S. African artist, encompassing his charcoal-drawing animations (which is how I know him best), prints, works on paper, sculpture etc, in his continuing dialogue w/ apartheid, colonialism and cultural events both unique to S. Africa but applicable to contemporary society. Plus he's been working on a stage adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's satire "The Nose", led by Dmitri Shostakovich and debuting @ the Met Opera next month.
+ Yin Xiuzhen. Large site-specific installation by the Chinese artist, adapting a minibus into a corridor-like chamber for chitchat.
THURSDAY
* 2010 Whitney Biennial @ Whitney Museum / 945 Madison Ave (6 to 77th St). The mighty Whitney has the distinction of leading off the ecstatic wave of impending art events (the Armory Show + VOLTA and its satellites and the Dakis Joannou show @ New Museum, happening next week). So it's to the museum's benefit that this smaller, focused gathering (55 international artists, based in the museum itself instead of bleeding out into the city) has the potential to be something very good. I mean, two years is a LONG time. Much has happened since the last sprawling Biennial. Let's see what they've done to better it.
* Tala Madani "Pictograms" @ Lombard-Freid Projects / 531 W 26th St. Madani is running a strong cool-wave now, w/ her strong solo show at the gallery in '08, her powerful output @ the New Museum's "Younger Than Jesus" inaugural Triennial, and an assortment of group shows. Her new exhibition, augmented by spraypaint on canvas, utilizes her characteristic all-male cast, only this time they resemble letters, to dual representational effect.
* "Animate Matter" Group Show @ Thomas Erben Gallery / 526 W 26th St 4th Fl. Four gallery artists 'activate' their mediums in various methods, incl. VOLTA showcase artist Dona Nelson (whose cloth-covered abstract paintings hang freeform), Pia Maria Martin's animations, Richard Staub's signature stylized junk-assemblage and works on paper by Rose Wylie.
* Pieter Hugo "Nollywood" @ Yossi Milo Gallery / 525 W 25th St. He riveted us a few years back w/ the unparalleled 'The Hyena and Other Men', and the S. African photographer returns w/ his lens focused on the Nigerian film industry and its special self-representation.
* Chris Martin + Joe Bradley @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 528 W 26th St. I would have been satisfied w/ just a Martin show, he of the colorful mixed media abstract paintings, but this show was conceived as a dialogue b/w the two NY-based artists, and Bradley's streamlined work should pair well against Martin's maximalist canvases.
* Nari Ward "LIVESupport" @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. Ward's 1st solo show in the gallery should cut to the quick in two ways: his junk-assemblage installations recalling violence and disarray and his reedited vintage photography. Ward's work will also be part of the gallery's booth at this year's Armory Show.
* Debra Hampton "Twenty Paces" @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art / 547 W 27th St 2nd Fl. Wildly realized warrior-heroines of some near-future apocalyptic world, composed of very NOW materials (like fashion mag collages) — think sort of a cross b/w Wangechi Mutu and early 'Heavy Metal'.
* Anya Kielar "Face" @ Rachel Uffner Gallery / 47 Orchard St. This looks cool: Kielar assembles these pigmented-sand-covered relief sculptures of various materials on masonite board in such a way that, abstractly, they resemble part of a human face.
* Toro y Moi + Twin Sister @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. Two very different, very trippy takes on dream-pop. I am completely enraptured by Twin Sister's trip-hop-ish live set, and Toro (aka SC's Chaz Bundick) croons over sun-drenched electronics.
* "Monsters & Murderers: The Films of Bong Joon-ho" @ BAM / 30 Lafayette Ave, Ft Greene (D/M/NR to Pacific, 23/45/B/Q to Atlantic). The mini-festival title is a bit silly if you think of monsters in the conventional beastly sense — of which, Bong's "The Host" is nonpareil in its mastery of that genre — but if you add to it the monstrous human element, that WE can take this horrid form, then the meaning becomes way more clear. SO, in celebration of the full-on debut of Bong's latest film "Mother" (premiered here @ the NY Film Festival), a look back at his other three films, plus a selection of shorts.
