16 Miles of String - Andrew Russeth

Bontecou at FreedmanArt, Cesarco Apes Broodthaers, Mekas, etc. [Collected]

2012-01-16T23:36:00.002-05:00

Installation view of Lee Bontecou, "Recent Work: Sculpture and Drawing," at FreedmanArt, New York, through Feb. 11, 2012. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Arthur C. Danto quoting Donald Judd on Lee Bontecou, in an article headlined "A Tribe Called Quest": "The image extends from something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other." [The Nation]

Alejandro Cesarco reproduced the stationary that Marcel Broodthaers made for his 1969 Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles. [Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution]

"Nothing out of the ordinary, / from one day to the next." An poem from the early 1970s by Jonas Mekas. [Art Blog Art Blog]

Martha Rosler talks about the movies. Her all-time favorites: Alphaville and Kiss Me Deadly. [Cynephile]

Robert Morris sentence-diagram drawings for Merce Cunningham. [Eponanonymous]

"Bob made it, but Jasper made it art." Edward Meneeley on Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953, maybe). [Greg.org]

"What about your cell phone? Do you leave it on when you work? Do you like getting calls or texts in the studio?" Nick Lemmin interviews Grayson Revoir. [Lemminsonline via West Street Gallery]

The Lion Queen. [Ms. Jen Bekman]

"It seems silly to feel sorry for successful artists, or for rich people in general, but in the end, there is no attitude to strike that can beat the house." — Katy Siegel on Damien Hirst. [Artforum.com]

"American dream." [PANI]

Bjarne Melgaard in "Grisaille" at Luxembourg & Dayan

2012-01-15T23:44:00.000-05:00

Bjarne Melgaard installation in the bathroom of Luxembourg & Dayan, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

On one wall of Luxembourg & Dayan's fourth-floor bathroom, where he built his latest installation, Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard hung a letter that he wrote late last year to murderer Teodoro Baez, who is serving a life sentence in Pontiac, Illinois, for killing two people with a samurai sword after a dispute about drugs. Baez's had been sentenced to die, but he was spared last year when Illinois abolished the death penalty.

In his letter to Baez, Melgaard introduces himself as "a contemporary artist" and explains that he is working on a show at a New York gallery. "I own several letters and drawings of yours," he explains, adding that he included those works in a group show he curated at Maccarone last year, "The Social Failure," a one-week addendum of sorts to his well reviewed exhibition "After Shelley Duval '72 (Frogs on the High Line)," whose artist list included more than two dozen murderers, including Ted Bundy, Phillip Jablonski, and John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who is believed to have killed more than 33 young boys and who took up painting after his arrest.

Melgaard's exhibition was actually not Gacy's first time participating in a contemporary art show: that credit goes to—as far as I know—Mike Kelley's 1988 piece Pay for Your Pleasure, which included some 40 painted banners that depict various artists and intellectuals paired with an unsavory or just simply uncomfortable quotations. For instance, one from Oscar Wilde: "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose." (Google Books has the complete list of the quotations from a Kelley anthology.) An artwork by a mass murderer—the person changed based on the location—came at one end of the installation.

Here's Christopher Knight explaining how that worked:

"At the 1988 debut of 'Pay for Your Pleasure' in Chicago, a painting by mass murderer John Wayne Gacy was shown in the hall. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which owns the installation, a drawing by 'Freeway Killer' William Bonin has been displayed. And, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here, in the compact, 12-year survey of the L.A.-based artist's work that has been traveling in Europe since April, the corridor leads to a blocky portrait-bust, created in cement in 1977 by Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle. The piece gets made wryly site-specific, as the murderer's art changes with each location in which 'Pay for Your Pleasure' is shown."

Peter Schjedahl wrote about it too, back when he was at 7 Days and it was on view at Metro Pictures.

But back to Melgaard's letter. He goes on to tell Baez that he is "interested in establishing a correspondence," and asks if he is willing to "collaborate to the extent you are able" on an upcoming exhibition. It's Pay for Your Pleasure the sequel, apparently, in which the artist throws himself into even more twisted, abject ethical and moral situations. It sounds like a pretty horrendous idea—the artist taking Jerry Magoo's comparison of him to Slipknot to some horrific extreme—but we'll see how it all pans out. (Melgaard, for the record, has an installation opening at Karma on January 19.)

The piece at Luxembourg & Dayan, though, was pure Melgaard, the superb overload of ideas and form that everyone has been rightfully swooning over for the past few years all shoved into a tiny bathroom: chalkboard walls scrawled with messages, pictures of Baez, a sink filled with Diet Coke cans, empty prescription bottles (labeled for Melgaard, no less) and pills, obscene drawings, a photograph of a ferocious-looking jaguar. All wonderful.

Besides serving as a stellar advertisement to encourage visitors to toss an installation into that unused bathroom they have, Melgaard's work was there as part of the gallery's "Grisaille" show, whose news release noted that grey "connotes estrangement, gloom, neutrality, rigor, seriousness, objectivity, gravitas, elegance, neutrality, depression, practicality, and calm." Which are all words one could associate, in various places, rather handily with Melgaard's installation. Hovering now in this in-between space, will the artist know—will we know?—when he crosses over into something else?

Yorgos Sapountzis: From Simone Subal Gallery to the Bowery to the Manhattan Bridge

2011-12-26T23:31:00.000-05:00

Yorgos Sapountzis performing as part of "Head Zest, New Walls," at Simone Subal, December 18, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

It sounded like a large metal object was crashing down the stairs of the building that houses the Simone Subal Gallery, at 131 Bowery. A group of perhaps two dozen people in the second-floor space looked at each other—was it starting?—and a few headed toward the stairs. The rest followed behind them.

A few minutes earlier, Greek artist Yorgos Sapountzis (whose exhibition is on view at the gallery through January 22) had gone in the in the same direction, after handing out simple fabric capes (teal, yellow, forest green, red) and tall, thin metal poles to some in the crowd. I received a brown cape and another piece of fabric—"Hold his," the artist said in a soft, deep voice, as he moved to the next person—but no pole.

Sapountzis was now at the bottom of the stairs, holding strings that were looped through two large square sheets of metal. He opened the door and the crowd streamed outside behind him, some wrapping their capes around themselves to block the cold. It was freezing, perhaps the coldest it has been so far this winter.

The artist set off south on the Bowery, walking quickly and dragging the metal sheets behind him, which cracked and clanked and crashed occasionally into a garbage can or a parking sign. Shoppers, store owners and people waiting for buses watched him as he darted around those strolling the sidewalks, gingerly maneuvering his sharp sheets with him.

At the corner of Bowery and Grand, he suddenly stopped and faced the caped masses, staring them down. He was wearing a black hooded jacket, grey pants and scuffed white sneakers, and he held a hammer in one hand, duct tape and string in the other. He was breathing heavily, and looked a little menacing. He crouched down and began beating the metal with his hammer, punching sharp indentations into the panel with each blast. Then he was off again, marching down the Bowery.

He stopped outside a branch of the Chinatown Federal Savings Bank. Someone was waiting for him there: a man wearing a long jacket, knit cap and gloves—all black. He had a hammer in his pocket, and a dark beard like the artist's. The two men faced each other and, in unison, enacted a series of movements—waving one arm, then the other, as they stepped about and then squatted, grabbing their ankles.

The metal panels were handed off to two members of the audience audience, who looked surprised. Where were we heading? What were we being made to do? (There was one hint: the announcement for the event had included a ghostly image of the Manhattan Bridge, which was still a few blocks south.) The new member of the entourage set us marching further south, as Sapountzis collapsed onto the ground. He appeared moments later, sprinting down the street.

More men were waiting along the path—outside another store and on a triangle near the exit ramp of the Manhattan Bridge—and at each rendezvous the same ritualistic movements were repeated before the marching resumed. After the last meeting, Sapountzis and his three associates headed up toward the Manhattan Bridge, past a dark police van, to an enormous expanse of cement—I had no idea it was so big—that leads up to the bridge, just east of the Bowery.

The crowd members formed an arc around the performers, keeping their distance as the four men performed their movements once more. A young child—probably just a few years old—broke from the group and approached the men as they moved, trying to make sense of it. As this occurred, the police van (one seems always to be present at the base of the bridge) drove off: nothing to see here, apparently.