* "Memories of Murder" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2003) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7:30p. Bong made it big w/ this one, based on S. Korea's 1st serial killer. And it's ace seeing the incredibly versatile Song Kang-ho as an earnest detective in this grueling feature.
FRIDAY
* Robert Morris @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St. I always dug Morris' scatter pieces more than his felt (though, admittedly, no one can do felt quite like Morris). This seminal piece, recreated from his original 1969 solo show at the gallery, contains that signature felt, plus metal and is augmented by nine original work drawings related to the piece.
* Alexander Calder @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. W Chelsea just got inundated w/ a lot of fine sculpture. What w/ the fab small-scale stuff of Beverly Pepper (Marlborough) and Ken Price (Matthew Marks), now we've large-scale sculptures by Calder from 1957-64 (and classics by David Smith, a few blocks away). And though there are no mobiles here, I somehow expect these works to carry that deceivingly light, kinetic mannerism of his smaller works.
* David Smith @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Five of Smith's final major large-scale cubular sculpture before his premature death. Pair w/ the Calder show a few blocks away.
* Eemyun Kang "Dozing River" @ Tina Kim Gallery / 545 W 25th St 3rd Fl. Large-scale sleepy abstract landscape paintings, tending toward one large central floral element against a hazy colored background.
* Lucas Ajemian + Julien Bismuth "Les Tristes" @ Invisible-Exports / 14A Orchard St. The duo is making a film, which will be staged in and around the gallery, and a publication of sorts. The 2nd part of that reminded me a bit of Alexandra Mir's 'newsroom' installation at Mary Boone back in 2007, crossed w/ the live readings of On Kawara's 'One Million Years' at David Zwirner in early 2009, only...you can actually BE in Ajemian and Bismuth's film.
* Noveller + Sisters + Knight School @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$5. Bruar is going to be crowded tonight! An investigation into noise, segueing from the clean pop of Knight School to the garage-thump duo Sisters to Noveller's wailing, multi-textured solo drone guitar.
* "Persecution" (dir. Patrice Chéreau, France, 2009) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 8:40p (part of Film Comment Selects). AKA Romain Duris + Charlotte Gainsbourg's new film, a destructive path of romantic distress and torment, which Chéreau knows VERY well how to depict (anybody see "Gabrielle"?). ALSO SAT 6p
* "Mother" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2009) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7p + Q&A w/ Bong. Dude hard-up on his luck possibly framed for murder, and his tough-as-nails mom goes to bat for him on an inexhaustible quest to prove his innocence.
SATURDAY
* Five Year Anniversary @ Jonathan Levine Gallery / 529 W 20th St 9th Fl. Excellent primer for those new to 'Pop Surrealism' (or Street Art, if you've actually never heard of that before, and obvs you're not from NY) or those who want to catch up w/ the gallery's fine roster of artists. Expect poetically beautiful representational works, wildly colored abstracts, and viscerally disturbing paintings.
* Joan Jonas "Reading Dante III" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Jonas furthers her investigation into Dante's "Divine Comedy", which you may have seen at Performa 09, by a reinterpreted multimedia installation, melding the characters w/ her own personal journeys.
+ Stefan Bruggemann "Headlines & Last Line in the Movies". I know Bruggemann's site-specific installations best for their heavy textual context — he's VERY good at creating lively character-based works. Though at a group show last year @ the gallery, he flipped a mirror and called that his piece. This time, he spraypaints mirrors w/ final dialogue from films, which just sounds dope.
* Mike Nelson @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Nelson's disquietingly familiar installations remind me a bit like Ed Kienholz's works but absent of people, which is perhaps creepier.
* Thomas Nozkowski "Works on Paper 1991-2008" @ Senior & Shopmaker Gallery / 210 11th Ave. The gallery inaugurates its new space in a big way, w/ a survey of the dots+bars artist's printmaking techniques and varied output.
* Esko Männikkö "Harmony Sisters" @ Yancey Richardson Gallery / 535 W 22nd St 3rd Fl. I am digging this influx of Finnish art, both here and at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery a few blocks north (and at the upcoming Armory Show, via Galerie Forsblom + Galerie Anhava). This exhibit features Mannikkö's super-sharp portraits of wild and domesticated animals.