All four men huddled together, and then the three who had joined along the way violently attacked a metal sheet with their hammers. It was deafening, so loud that many stepped back or held their ears. Meanwhile, Sapountzis was going wild, darting about with a tape measure, running it behind and around the crowd. What was he trying to build?

The artist disappeared behind the tall stone columns at the bridge's mouth, followed only by the brave child, and took a makeshift flag—made by taking two metal poles and capes from the crowd—to the edge of the roadway, waving it in madly, broadly, even leaping from the ground as he waved it. Cars streamed off the road behind him. Then he dropped the flag, walked over to the crowd, and it ended with applause. Fabric and metal and hammers were scattered across the cement field.

The evening was, in some sense, a reminder of the possibilities that are present in public in any city, even one in which public space is becoming increasingly regulated, regimented, and corporatized. Writing a week later, it all still feels like a wonderful and unlikely success: a small team of people in ridiculous costumes moving through the city with hammers, steel panels and poles—everything that one would need to build a modest, temporary encampment—entirely uncontested by the police, just yards from one of the city's landmarks, and about half a mile from both the headquarters of the NYPD and City Hall.

What would have happened if the police had arrived, if they had asked Sapountzis—or, even more intriguing, someone blindly following along—what was going on?

But perhaps that line of questions lends an air of danger to the performance that was not quite there. There was nothing nakedly illegal about the gathering, though the number of people involved brushed up against the 20-person limit for a permit-less public assembly in a New York City park. (It's not exactly how one would define the space where the performance peaked and concluded.) I suspect that Sapountzis must have at least considered the possibility that the police would have dropped by. He would have been crazy not to do so. But they never arrived.

Writing in January's Artforum, sociologist Saskia Sassen argued that this year's Occupy movements can be understood as a masterful remaking of Zuccotti Park, a site rich with corporate interests, as a new territory, in full view of the camera. "People becoming present and, crucially, becoming visible to one another can alter the character of their powerlessness," Sassen writes.

Sapountzis's work was bound up with issues of the public and private, and the control of space in urban areas, that are not dissimilar from those raised by Occupy Wall Street. However, in contrast to the media spectacle of the OWS protests, it addressed its audience, and the city itself, on more intimate, specialized and even obscure terms. We were all visible only fleetingly, unable to offer an explanation.

With many Occupy encampments across the United States now without a permanent home, the energies they channeled have been rendered more diffuse. Fittingly, Sapountzis's work seemed to follow this organizational logic, asking what small groups can accomplish in the streets today, and what plans, however provisional, can be hatched by a handful of people with shared interests, or just four men and some willing participants.

May 11, 1975: The War Is Over!

2011-12-17T11:12:00.000-05:00

Surf's Up: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Vol. 1, No. 1, edited and with an introduction by Bob Nickas, page 62, The W.C., #39, Vol. 4, No. 3. Photo: 16 Miles

"One of the suppositions which emerged early on from the seminar was the distinct possibility that it's the wrong artists who stop working; that they are the ones who were meant to carry on; it's everyone else who should have packed up and left." — Bob Nickas

On Thursday evening, White Columns held a release party for Surf's Up: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, a collection of "reflections on the artist who disappears." Edited by Bob Nickas, who is perpetrating something of a disappearing act himself (he has said he will no longer curate shows in New York City, and he no longer attends openings, dinners, and so forth), the book came out of a seminar he taught at NYU this semester called "Disappearing Acts." Which sounds like a great time.

Nickas fans will want to pick it up for his introductory essay, which brings Gretta Garbo and Howard Hughes into the discussion of self-absented artists, a topic the curator-writer has addressed in essays on Laurie Parsons, Lee Lozano, Cady Noland and others over the years. He shares that Noland told him back in 1994, "I don't want to have another show in New York for at least five years." And here we are, 17 years later. (He also brings up Maurizio Cattelan's supposed retirement and the Occupy movement, and describes Occupy Artists Space as "misguided.")

Seminar participants also contributed pieces, and there are a few choice ones, like an essay by Sam McKinniss about the 2007 suicides of artist Jeremy Blake and his wife, the filmmaker and writer Theresa Duncan, about which New York and Vanity Fair published articles.

Like McKinniss, the first work by Blake that I saw was the cover he did for Beck's Sea Change album, and I saw and admired his art at various Whitney Biennials. Then he and Duncan died. People like Parsons, Lozano, Noland, and the other famously-absent artists (Charlotte Posenenske, Bas Jan Ader, and Christopher D'Arcangelo, to name three more) had vanished well before I became seriously interested in art, but not Blake and Duncan, who once lived a few blocks from where I live, over in the rectory at St. Mark's Church on Second Avenue. Though I am embarrassed to admit this, since I never knew them personally, their story has always stuck with me, and has seemed to ask this unpleasant, awkward question: Who else among today's artists will vanish?

There is also a nice essay by Davey Hawkins about the California artist Gary Beydler, a onetime student of Robert Irwin, and his Hand Held Day film, which involved the artist holding a mirror almost perfectly still in the desert for 14 hours, to create a five-minute work in the 1970s. ("I drank and ate a minimum," Beydler is quoted saying.)

Surf's Up has four different covers (I opted for the one that features a young and sporty Hughes posing with a bicycle), and is printed in a first edition of only 100, so it seems destined to circulate rather elusively, much like many of the artists that it addresses.

And, on the final page, there is the image posted above, a poster for a concert in Central Park with Phil Ochs and other musicians marking the end of the Vietnam War, which is timely.

Nancy Arlen in "Zoom, Shift, Abstract" at Simone Subal Gallery

2011-11-27T21:40:00.017-05:00

Nancy Arlen, Untitled, ca. 1981, cast polyester resin, mounting hardware, 12 1/2 x 9 1/4 x 12 3/4 in., in "Zoom, Shift, Abstract" at Simone Subal Gallery, 131 Bowery, 2nd Floor, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

What is your stance on Energism? Is it the hottest thing today? Is it enduring a backlash, or is there a comeback underway?

Truthfully, if I ever knew about Energism, I had forgotten about it until this afternoon, when I visited "Zoom, Shift, Abstract," a group show at the Simone Subal Gallery on the Lower East Side, where there are two works by Nancy Arlen, who was, for a brief moment, grouped under that term by the critic and historian Ronny Cohen in the late 1970s.

Nancy Arlen, Untitled, ca. 1981, cast polyester resin, mounting hardware, 20 1/2 x 13 3/4 x 12 in.

In a 1998 obituary for Arlen, Artnet's estimable Rosetta Stone declared Energism "still-born," while Roberta Smith summarized it this way in 2007, in a capsule version of her review of Mitchell Algus's "Canal Street" show: "The brief and hapless trend sometimes called Energism parlayed the plastics and glitter of the discount stores of Canal Street and a revived interest in Russian and Polish Constructivism into a punked-out version of Post-Minimalism."

According to Subal, Arlen did indeed find her materials at the plastic shops of Canal Street, just a few blocks from the show. But only for a brief period: she dropped out of the art world in the mid 1980s and, despite a 1998 one-person show at Mitchell Algus, her work has appeared in exhibitions only very infrequently. Few artists from Energism, Smith wrote, in a capsule review of the Algus solo show, "have suffered such complete oblivion"

Arlene had more success in the music world, drumming for No Wave pioneers Mars, one of the four bands to appear on the Brian Eno-produced compilation No New York. But here she is at a new contemporary gallery, if only momentarily, with these two sculptures, which look like they could be reject inflatable pool toys or deformed Ziploc bags, filled with gelatin or formaldehyde, injected with oozing colors, and made to float off the wall. They are pretty stunning.

Mars, "Plane Separation," from Mars: Live NYC 1977-1978

A work by Rey Akdogan, who cares, 2011, light source, packaging foam, textured plastic filter, cotton strings, plexiglass, electric tape, 1 x 24 in., on the stairwell of 131 Bowery, New York.

One addition: when making your way up to Subal, take a peek at the tiny light highlighting the building's wonderfully weird stairs, a piece by Rey Akdogan, who also has work in the show.

Abelow and Bromirski, Gaddafi and Holbein, Kael and Lumet, etc. [Collected]

2011-10-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

Fabienne Audéoud and John Russell performing in "After Shelley Duvall '72 (Frogs on the High Line)," curated by Bjarne Melgaard, at Maccarone, New York, September 17, 2011 Photo: 16 Miles

Joshua Abelow's ART BLOG ART BLOG space is ending its run with a one-night Martin Bromirski show. [Anaba]
Muammar Gaddafi's corpse and Hans Holbein the Younger's Dead Christ, 1522. [Blake Gopnik]
"Finally, Hirschfeld asked her point-blank what she thought critics were good for. Kael gestured toward Lumet. 'My job,” she said, “is to show him which way to go.' The evening ended soon afterward. Lumet later explained, 'I thought, This is a very dangerous person.'" [The New Yorker]
"A small show, or gathering, or event-exhibition, or bar night, or cocktail menu by Mario Garcia Torres." [Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution]
Michael Kimmelman and Karen Rosenberg—architecture critic and art critic, respectively, at The New York Times—have joined Twitter. [@Kimmelman and @RosenbergKaren]
Jerry Magoo's traffic. [Art Observations With Jerry Magoo]
"Five Bushwick Galleries You (Probably) Haven't Been to Yet." [Hyperallergic]
"Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us." — Carl Andre [ROLU]
David Lamelas, To Pour Milk Into a Glass, 1973. [Strange Messenger]
"After Shelley Duvall," the group show that Bjarne Melgaard curated at Maccarone, closes today. Here is an interview with Melgaard about the show. [GalleristNY]

"160 km" at Kid Yellin

2011-10-20T23:55:00.000-04:00

Installation view of "160 km" at Kid Yellin, Brooklyn, New York, through November 6, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"160 km," the current show at Kid Yellin in Red Hook, derives its title from the fact that somewhere around 90 percent of Canadian residents are believed to live within 160 km—or about 100 miles—of the border with U.S. This is, at least, what Kayla Guthrie says in a moving essay about drives along the coast of British Columbia. We are dealing, in other words, with slight separations—partial awarenesses across short distances. Also, all ten of the artists are from Canada.

A few of them are young and promising, while others were, for me, totally unknown. In the former camp is Elaine Cameron-Weir, who is here (albeit too briefly) with two sculptures, one of which is 100 (steel) (2011), a thin steel rod propped against a wall, covered with brown tobacco that looks like moss. A quiet, crucial grace note in her one-person show at Ramiken Crucible back in May, it looks tough and strong on its own.

Elaine Cameron-Weir, 100 (steel), 2011, rolling tobacco, 96 x 5 x 5 in.

Kid Yellin is gigantic, and the show is sparsely populated, so there is room for everything and everyone to breath—even on opening night, October 8. Only a few sculptures—including two wild Rochelle Goldbergs (one nine feet tall), a Cameron-Weir and a Ben Schumacher floor work—are in the gallery's main room. The Schumacher, titled 217 251 (2011), consists of a long white faucet (Glacier Bay brand, the checklist says) wrapped with translucent micro-mesh that the artist printed with a light-blue metallic streak.

Ben Schumacher, 217 251 Chrome, 2011, inkjet print on micro-mesh, plaster, Glacier Bay bath faucet, steel, staples, inkjet print on paper, 24 x 72 x 4 in.

An untitled Lukas Geronimas, in a side gallery, looks uncannily similar to that Schumacher, though Geronimas's streak is a lustrous gold—gold leaf, as it happens—that he has made to glide across a blue canvas. His work is varied. Two pieces consists of large spools of paper—pale yellow and green—each hanging from a wall-mounted rack like maquettes for Craig Kauffman's hanging pieces. They are a little beat up, a little worn, and a fluorescent light hangs on the bottom of one, its cord stretching loosely to an outlet on the floor. Another is a simple mahogany grid made of four squares, which is almost imperceptible near the gallery's entrance.

Lukas Geronimas, Untitled, 2011, dyed canvas, gold leaf, dust, metal, waxed string, wood, 12 x 16 in., and Rochelle Goldberg, Flatlander, in space, vertical, 2011, wood, background paper, paint, acrylic polymer, 108 x 21 x 12 in.

Aaron Aujila's work was a nice surprise: just two tall white pieces hung on a wall that look like slabs of a prefabricated room interior. Austere and honest and a little bit funny; Anne Truitt's 1961 picket fence, First, made contemporary and cheap. Also on view: works by Dylan Eastgaard, Shawn Kuruneru, Matt Creed, Robin Cameron, and Ryan Foerster.

Aaron Aujla, Divine Pleasure, 2011, wood cast polyurethane, joint compound, and acrylic house paint, 80 x 40 in., and Aaron Aujla, Vermont Cream, 2011, wood, cast polyurethane, joint compound, and acrylic house paint, 80 x 40 in.

Rochelle Goldberg, Exit Through the Inside, 2011, cardboard, Hydrocal, paper pulp, paint, 72 x 12 x 12, and Robin Cameron, Dancing while drawing, 2011, oil stick and oil pastel on paper, 60 x 88 in.

Lukas Geronimas, Subtitled, 2011, mahogany, textile, brass, tacks, string, adhesives, metal, 50 x 32 in., and Lukas Geronimas, Subtitled, 2011, mahogany, paper, plastic, brass, string, tacks, fluorescent light with transformer, wiring, 62 x 57 in.

Later, after a burger and beer at Brooklyn Ice House, I ran into an art dealer who was heading to a nearby bar. He was also curious about Aujila's work, and said that it reminded him of Gordon Matta-Clark's Bingo (1974), just a bit, the long section of a house that was on view at the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art until last month. I was excited, and pleasantly annoyed, because I had been thinking the same thing a few minutes earlier, and had been really pleased with the idea.

Harvest Moon at 425 Oceanview Avenue, Brighton Beach

2011-09-20T10:51:00.004-04:00

Installation view of "Harvest Moon," with a work by Matt Sheridan Smith hanging from a tree, at 425 Oceanview Avenue, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York, through September 11, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

As the summer wound down and the impending anniversary of September 11 brought swaths of Manhattan to a near standstill, the mood remained breezy and laid back out in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, almost at one end of the Q line. The artist Ryan Foerster lives out there these days, down on Oceanview Avenue, and he organized a show surrounding his home out there, called "Harvest Moon," and another exhibition, "Photosho," in a back room.

A tall white sail hung from a tree at one corner of the property, a work by Matt Sheridan Smith. As Foerster told The Observer's Michael H. Miller, no one in the neighborhood bothered him about the work, but he weighted it down anyway, just in case it were to spill out into the street, blocking the intersection. Probably, though, there would be no problem if that happened. People drive seem to drive slowly out there.

David Schoerner

Six drawings by David Shoerner were held to a window's metal gates by small magnets. They harbored text — RED RIGHT RETURN. IN ONE PIECE WITH HER. SUMMER IN THE CITY — and they swayed in the wind. A black sheet of fabric by Elaine Cameron-Weir was rustling too, small metal rods clinking gently against another set of bars: one of the artist's trademark birdcages, shown at the Ramiken Crucible this summer, made into a kinetic sculpture and a sound work.

Shawn Kuruneru

Elaine Cameron-Weir

Over in a corner stood Zak Kitnick's rusted but not battered sculpture, readily identifiable as cast-off, scrap metal if not for the fresh, clean, screws he has fastened tightly into work. It's an aged, stolid ancestor of the dark, sexy, almost sinister metal works -- all black and polished -- that he has embedded in the walls of Clifton Benevento in SoHo through November 5.

Erik Lindman also showed a variation on more familiar work, reengineering the crosses that he's made recently from wooden stretcher bars, which he showed in the two-week Richard Aldrich-curated "Addicted to Highs and Lows" at Bortolami in April. He has switched here to metal shelving brackets. It's a work of pure, old-time religion, hand-crafted design.