* "The Helsinki School: Seven Approaches" @ Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery / 505 W 24th St. Seven artists who use photography as a conceptual device. Members of the School include Joonas Ahlava, Ola Kolehmainen and Niko Luoma.
* "Celebration: The Birthday in Chinese Art" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). w/ the lovely Cinnabar (the Chinese art of carved lacquer) recently closed, I felt this gaping loss in Chinese decorative arts that I did not even realize I HAD. Luckily, this exhibition of auspicious occasions, feat. embroidered hanging scrolls, lacquered screens and loads else from the Ming and Qing dynasties, should satisfy this new-found crazy craving.
* "The Host" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2006) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 6:30/9:30p. Outrageously good, breathtakingly thrilling. Bong takes the worn-out CGI'ed notion of the blockbuster monster movie and turned it on its ear. Not only are the effects and the beasty absolutely ACE, but just beneath the surface is Bong's main point: a bittersweet, fractured family drama, w/ Song Kang-ho as the bumbling young dad and Bae Doona as the emotionally distant athletic sister. Gets my LIST's seal of approval.
* Surfer Blood + Beach Fossils @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p/$10. Those Florida boys Surfer Blood rock really hard, and though their show tomorrow night @ Mercury Lounge sold out, THIS one should be wayyy better. Though both share biilling w/ Nashville's Turbo Fruits (think The Guess Who), Market Hotel also hosts Greenpoint's Beach Fossils, whose surf-inflected live show is (somehow) more energetic than ever, riling the crowd into a happy frenzy, and the sludgy Grooms. NICE.
* pow wow! @ Fort Useless / 36 Ditmars St, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle/Broadway), 8p/. I missed the Nazareno Bros & crew during CMJ and only now realize they've augmented their good-vibey retro-pop w/ a lead guitarist/singer named Amanda. I dig it! w/ Mama Bear. (and, incidentally, this venue is located like a block from Market Hotel)
SUNDAY
* "A Brighter Summer Day" (dir. Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 1:30p (part of Film Comment Selects). Yang's four-hour coming-of-age opus, set in early '60s Taiwan and feat. a cast of extras numbering in the thousands, I think. I'm like many Westerners, unfortunately, who know Yang only for his masterpiece "Yi Yi", completed before his premature death, but as a member of Taiwanese New Wave he had many films before, only they never had proper billing stateside. This is one of them.
* "Barking Dogs Never Bite" (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2000) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 6:50/9:15p. Bong's debut, which never got proper billing stateside, about a socially-challenged young college professor who begins kidnapping dogs around his apartment complex and an equally young dreamer (Bae Doona) who investigates the disappearances.
* Pterodactyl + Shooting Spires @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$7. Dig: the messily melodic punks Pterodactyl v. Parts & Labor's BJ Warshaw, AKA Shooting Spires, his amped-up solo project.
MONDAY
* Bong Joon-ho Shorts (dir. Bong Joon-ho, various) screening @ BAM (part of "Monsters & Murderers" series), 7p. Including his contribution to "Tokyo!", Bong's afflicting portrait of Teruyuki Kagawa as a hikkikomori in 'Shaking Tokyo', plus 'Sink and Rise' and 'Influenza' (both from 2004, who each contain ingredients that reappear in 'The Host'). Essential!
* "Morphia" (dir. Alexei Balabanov, Russia, 2008) screening @ Walter Reade Theatre / Lincoln Center @ 65th St (1 to 66th St), 6p (part of Film Comment Selects). AKA 'Morphine', the good young doctor in a rural hospital during the Revolution, who becomes addicted to said drug and entangled w/ the nurse.
* Purim Party @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Jewish Halloween? PopJew hosts a fab lineup, feat. Beachniks, Sundelles, Tough Knuckles and headliners So So Glows, urging us all to 'get down'.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Robert Ryman "Large/Small, Thick/Thin, Light Reflecting, Light Absorbing" @ Pacewildenstein / 32 E 57th St. An exhibition rich in Ryman's particular aesthetic vocabulary, both in media (varnish, enamel, epoxy, graphite) and surface (wood, MDF, Tyvek, cotton). In my opinion one of THE MOST important shows on right now, and an excellent primer for anyone who 1) wants to 'get' this painter's message and 2) might think just because he uses only white paint his stuff all looks the same and boring. Guess again!