Installation view of "Photosho," at 425 Ocean Avenue, with Leigh Ledare work at left

Front: Lukas Geronimas; back: Zak Kitnick

Left: Hunter Hunt Hendrix and Erik Lindman; right: Robin Cameron

Ben Schumacher and Erik Lindman

Grayson Revoir

Jacob Kassay

Washed out, beaten and faded were the operative terms for the shows, which are also words that one could apply to the neighborhood. They would also apply to much of the work of Jacob Kassay. As he has in some recent group shows, Kassay has backed off of his intense silver-plating, opting for just the lightest touch of that element against a black field. It results in almost a golden haze, the realization of nostalgia. It's also a great move in a more minor way, as a response to dealers who are reportedly flipping his works in direct proportion to their shininess.

I'm dreaming, one day, of a gigantic museum exhibition in which Kassay's silver monochromes are ordered into one gigantic silver rainbow, one full silver spectrum — stretching from barely there to full-on, full-throttle chrome. This one is going to be pretty near the dark end. Will people believe that it was once hanging next to a gas meter, a sun-baked Kyle Thurman painting, and a roughed-up Lindman, out in Brighton?

Left: Kyle Thurman; right: Erik Lindman

"Productive Steps" at Mount Tremper Arts

2011-09-05T23:58:00.000-04:00

Grayson Revoir in "Productive Steps at Mount Tremper Arts, through August 21, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Melissa Shimkovitz

Just down the road from the upstate hamlet of Phoenicia, New York, sits the remarkable arts center Mount Tremper Arts, which has been hosting an adventurous annual summer arts festival on its estate since 2008. This year, artists Lucas Blalock and Sam Falls (whose latest show opens at West Street Gallery on Friday) organized the festival's visual art exhibition, titled "Productive Steps," which was divided the walls of performance space and a spacious sculpture garden out back.

Installation view of outdoor section of "Productive Steps"

At a glance, the backyard garden could have been mistaken for that of almost any other country home. There was a trampoline, an outhouse, and some walking stones. But the trampoline was occupied by a hefty pile of wood — and was, in fact, a work by Grayson Revoir, who's been been making sculptures that flirt with — but never quite give themselves over — to full functionality: picnic tables, sans seats, filled with nails; a shelving unit that could just maybe double as a makeshift beach shower; and this trampoline.

Melissa Shimkovitz was responsible for the boarded-up outhouse, and David Scanavino produced the walking stones, which were actually cement slabs molded by rope. Nick van Woert, whose show at the French Institute Alliance Française in Manhattan on September 17, delivered a super gritty, just barely rusted sculpture filled with various molded objects, a welcome counterpoint to his typically far slicker work.

Nick van Woert

Detail view of David Scanavino

Installation view of inside section of "Productive Steps," with the instruments of the International Contemporary Ensemble

David Benjamin Sherry

Daniel Turner

John Houck

Jill Sylvia

Zak Kitnik

Inside the exhibition space, van Woert's metal bars nicely paralleled Zak Kitnick's choice metal screen works (two more were also on view at the Queens Museum of Art). Kitnick has a show opening this Saturday, September 10, at Clifton Benevento in SoHo. Other highlights: an even-more-subtle-than-usual Daniel Turner wall drawing; a super colorful, extroverted piece — a photo-sculpture? — by David Benjamin Sherry; and, pictured below, a supremely weird and gorgeous piece by Dani Levinthal: just a rich blue sky (or is that a pond?), some scrawled words, a photo and a cascade of feathers — some memories or mementos, maybe, of a summer quickly passed.

Dani Levinthal

Gina Beavers, "Tapestry Embrace," at PACS Gallery

2011-09-01T09:52:00.003-04:00

Left to right: Gina Beavers, Washer Flo-lite, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 46 in.; Gina Beavers, She's Got Legs, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 in., in Gina Beavers, "Tapestry Embrace," at PACS Gallery, August 22, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles

Ultra-slim, ultra-thin, gold-tipped high heels against a chalky white background. The white outline of a washing machine floating against the ceiling in a sterile, dimly lit corporate space. A white canvas, blank except for a paint palette and a paintbrush. Those are the contents of three different paintings, all by Gina Beavers, which were included in her recent one-night show at the PACS Gallery in Williamsburg. To put it reductively, Beavers' work is diverse.

In the show's press release, Beavers explains that its title, "Tapestry Embrace," is a dish at the Zen Palate restaurant in the Theater District (its slogan is "The Art of Eating Well"), and admits that, when she was first considering the name, she didn't actually know what was in it. "I could have sworn it said … something about a wrap, and the sides of the wrap enclosing the ingredients in an 'embrace,'" she writes.

But Beavers was wrong. "Tapestry Embrace," the dish, actually features, in her words, "grilled seitan (soy) steak and shiitake mushroom in teriyaki sauce, garnished with grilled zucchini, yellow squash and a banana-leaf filled rice cone." Nevertheless, she kept the title. "Oh well." (She notes that the phrase is actually twice borrowed, having also emblazoned it on one of the posters included in Price Good Market Inc., the endearing art store that Beavers and Denise Kupferschmidt staged at St. Cecilia's Convent earlier this year.)

Installation view of Gina Beavers, "Tapestry Embrace," at PACS Gallery

A similarly curious, casual approach to appropriation operates in Beavers's paintings. In an earlier statement, she writes of her process, "I get an idea, which I either photograph or look up by typing key words into google images." Sometimes, when the internet fails, she constructs sketches of an image from memory. Regardless, she says, "I then paint as closely as I can, the original idea. If it's from a photo, I stick slavishly to the photo, in a submissive way." But Beavers is not quite as subservient as she claims; she has a definite, definable style, or at least certain notable interests. When she really wants to lay on the paint, she does so in controlled, heavy passages. Those ski-slope-steep black heels project well off the canvas, and the washing machine's outline has the solidity and thickness of a long Tootsie Roll.

Left to right: Gina Beavers, 8 Watercolors, 2011. Acrylic and paintbrush on canvas, 9 x 15 in.; Gina Beavers, Kid drawing, Seline, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

When she paints people — and this is where things get most interesting — Beavers applies color in quick patches. Line and disparate colors collide and form angles, cheekbones, faces. There's a whiff of mid-to-late Picabia in a double portrait called Observe the intention of the pose (2011) and a feint toward Eric Fischl in the gray In this nude, the sculpturesque quality (2011). (Both works are below.) They're psychologically affecting portraits, staring out at us not quite impassively.

Where are these people coming from? That nude could be from any number of paintings or films or porn shoots. But churned through Beavers's process, and placed in that epic frame, its source is obscured, though never vanquished. We know that we've seen images like this before, but we can't quite place it. I know I've seen those heels before, perhaps as a drawing on the stand of a SoHo street vendor or sitting, just as shoes, in a friend's apartment. She has also copied some drawings that are, according to their titles, by children. (One is above.) They look like the work of Joe Bradley.

Gina Beavers, Observe the intention of the pose, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 38 in.

Gina Beavers, In this nude, the sculpturesque quality, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 26 x 32 in.

However obscure the sources of some of Beavers's images may be, the roots of her titles are, at least, not in doubt. The two mentioned above come from a 1942 textbook called Anyone Can Paint! From some artists, that buried reference would read as raw sarcasm ("no, most people cannot paint") or a snide remark ("yes, true enough, but they shouldn't"). But coming from Beavers, who borrows and reworks images — across genres, media, and styles — with a care and peculiarity that I can only read as somehow deeply personal, I'm tempted to understand it as an optimistic exhortation, albeit one with an edge. "Anyone can paint!" she says. Cue that blank painting. "Now, what will you have us look at?"

Kaprow at Grand Central, "Fabiola" Tour Continues, a Weiner Remix, etc. [Collected]

2011-08-16T22:46:00.005-04:00

Installation view of Tracy Thomason, "Highlights, Low Fades, & Deep Cuts," at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, through August 28, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Documentation of the 1965 Allan Kaprow happening Calling, which involved wrapping people Christo-style and carrying them into Grand Central. [ROLU]
Francis Alÿs's Fabiola — an installation of more than 350 paintings of Saint Fabiola that Alÿs acquired from flea markets and antique shops around the world — is now on view at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland. Since appearing at Dia's branch at the Hispanic Society of America in Washington Heights in 2007, it has been touring around the world. [this is tomorrow]
Christoph Büchel turned Hauser & Wirth's Piccadilly gallery into a community center — a community center with a really wonderful website, no less — last month. [Strange Messenger]
WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL HOWSOEVER, a new print by Lawrence Weiner, is available through 20x200. The work is a remix of sorts of his commission for the Art Production Fund's mural project, covered here earlier. [Ms. Jen Bekman]
"I’m going to break this down very simply, and as nonlibelously as possible." David Levine recalls his father's involvement in the Marlborough-Rothko scandal. This is the sleeper hit of the summer. [Triple Canopy]
Artist Matt Connors intensely blogs a book on German artists in the 1980s. I'm a big fan of the Katja Hajek's — 'I'm just chilling by a grand piano' — portrait. Sadly, there's very little material about her (in English, at least) online. [And a Half/Und Eine Halbe]
The Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired a painting by Allan D'Arcangelo earlier this year. It's a beauty. [Eyelevel]
"Just as dusk settled over the brick hulk of the New York Security building on Laight Street in TriBeCa last Wednesday, figures in black began walking in, nodding to the guard, and taking the elevator to the fifth floor," Andrea Kannapell, The New York Times, April 9, 1995

Alex Da Corte's Flowers

2011-08-15T23:28:00.002-04:00

Alex Da Corte, Silver Screen, 2011. MDF, wood, enamel paint, foam, glue, bucket, silver spray paint, epoxy resin, cable, grapes, baby powder, plastic flowers, shampoo, conditioner, soda, acrylic rods, and plastic bags, in "'That's How We Escaped': Reflections on Warhol," at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, through August 7, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

“I take one idea and I want to add to it, flip it, or just turn it on its head," artist Alex Da Corte told Christopher Bollen, in Interview, last year. "That’s how it mashes into my own.” Da Corte did exactly that in Silver Screen (2011), a wall-hung sculpture that was included in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia's recent exhibition "That's How We Escaped," which was about the raucous opening reception that was held there on October 8, 1965, for Andy Warhol's first museum exhibition.

Silver Screen consists of a bevy of fake flowers, sprayed with silver, which spill out of a replica of the stairs on which Warhol and his entourage were stranded during that crowded opening party. Flowers also recently figured in Da Corte's exhibition in Cleopatra's booth (which is to say, hotel room) at The Dependent Fair in March of this year. At the Four Points by Sheraton they looked fresh, moist, and tropical — they were thriving in that tiny, sweaty bathroom. At the ICA, though, they look as though they could have been frozen for years, accumulating layers of nostalgia. Decades have apparently passed since March.

Alex Da Corte's installation at the Dependent Art Fair, March 4, 2011

Here's Warhol, discussing that storied evening:

"We were on those steps for at least two hours. People were passing things up to be autographed — shopping bags, candy wrappers, address books, train tickets, soup cans. I signed some things but Edie was signing most of them 'Andy Warhol' herself. There was no way to leave — we knew we'd be mobbed as soon as we came down. Finally the officials ordered the fire department to break through the sealed off door behind us with crowbars, and we were led out that way, through a library, onto the roof, over an adjoining building, down a fire escape, and into waiting police cars. Now things were getting really interesting."

The late ICA curator Sam Green, anticipating a crowd, had removed almost all of Warhol's works before the opening. "Nobody even cared that the paintings were all off the walls," Warhol later remarked. "I was really glad I was making movies instead."

All of that said, Da Corte's soda floor pieces (his sugar-sweet Carl Andres, if you will), which he showed at P.S.1 in 2009, are still number one in my book. (If I had the floor space, I'd try to make one happen.) However, his flowers are creeping up on me, revealing, as they do, an artist willing to rethink and reengineer his ideas at a rapid pace, moving easily from germination to retrospection.

"Flowers for Summer" at Michael Werner Gallery

2011-08-03T22:21:00.006-04:00

Top to bottom: Kurt Schwitters, Chrysanthemum, 1946. Oil on board, 13 x 10 in.; Sigmar Polke, Farbprobe (Color Study), 1986. Mixed media, malachite, silver oxide on canvas, 19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in., in "Flowers for Summer," at Michael Werner Gallery, New York, through September 10, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

In 1946, two years before his death, Kurt Schwitters painted a bright, burning yellow chrysanthemum on a board just a bit larger than a slice of paper. It suggests a manic, almost terrifying, intensity and, as it happens, is hanging at the Michael Werner Gallery right now, alone worth a trip to East 77th Street.

Pablo Picasso, Vase de fleurs, 1904. Oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 19 3/4 in.; Peter Doig, Lemons, 1989. Oil on board, 30 x 25 in.

The current show one will find there is called "Flowers for Summer," a simple title and self-explanatory premise that belies the high quality of work on view. That Schwitters, for instance, hangs above a spare and elegant Sigmar Polke, just a few black lines curving over a green cloud. It's a minor work — Farbprobe (Color Study), it's called — but it's also a prototype for a good percentage of the abstract paintings being made today.

Mere inches from this German doubleheader is another thrilling pairing: a brushy 1904 vase with flowers by Picasso next to a 1989 scene of lemons (flowers gone mature) hanging on the branches of a tree, by Peter Doig. The latter is vaguely surreal, the branches wiggling in from every side of the painting like green snakes, and it holds its own against the Spanish master's work.

Installation view

Lucio Fontana offers a flower vase, as well, though his is a ceramic sculpture and sharply angled, violently brushed with washes of light color. It is from 1938, when Fontana was not yet quite 40. His iconic slashed and punctured canvases were still years away, but here one can see all of the strange energy he would hone and then channel into them.

Installation view; foreground: Aaron Curry, Greenegalbwrry, 2011. Steel, wood, wood stain, cardboard, ink, gouache, rope, 81 x 54 x 71 in.

The gallery has taken a charmingly lax approach to its theme, meaning that a tall 1941 canvas with bulbous undulating shapes — all black, white, and dark blue — by Léger can qualify as a flower for summer, as can a still life by Kirchner, in which a wine glass sprouts into something resembling a flower in its shadow, which falls on a table covered with floral motifs. In a piece from 1911 by the Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (which appeared in Werner's revelatory 2010 exhibition of the artist's work), the flowers appear on a woman's white shawl. She looks out of the picture and holds a fan in her hand, teasing an offer of a cool, refreshing breeze.

Clockwise from left: A.R. Penck, Pfingstrosen, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 39 1/4 x 39 1/4 in.; Eugène Leroy, Ides de mars-iris, 1992. Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 21 1/4 in.; Félix Vallotton, "Le châle blanc," 1911. Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 32 in.; Francis Picabia, Papion, ca. 1936-38. Oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 in.

Nearby, in a Picabia from the latter half of the 1930s, flowers connote darker, more mysterious urges. Two orange-red flowers hover in the center of the canvas, sharing the frame with a nude woman, a large head, and other subjects that are harder to discern: Picabia, ever an arch provocateur, makes it difficult to focus on a single image. Here, summer — reality, really — is coming undone.

Per Kirkeby, Energy, 1969. Mixed media on Masonite, 48 x 48 in.; Thomas Houseago, Flower/Plant Panel I, 2011. Tuf-Cal, hemp, iron rebar, 75 x 46.5 x 8.5 in.

Grand Openings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

2011-08-01T10:07:00.000-04:00

Ei Arakawa sending a weather balloon into the air, in Grand Openings Return of the Blogs, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 20, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Today, Monday, August 1, is the final day of Grand Openings' 13-day run at the Museum of Modern Art. The five-member group — comprised of curator Jay Sanders, artist and gallerist Emily Sundblad, artist Ei Arakawa, musician Stefan Tcherepnin, and artist Jutta Koether — has staged a variety of events at the museum over the past two weeks, ranging from discussions with curators to a performance by the black-metal band Liturgy.

On Friday, July 22, the group staged a singles night in the museum's atrium that was emceed by Arakawa. Dozens of self-identified single people performed Koether's Mad Garlands piece, using black wooden planks (some splashed with liquid glass) to enact a variety of actions at Arakawa's direction. It was pure mayhem. A dance contest, with two partners sharing a plank, followed. I participated, and wrote about it as part of my piece on Grand Openings' MoMA appearance, published in last week's New York Observer.