* Ross Bleckner @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 Fifth Ave. Bleckner gives us huge square-ish abstracts of submerged flowers in two flavours: shiny phantomic arrays on shiny photographic paper (not my favorite) and fuzzy soft-focus renderings on linen incorporating digital numbers. These work especially well, and I'd love to see a bench or two installed in the gallery's main room, so we can contemplate these a bit more thoroughly, like a good Monet, allowing the petals and numbers to emerge and subsume one another over their dark backings.
* Keith Haring @ Tony Shafrazi Gallery / 544 W 26th St. The 20th Anniv. of the downtown NY icon. You can't hate on Haring unless you're an absolute Philistine, but if you are you're probably not reading this LIST. Shafrazi created a career-spanning exhibition of Haring's oeuvre, the Day-Glo paintings, the silkscreens and works on paper, the graffiti, Haring's bent-metal sculpture — and despite the fact I've seen a lot of this stuff (and probably you have too, if you followed Haring), there are some nice additions. One: the totemic carved-wood monoliths, painted in searing Day-Glo orange or yellow, and two: the black-light room. Oh yes, a black-light room, way out on the north gallery, outfitted w/ several of Haring's particularly psychedelic works and an '80s techno soundtrack, interspersed w/ Haring's commentary. But beware: you enter the black-light room, you might spend 15+ minutes in there like me b/c, even though I was born in the 80s and missed much of this stuff, it still acted as a sudden flashback.
* George Segal @ L&M Arts / 45 E 78th St. It is a treat to see Segal's plaster-cast figures in situ, in their 'natural urban habitats'. The gallery was transformed into their playground, NYC-ish park benches, a truncated subway car and the like. While Segal isn't nearly as unsettling as Ed Kienholz's installations, there is a strong sense of quiet, sad nostalgia in some of the characters: a seated woman in profile a la James McNeill Whistler, and a nude woman, cleaved just above the knees, contemplating her reflection in a stained bathroom mirror.
* Baron Adolph de Meyer @ Robert Miller Gallery / 524 W 26th St. A lavish, discernibly chic survey of the preeminent fashion photographer's body of work, from early portraits of his wife and muse to his later projects with Conde Nast and screen/stage actresses. There is a LOT to see here, so a few highlights: the unmissable reddish pigment print of Baroness Olga de Meyer (1897), Natica Nast, replete w/ beaded necklaces, against this glowingly ethereal stand (1920), a debonair self-portrait w/ a cigarette and a wall of screen beauties, each one in a fiercer feathered hat than the last. Repeat visits are necessary.
* Bill Jensen @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Gorgeous not-large abstract paintings and works on paper. You get Jensen's Taoist background more readily from the b&w works, perhaps, w/ their snaking brushstrokes, but the saturated-color lot really come alive, all resonating red-oranges and other 'hot' colors. In fact, the textural nature of these, the sort of static-y, roughly applied color intermixed w/ solid drips and pours, reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter's signature (de)application style. But what keeps it firmly Jensen's own are the color bands, tributaries for the eyes.
* Beverly Pepper "Metamorphoses" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Ahhhh this is dope!! I MUCH prefer Pepper's smaller works, like this blocky selection rendered in delicious media like onyx, Zimbabwe granite and marble. The variations on angles, crypto-portals and bent triangles lends itself to like this slightly sci-fi futuristic vibe, like said objet were ephemeral forms discovered on Mars or whatnot, so they embody a prescience that requires further contemplation. I could stare at them for hours.
+ George Rickey. Classic works from Rickey's estate, lighter-than-air steel cubes and rods (and in the case of the 'Nebula' sculptures, schools of fish) that wave or undulate via fans and ambient airflow. A mesmerizing accompaniment to Pepper's weightier offering and a very satisfying dual-sculpture exhibition.
* Gary Simmons "Midnight Matinee" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Simmons makes vintage cinema signage ghostly and frightening by hazing it out like cold flames on spare, black backgrounds. This works most effectively on the massive wall painting, effectively matte-ing the black and permitting the divided image to be sucked up the top and bottom edges.