The members of Grand Openings spent much of their time in the atrium working on laptops while sitting on benches or wandering around the space, preparing for later events, inviting that old question: "Is this art?" -- or, perhaps more precisely: "Are they performing?" The show seemed intent on tossing aside any attempt at an answer. Sure, it's art: it's in a museum. But maybe we're at a point where we need to start asking better questions. This weekend, a writer friend told me he thought the whole affair smacked of "half-baked relational aesthetics," which is a description that I almost suspect the group would applaud.

Painter and professor Jutta Koether, artists Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien, and Arakawa on a tour of MoMA's sculpture garden

Arakawa, Anne Tcherepnin, Stefan Tcherepnin

July 21, 2011: a drawing by Ms. Tcherepnin and a sand piece by her son, Stefan Tcherepnin

Sundblad and an accomplice at work on replica Niele Toroni paintings

July 22, 2011: Arakawa and Koether demonstrate how to dance with the aid of a wooden plank

July 24, 2011: Masaaki Yoshino

The exhibition (or the residency or the show: it's hard to know what to call it) is called Grand Openings Return of the Blogs, the latter part of that title referring to the typed "blog" entries that the group members have been posting in the atrium — their base of operations — throughout their time at the museum. In addition, they have been updating the schedule of events for the show on a webpage available through MoMA's site, in something of a blog-like fashion.

Stretched over thirteen days, it is has been impossible to see everything that has taken place. I have only visited four of the first twelve days, but even if one watched for all thirteen days, it would be impossible to keep a complete record of activities, since multiple events often happened at the same time. Arakawa explained to me during an interview that only members of Grand Openings will effectively see the whole show.

A scene from the rehearsal for the opera The Marriage of Stefan Tcherepnin

Blogs have become the primary means of documenting the myriad events. Reading the myriad writers that have stopped by the atrium to see the show (Danielle Dobies, Michael Bilsborough, and Ashton Cooper, for instance), it is possible to put together a partial record of activities. The resulting picture is inevitably incomplete, but seems perfectly in keeping with Grand Openings' approach, which continually elides performance and rest, art and inactivity.

Colin Snapp and Daniel Turner at Martos Gallery

2011-07-29T10:29:00.001-04:00

Installation view of Colin Snapp and Daniel Turner at Martos Gallery, New York, through July 29, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles

Detail view of Daniel Turner, untitled iron oxide stain, 2011

Daniel Turner's works often evince a just-barely-controlled aggression. He has scuffed crisp-white walls with rough, grey abrasions and packaged tar under folds of plastic and vinyl, keeping toxicity just out reach, rendering it almost sexy. In his best pieces, abuse and pleasure are uncomfortably bound up together.

At Martos Gallery, Turner has laid a long, thin blanket of rust across a stretch of the floor. My photographs fail to convey this, but the work bubbles with earthy, ocher, primal colors, and it wouldn't look out of place in Washington's Hoh rain forest, where Colin Snapp, the other artist here, shot some of his large-scale photographs.

Like Turner's piece, Snapp's photos are immediately cold and forbidding: dark or washed-out, blurry and almost illegible. But then, assuming you're not up too close, you notice leaves or a hint of a flower, some warmth creeping up through the severity.

All Falls Down: Sam Falls and Nick van Woert, "Death Valley," at Cleopatra's

2011-07-20T22:50:00.002-04:00

A work by Sam Falls, at Cleopatra's, Brooklyn, in "Death Valley," with Nick van Woert. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Even as I type this, the two paintings that Sam Falls has on view at Cleopatra's, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, are being torn apart, transmogrifying in slow motion. Both works are monochromes in the loose tradition of Arman: translucent, wall-mounted vitrines filled to their brims with found materials — apples in this instance, red and green.

But there is another material locked inside those boxes: live worms. They are silent and almost invisible from across the gallery, but up close one can see them clearly as they slither quickly around the fruits, waiting for them to rot, for the opportunity to break their skins. It is a grotesque sight.

Falls is planning to feed more apples to the worms throughout the exhibition, until the wall of fruit is replaced by a wall of waste, the colorful monochromes turning the dry brown color of soil. Only at that point, in a sense, will the paintings will be complete. (Will they need to be tended and watered like Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room?) Perversely, these finished products will almost certainly lack the laid-back, easy beauty of their original state.

For now, the works embody organic, natural processes, and are marked with the rare distinction of being paintings that have the potential to fail — literally and completely — in public. The worms could die. The waste could slip through the seams of the vitrines. The smell of the accumulated effluvia could simply become too intense to endure, forcing an evacuation of the gallery that would make Robert Barry proud.

Fans by Falls

For now, though, everything appears to be going according to plan. Falls has even kindly provided portable fans that he has painted into kinetic Kenneth Nolands, classy tools for braving these summer days, or just for clearing the air if his paintings become too pungent as they are composting.

Work by Nick van Woert is here, too, at the front of the gallery: a series of thin plastic containers that he has filled with household substances like mouthwash, sugar, and cleaning liquids, perfectly cold, synthetic partners to Falls's naturally decomposing display.

A work by Nick van Woert

Classic New York Magazine Art-Dealer Profiles [Collected: Throwback Edition]

2011-07-19T08:20:00.001-04:00

I thought it might be nice to revisit some of New York's profiles of art dealers from the past 40 or so years since there are some remarkable ones hiding in Google Books' archive. They are rich with with romance and heartbreak, high drama and petty squabbles, like any great summer read, and they show the New York art world on its way to becoming what it is today, sometimes with uncanny prescience. Here are some of my favorites.

Mary Boone, New York, April 19, 1982. Photo by Larry Williams

"The New Queen of the Art Scene," by Anthony Haden-Guest, April 19, 1982:

"Salle is 29, and articulate, with a dark, Jesuitical face. He and Schnabel are close friends, but, as is usual between artists, theirs is not the simples of friendships. Last year, the two agreed to exchange artworks. Schnabel chose first. When David Salle visited Schnabel's studio, he found his own canvas—painted on by Julian Schnabel. 'We'll make art history,' Julian explained."

Larry Gagosian, in front of a painting by Mark Rothko, New York, September 2, 1991. Photo: James Hamilton

"Art à Gogo," by Andrew Decker, September 2, 1991:

"After graduation, he took odd jobs, including parking cars and working at the William Morris Agency. In the mid-seventies, he started selling posters on the sidewalks near UCLA. 'Real schlock,' he says, laughing. 'I'm being painfully honest. It was like a kitten playing with balls of yarn, or sea gulls flying over a foggy shore. I'm not responsible for it.'"

Klaus Kertess and an early Ralph Humphrey, New York, May 20, 1968. Photo: Herb Goro

"The Gallery of the Year," by Rosalind Constable, May 20, 1968:

"Critics are struggling to find a name for this branch of Minimalism. 'Urban Pastorale,' suggested one. 'Romantic Minimalism,' said another. 'Abstract Luminism,' said a third. Critics on the whole don't like it (yet), find it 'empty.' But critic Lucy Lippard is enthusiastic: 'As the eye of the beholder catches up with the eye of the creator,' she says firmly, 'empty,' like 'ugly,' will become an obsolete criterion."

Arne Glimcher, in front of a painting by Chuck Close, in New York, October 10, 1988. Photo: Louis Psihoyos

"The Art of the Dealer," by Edith Newhall, October 10, 1988:

"Even when Glimcher was in Africa last summer, dealers, artists, curators, and the rest were gossiping about his future. The rumor was that he had given up the art business and sold Pace to Charles Saatchi, the British advertising tycoon and contemporary-art collector. ('I hear that it was proposed but it was turned down,' says art critic Robert Hughes.)"

Ethell Scull, with Jasper Johns's Out the Window and Black Target. Photo: Jean Pagliuso

Ethel Scull is not an art dealer, I know, but this is a heartbreaker of a piece, and it feels like the right one to end on.

"Back on Top With the Mom of Pop Art," by John Duka, June 9, 1986:

"On May 14, the two sides convened at the warehouse. With Ethel were Raoul, Myrna, and a representative of Sotheby's. On Bob's side, Epstein and two purchasers attended. First choice in selecting a piece was to be decided by a coin toss. Felder produced a quarter, but Epstein wouldn't use it. After some shouting, a neutral quarter was found. Epstein called heads. It came up tails. Ethel had won again."

"Painting Expanded" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

2011-07-18T09:20:00.000-04:00

Lauren Luloff, Yellow Window, 2011. Oil, bleached bed sheets, and fabric on muslin, 76 x 60 in., in "Painting Expanded," at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, through July 29, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery's summer show brings together work by 17 painters, most of them young and closely watched, for a group show called "Painting Expanded," which was curated by Renee Coppola, Phyllis Lally, Emily Ruotolo, and Scot Surdez.

Sam Moyer, Untitled, 2011. Ink and bleach on canvas mounted to wood panel, 60 x 48 in.

It's a largely black, white, and beige affair on Bonakdar's ground floor, where a quirky, tightly assembled wood construction by Donelle Woolford (the nom de plume of artist Joe Scalan) hangs near a mirror wrapped in Plexiglass by Justin Beal and a bright silver denim trapezoid by Anissa Mack. The much-discussed Jacob Kassay has a small diptych that spans the floor's staid spectrum: one of the panels is white, the other black, and neither one sports Kassay's trademark burns. According to the checklist, they're brushed with oil and silver deposits, and they show Kassay exploring that ultra minimal, almost-empty zone that he ventured into in the works in his recent Mitchell-Innes & Nash show with Virginia Overton and Robert Morris.

Jacob Kassay, Untitled, 2011. Oil on linen and silver deposit on canvas in two parts, overall installed dimensions: 12 x 24 in.

Hayley Tompkins, Knife, 2009. Found object, gouache, 9 1/4 x 3/4 x 2 in.

Ivin Ballen, 62 Diamond Street, 2011. Fiberglass, aquaresin, acrylic, gouache, 80 x 74 in.

The exhibition takes a flashier turn on the second floor, which harbors most of the more-colorful works. Alchemical processes seem to be at work in a few pieces, as in Ivin Ballen's enormous 62 Diamond Street (an address out in Greenpoint), which unites pulsating, nearly-three-dimensional bands of angular, patterned abstraction with faux duct tape delicately forged from fiberglass and aquaresin. Strange magic is also at work in Anna Betbeze's Slab, which looks from afar like a gloriously decomposing piece of sod that she's actually fashioned from wood, ash, acid dye, and watercolor.

Most of the artists will be familiar to those who have visited the galleries of the Lower East Side and the less-traveled sections of Chelsea over the past few years, but that's fine by me: summer can be as much a time for catching up with old favorites as discovering new ones.

Installation view of "Painting Expanded" on the first floor of Tanya Bonakdar.

From a Back Room to a Fire Escape

2011-07-14T00:06:00.001-04:00

The crowd on Orchard Street, in front of Untitled, on Sunday, June 26. Olivier Mosset is the fiercely bearded gentleman in black. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

"Group Show War," my article in this week's New York Observer, discusses the various exhibition strategies that galleries have adopted for the summer months, traditionally a sleepy time in New York's contemporary art world. It begins at Untitled's recent opening reception:

On a breezy evening in late June, visitors to an opening at the Orchard Street gallery Untitled looked confused. But it wasn’t the art—a monochromatic white painting by veteran Swiss avant-gardist Olivier Mosset paired with depictions of buckets and paint-splattered rags by young talent Haley Mellin—that was confusing them. It was the fact that the 2,000-square-foot gallery seemed to have shrunk to a 10th of its size.

“We really wanted to do this show with Olivier and Haley, and this is the size of the show,” Untitled’s proprietor Joel Mesler told The Observer matter-of-factly. But as he spoke, the bright yellow wall behind him began to spin along an invisible axis at its center, and Mr. Mosset, unmistakable with his long white beard, emerged.

There's a private viewing room behind that bright yellow wall, rich with work by an idiosyncratic assortment of artists. On opening night crowds streamed around the spinning wall, but word is that visitors to the gallery during regular business hours need to ask for the secret to be revealed.

The "back room," hidden behind the bright yellow wall at Untitled, features space dividers by Davis Langlois, a Modernica day bed (not for sale), and Donald Judd chairs (also not for sale). The silkscreen to the right is by the Bruce High Quality Foundation; the prop piece to the left is the handiwork of Graham Collins.

Down the street and around the corner on Canal Street, Stewart Uoo and a gang of collaborators had taken over 47 Canal Street for a one-night event. A cadre of those artists set up camp on the gallery's second-floor fire escape and blanketed the surrounding neighborhood with martial beats, analog squiggles, and muffled vocals worthy of Mark E. Smith. Occasional passersby stopped and stared, and then continued on their way. About two weeks later, Rachel Mason's performance at Asia Society Society, just next door at 45 Canal Street, would also elicit a few confused looks.

It's getting wild down on the Lower East Side, and it feels like the number of galleries is quickly approaching a critical mass. It seems reasonable to suspect that the scene there just may last for a while. However, with the exception of Untitled, most of the the area's young galleries have severe space limitations. As their ambitions grow, will they be content in their relatively humble spaces on Orchard and the surrounding streets?

Performance excerpt of Stewart Uoo, "Throw-up," at 47 Canal, June 26, 2011. Video: 16 Miles

The Outsider: Rachel Mason and Little Band of Sailors at Asia Song Society

2011-07-13T09:10:00.004-04:00

Performance stills of Rachel Mason and Little Band of Sailors, The Outsider, at Asia Song Society, New York, July 12, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"The breeze is actually quite pleasant," an Asia Song Society employee advised me by email yesterday, letting me know that if I arrived at ASS after all the seats for Rachel Mason's performance were filled, I'd still be able to see through the front window from the street. I made it just in time to find a spot, and discovered members of Mason's backing band, Little Band of Sailors, already in position, bravely waiting to begin the performance in the scorchingly hot gallery. (Those who chose to watch from the outside had made a more prudent choice.)

Performance excerpts of Rachel Mason and Little Band of Sailors, The Outsider, at ASS, July 12, 2011. Video: 16 Miles

Mason and Little Band of Outsiders also performed the work at the Terence Koh-backed gallery on Monday night.

Just before 8:30, a man near the back of the stage, wearing thick makeup around his eyes, intoned the opening lines of H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 short story "The Outsider": "Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness…" Two guitarists wearing cat masks, their huge yellow eyes pointed at the audience, accompanied him, lending an ominous, albeit vaguely corny, prog-rock touch to the affair. It seemed clear that things were going to get weird. They did.

Mason and her crew proceeded to enact Lovecraft's story, a tale about a man escaping from a deserted castle in search of life, with films, costume changes, and songs, a gesamtkunstwerk that veered wildly from bracingly literal moments from the story (a video of the main character, somewhat mysteriously clad in a white Spandex suit and white motorcycle helmet, climbing the side of a building), to more bizarre, abstract passages in the form of musical interludes sung by Mason.

Lovecraft's character eventually escapes his prison and finds another castle, where he encounters a spectral presence, "a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable." Mayhem ensues, as it did in the gallery, with a large group of people (visible in one of the video excerpts) screaming and dancing wildly about a tall, ghastly looking creature, who later sang a haunting, chant-like song.

There was much more. The Venezuelan punk musician Yva Las Vegas provided a surprise entr'acte, singing and madly strumming an acoustic guitar from a stool at the back of the gallery. A limber woman in another cat mask crawled around the stage, twisting her body into a bridge. Mason, song after song, costume after costume, dominated the audience like a ghostly, contemporary Patti Smith. (She has also been described as "Alice Cooper meets Carol King in another dimension," which is a fine description.)

A three-masked chanteuse dashed out onto Canal Street, and sang into ASS via a wireless microphone.

And near the end of the show, a performer wearing three Eyes Wide Shut-style masks, a red leotard, and a purple cape — it appeared to be Mason again — burst through the open door of the gallery and dashed out to the center of Canal Street, spinning in place and singing into the gallery via a wireless microphone. She moved gracefully from one side of the road to the other when a car approached, and then retreated inside.