* Jaehyo Lee @ Cynthia Reeves Gallery / 535 W 24th St 2nd Fl. I was absolutely riveted by Lee's first environmental-intervention sculpture show in 2008, from the leaves-curtain onward. This one is a bit 'fancier', like the designer furniture fashioned smoothly from logs or the obelisk of nail-formed letters (looking something like Jasper Johns' stamped encaustics, only in heavy metal). But mate that w/ this dorsal column of logs, like a massive sea-beast rising from the gallery floor, and an array of twig curtains, and it's impossible to ignore Lee's unique artistic prowess.
* James Rosenquist "The Hole in the Middle of Time" @ Acquavella / 18 E 79th St. The American Pop legend, and a personal hero of yours truly, has a history of adding 'movement' to his epic paintings — which goes beyond the obvious dynamism of his increasingly abstract works, I mean like physical moving parts like laser clocks and conveyor belts. But Rosenquist takes it a step further w/ the installation 'The Hole in the Wallpaper', 14 spinning laser-print reproductions of his classic works, each inscribed w/ a static mirror reflecting us and the greater room. This piece accompanies the titular exhibition, large works of melting cosmic clocks and silly string fireworks explosions, augmented by either spinning painted clock-face mirrors or outsized colored pencils.
* William Bailey @ Betty Cuningham Gallery / 541 W 25th St. I am VERY impressed w/ Bailey's exhibition. Though I'm familiar w/ his from-memory still-lifes (meaning he has a collection of objects he uses, but he pairs them in his head, adjusting the lighting and so on and then paints the image), I've never seen his portraiture before. And these, a mix of oil paintings and works on paper, are somehow both dreamlike and physically immediate — thanks especially to the models' intense gazes.
* Theresa Chong @ Danese / 535 W 24th St 6th Fl. Chong's new series of pencil and gouaches on paper (either a midnight blue backdrop or a whitish rice paper) are named for snowy Arctic Circle scenes, which makes sense as her constellations of lines and tiny blocks sort of resemble ice crystals.
* Park Jihyun "Incense Series: Weightlessness" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. Park composes — 'paints' or 'erases' if that helps — his works on paper w/ fire, marking them w/ burning incense to create cloudy subtracted forms. The show opens w/ a very effective installation of 'trees', nighttime on one side and daytime on the other. There are also several that look like breaks in a forest canopy, looking up into a night sky aswirl w/ stars. Another daytime work is a cloudbank framed by a window. Another thing: all these are impossibly abstract up close, which adds to the laboriousness of Park's process, effectively burning in just the right spots so, when viewed from a dozen feet back, the image becomes crystal sharp.
* Jill Moser @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. The majority of Moser's new abstracts feature a sunnier palette (think the goldenrods, yellows and pinks of Joan Mitchell) instead of her blue-green algaeish earlier works. They're still sparsely colorful, but they're loads warmer now.
LAST CHANCE
* "The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St, 2nd Fl. Shahenn Merali has curated one of the most important group exhibitions that I've experienced in a good long while. First try to name even two contemporary Iranian artists, then throw all your didacticism out and catch this show, feat. more than a dozen artists based in Iran and abroad, from people 20 years my senior to several years younger than I, working in a broad variety of media. The lavish painting by Vienna-based duo Asgar/Gabriel echoes the 'Twitter Generation' protests following the June 2009 elections in Iran — a piece specially created for this show, as the duo claim to rarely be so overtly political. This particular painting sets the tone, created by a Tehran-born man and an Austrian woman, for the ideas coming from the multiple participants in the exhibition. Vancouver-based Babak Golkar pairs traditional nomad carpet w/ futuristic high-rise architecture, whose extruded shape mimics the patterns in the weave. Samira Abbassy takes elements of formal miniaturist painting in her multi-panel treatises on war and gender. Mandana Moghaddam's scene-stealing installation of a concrete trough (full of bubbling fluid), surrounded by empty gasoline containers and blinking green fluorescent bars, recalls the largest cemetery in Tehran. And that's just a bit of the art for viewing.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Action Minimalism
Though I've done my share of frequenting (and hyping) the so-called 'bad boy artist' exhibits currently on 'round the city, I balance that w/ proper Minimalism. Like pork belly + beet salad. Now there are some misnomers when it comes to Minimalism and minimalist artists, that they're all stoic, static, oppressively unmoving. You might think of Kazimir Malevich's painted 'Black Square's (Suprematism) or Mark Rothko's late-work plums and purplish-blacks (like those on view at the Rothko Chapel in Houston TX) which are technically color-field, or the fluorescent light works by Dan Flavin. OK so far, I guess. So let's throw in one of the obvious modern masters who's still doing it, and doing it brilliantly: Robert Ryman, he of the so-called 'white paintings', five decades of 'em. Ryman has a brilliant exhibition of new works, spanning his creative vocabulary, at Pacewildenstein uptown and it is anything BUT stoic/static. And despite the fact that the 30 works are mostly the same squarish size (usually 10" to 30" around), they're anything BUT boring. Same deal w/ Scotland's Callum Innes, who in a few words could be called an 'unpainter' — as his stuff may begin as a monochrome (even hardedge or color-field), until he vigorously 'un-paints' part of it, via turpentine, creating a very different, very active minimalist monochromatic new piece. His new show at Sean Kelly Gallery, coupled w/ Ryman's, is a fantastic instance of what I'm calling 'action minimalism'. Dig it? Read on.
Ryman's oeuvre sounds deceptively simple, varieties of white paint on varieties of backings (cloth, wood, metal etc), but the end results are practically endlessly varied. Ryman tweaks bits of each work, adds something new here, changes the size of the painted field, leaves part of the penciled-in grid, reworks the support mechanisms etc, to create loads of new results. But he furthers this experimentation, to the delightful benefit of us, the viewers, by meticulously working w/ the gallery lighting. THIS is where Ryman's paintings come alive, far beyond anything that could be captured in a catalogue. This is why when you walk into the room you'll note the gallery has added partitions and soft incandescents to 'activate' the paintings, drawing out the nuances that makes each work unique. An easy example straight away is how shiny and textured the paintings on wood are, how the grain of the wood bleeds through the paint (except in a few instances where he added additional cloudy grayish-white shapes, quite nearly like color-field, that obliterate all beneath it). Contrast w/ the paintings on MDF, shimmering like Eagle-Brand condensed milk, reflecting the room w/in it, but w/ no trace of the board's surface. Especially note the difference w/ the one stretched-cotton work, mounted on wood, and how 'flat' the white is, compared to the wood/MDF surfaces. Ryman's usage of Tyvek is also intriguing, as the solid-white bleeds into the gallery walls, permitting anything on it (an eggshell coloring, or gray-white) to literally bounce off the surface. Never have I been more aware of the gallery walls than at a Ryman show. You catch yourself comparing 'true white'. Ryman says "it is not just the intensity of the light, but the direction of the source that is important, and in each light situation the paintings [look] different". This exhibition is a brilliant chance to take advantage of looking for these differences — and differences in experience — and realizing the complexity of Ryman's work.
On paper, Innes' new series look like divided monochromes, one half white, the other half some color (and a few appear totally white, divided down the middle by a line a la Barnett Newman). Guess what: there is a LOT going on here, but you need to see them in person. Gallery lighting is a benefit, but another is just being in the presence of these paintings to immediately pick up on what's at play here. I detailed the path of least resistance in a previous LIST, but your best bet is to head straight in towards this glowing lemony yellow canvas and note its matte whitish half. I'm talking about the original gesso layer, what once was also lemony yellow until Innes took his turpentine-soaked brush and painstakingly obliterated the color. EXCEPT check the side of the canvas: you'll note spare traces of dry paint, which tend towards a whole rainbow of hues, not just the apparent yellow — which makes one wonder if there are other colors tucked beneath the apparent outer layer). The interplay b/w paint and gesso is especially clear in the white/white pairing on the inner wall. The half w/ paint shimmers like an expanse of White-Out while the gesso'd half is flat like a pencil eraser took a go at it. But again, the sides belie the energy Innes had to enact to rid it of color, even if that color should be white. Same deal w/ the gesso/black paintings: one has a reddish undertone, the other a greenish, but you'd only know that by seeing the leftovers on the gesso'd side. So besides the reverberating, shining color (whatever color that may be), there is a lot of spent energy on the other half of all these paintings. A lot of action happened to make these, and action is required of us to investigate just what is going on with them. It is to our betterment that we can check these out from multiple POVs, just like seeing the Ryman paintings from different angles and distances.
So my point is: Minimalism as a term and a theory can be VERY deceptive. It's not 'easy' nor a 'cop-out' for one's attention span. You have to pay attention to these, you have to be willing to take a role in checking them out. Only then does the action of these on-the-surface minimalist works come out, kinetic-like, interacting w/ the viewer.
Ryman's oeuvre sounds deceptively simple, varieties of white paint on varieties of backings (cloth, wood, metal etc), but the end results are practically endlessly varied. Ryman tweaks bits of each work, adds something new here, changes the size of the painted field, leaves part of the penciled-in grid, reworks the support mechanisms etc, to create loads of new results. But he furthers this experimentation, to the delightful benefit of us, the viewers, by meticulously working w/ the gallery lighting. THIS is where Ryman's paintings come alive, far beyond anything that could be captured in a catalogue. This is why when you walk into the room you'll note the gallery has added partitions and soft incandescents to 'activate' the paintings, drawing out the nuances that makes each work unique. An easy example straight away is how shiny and textured the paintings on wood are, how the grain of the wood bleeds through the paint (except in a few instances where he added additional cloudy grayish-white shapes, quite nearly like color-field, that obliterate all beneath it). Contrast w/ the paintings on MDF, shimmering like Eagle-Brand condensed milk, reflecting the room w/in it, but w/ no trace of the board's surface. Especially note the difference w/ the one stretched-cotton work, mounted on wood, and how 'flat' the white is, compared to the wood/MDF surfaces. Ryman's usage of Tyvek is also intriguing, as the solid-white bleeds into the gallery walls, permitting anything on it (an eggshell coloring, or gray-white) to literally bounce off the surface. Never have I been more aware of the gallery walls than at a Ryman show. You catch yourself comparing 'true white'. Ryman says "it is not just the intensity of the light, but the direction of the source that is important, and in each light situation the paintings [look] different". This exhibition is a brilliant chance to take advantage of looking for these differences — and differences in experience — and realizing the complexity of Ryman's work.
On paper, Innes' new series look like divided monochromes, one half white, the other half some color (and a few appear totally white, divided down the middle by a line a la Barnett Newman). Guess what: there is a LOT going on here, but you need to see them in person. Gallery lighting is a benefit, but another is just being in the presence of these paintings to immediately pick up on what's at play here. I detailed the path of least resistance in a previous LIST, but your best bet is to head straight in towards this glowing lemony yellow canvas and note its matte whitish half. I'm talking about the original gesso layer, what once was also lemony yellow until Innes took his turpentine-soaked brush and painstakingly obliterated the color. EXCEPT check the side of the canvas: you'll note spare traces of dry paint, which tend towards a whole rainbow of hues, not just the apparent yellow — which makes one wonder if there are other colors tucked beneath the apparent outer layer). The interplay b/w paint and gesso is especially clear in the white/white pairing on the inner wall. The half w/ paint shimmers like an expanse of White-Out while the gesso'd half is flat like a pencil eraser took a go at it. But again, the sides belie the energy Innes had to enact to rid it of color, even if that color should be white. Same deal w/ the gesso/black paintings: one has a reddish undertone, the other a greenish, but you'd only know that by seeing the leftovers on the gesso'd side. So besides the reverberating, shining color (whatever color that may be), there is a lot of spent energy on the other half of all these paintings. A lot of action happened to make these, and action is required of us to investigate just what is going on with them. It is to our betterment that we can check these out from multiple POVs, just like seeing the Ryman paintings from different angles and distances.
So my point is: Minimalism as a term and a theory can be VERY deceptive. It's not 'easy' nor a 'cop-out' for one's attention span. You have to pay attention to these, you have to be willing to take a role in checking them out. Only then does the action of these on-the-surface minimalist works come out, kinetic-like, interacting w/ the viewer.
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