At the end of Lovecraft's story, his protagonist returns to his castle and attempts to resume his life as a hermit. He fails and becomes a wanderer in the world, "an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men." That line could very well apply to Mason's sublime and strange work, for which she has melded the intricate stagecraft and high drama of theater with the raw, apparently improvisational nature of performance art.

The Sweet Spot: Peter Nadin's Bootleg Buying Club

2011-07-07T23:27:00.003-04:00

Peter Nadin, The Bo'sun's Chair, 2011. Fifty-seven hemlock logs, terracotta, wood, string, nutria fur, wax, fabric, indigo pigment, bronze and galvanized nails ranging from 60 to 122 inches high, in Peter Nadin, "First Mark," at Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, through July 30, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Peter Nadin, Raft, 2011. Honey, terracotta, wood, twine, bank run, wax and ham, 288 x 288 x 9 1/2 in.

Eggs, honey, and maple syrup are just part of the bounty, from the Old Field Farm, in Cornwallville, New York, which is available at GBE and poorly photographed here.

After a brief break, necessitated by its food-free Nate Lowman exhibition "Trash Landing," Gavin Brown's enterprise once again has a commissary. In the gallery's rear kitchen, in which Rirkrit Tiravanija operated a soup kitchen back in March, artist Peter Nadin has set up what he terms a "Bootleg Buying Club," a miniature market that sells goods from his 150-acre Old Field Farm, in Cornwallville, New York. A soup kitchen it is not. Instead it's artisanal and luxurious and just slightly tinged with nostalgia: contemporary Brooklyn as captured by the New York Times Dining section, which has already taken note. (As Paddy Johnson points out, Nadin is a press magnet.)

Nadin's gourmet heaven stocks pork rillettes and eggs, fine herbs and maple syrup, as well as jars of bright amber-colored honey, which seem likely to be popular with visitors given that three tons of that relatively pungent ingredient are sitting in the adjoining room, serving as a foundation of sorts for his Raft (2011) sculpture. (Interestingly, Nadin did not use Old Field Farm honey for the piece, though he did use local honey, purchased from a nearby county.) I couldn't resist buying a small jar on opening night, moved, in part, by the idea that I would go home and make John Cage cookies using Peter Nadin honey. (Wild, I know.) Of course, I stupidly forgot one of the cornerstone principles of Cage's macrobiotic regime: "Honey is sugar; don't use it." Regardless, it's great when slathered on English muffins or melted into tea.

Tiravanija's installation-heavy show manages to look somewhat restrained when compared with Nadin's offerings, which include not only 6,000 pounds of honey but also a forest of 57 towering hemlock trees and a suite of huge paintings rubbed with materials like wax, honey, and black walnut — bombastic updates, perhaps, on Ed Ruscha's Stains (1969). Witnessing all of this, it's hard not to wonder how smaller, quieter, more intimate shows will feel in Brown's year-old space.

Forces in Motion: Robert Morris at Castelli, Joe Scanlan, Guyton/Prina, Josh Smith

2011-07-06T09:12:00.002-04:00

Robert Morris, Father/Engine, 2010. Acrylic on aluminum panel, 8 x 8 ft., in Robert Morris, "1934 and Before," at Castelli Gallery, New York, through June 30, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"Some drawings will be rotated throughout the course of the exhibition," the press release for Robert Morris's recent show at the Castelli Gallery, "1934 and Before," advises. Sure enough, when I visited a few days before the end of its run, three of the eight paintings — or drawings, as Morris refers to the works, aluminum panels marked with acrylic or epoxy — that were purportedly included in the exhibition were missing. An accompanying catalogue depicted the absent works — a grainy black-and-white profile of a Neanderthal, a sepia-toned Midwestern landscape being engulfed by a sprawling dust storm, and a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, all copied from photographs.

These new works are huge. Each measures at least eight feet tall, and some, like an image of a Depression-era breadline, stretch twelve feet long. It would impossible to hang comfortably all eight works at once in the Castelli Gallery, which makes the rotation, at least in part, an issue of practicality. But there is more to it than that. Most artists recognize their space constraints and respect them, keeping additional extra works out of the exhibition, in a back room in some instances. Morris didn't do that. Instead, he matter-of-factly worked around his spatial constraints, cycling his drawings through the gallery. "These works will know bigger spaces one day," is seems to say confidently. It's an unusual gesture, and remarkably similar to one made by Joe Scanlan and a few other artists in recent years.

Robert Morris, 1934 Bread Line, 2010. Acrylic on aluminum panels, three pieces: 8 x 4 ft. each.

Recall the announcement for Scanlan's February Wallspace show, deceptively titled "Three Works" (there were more), which promises an exhibition that would '"take the form of a 'round robin." It continues, "[A] single work will be shown for a brief period of time before another work takes its place… [T]he works will proceed as the artist and gallery see fit." And so they did, with more than three pieces slowly making there way through different sections of the gallery over the course of the exhibition's run.

Wallspace billed Scanlan's show as "[p]art audition, part slide show, and part lot sale," and it's that last analogy that seems most apt, since the exhibition strategies of Scanlan and Morris closely resemble those of art-fair exhibitors, who often replace sold work for fresh new pieces throughout a fair's run. Time is money in such situations. Stephen Prina and Wade Guyton seemed to farcically acknowledge as much in their collaborative painting show at Friedrich Petzel, which took place this year on March 31 — a one-day affair, its opening reception reception doubling as its closing reception. If you were planning to see their new paintings on April 1 — April Fool's Day, no less — you were out of luck, a consumer arriving after a store's one-day sale.

What all of these strategies share is a willingness to toy with and rework the standard exhibition format, to compress it or render it topsy-turvy for the viewer. Your experience of Scanlan at Wallspace or Morris at Castelli depended, at least in part, on when you happened to visit those respective shows, an experience not entirely different from the one offered in the 1985 murder mystery film Clue, which had three different endings, with each screening featuring just one. Like the makers of Clue, Scanlan and Morris sidestep the fixed format promised by a gallery exhibition, opting instead to send out a few different variants, none equaling what one typically thinks of as a complete, 'correct' show, and Guyton and Prina, for their part, pretty much eviscerated that promise altogether. (For the record, Universal Studios is reportedly at work on a Clue remake, with Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski at the helm. It is due out in 2013.)

There are more examples, like "Genesis I'm Sorry," the show that painter Josh Smith curated at Greene Naftali in the summer of 2007, which played host to a variety of events and installations, as work was added and removed throughout the length of the show. It concluded with a re-creation of Duchamp's string–filled room (the inspiration for the title of this blog). The newfound interest in Charlotte Posenenske's mutable sculpture also seems notable, especially as Artists Space presented it last summer, reinstalling one of her large works in a new configuration every two weeks.

Robert Morris, Two Women Before 1934, 2010. Acrylic on aluminum panels, two pieces: 8 x 4 ft. each.

What all of this means is, as ever, another matter. The motion of these works suggests an allegiance with the "transitive painting" that David Joselit identifies in his 2009 essay "Painting Beside Itself," work that portrays the various networks of circulation to which they belong. Placed in a gallery, artworks are only momentarily halted on their journey from a studio to a storage facility, a collector's wall, or an auction block. Scanlan, Morris, Guyton/Prina, and Smith make that stay even briefer and more tenuous. One thinks of the story that Dave Hickey once told about the late art dealer Robert Shapazian, in which Shapazian reportedly confided in Hickey, of his decision to leave the Gagosian Gallery: "I sit around, a crate comes in, I see who the crate’s from, I go to the waiting list, I make up this outrageous number and send it out. … I am creating value, but it is not real value.'"

At the same time that these spinning, evolving exhibitions highlight their international networks of capital and distribution, they also evince a persuasive commitment to the real, here-and-now art experience. Much of today's most thrilling work largely disregards such concerns. We can, for instance, watch Ryan Trecartin's video suites at MoMA P.S.1, on YouTube, or on Vimeo. The former is preferable, but only marginally. In a few years, as young video artists really get going, exploiting online video for all it's worth, one suspects that such distinctions will look increasingly quaint. Morris, Scanlan, and their compatriots are making a radical case for the opposite: the in-person visit. They want you to return again and again, to see their exhibitions develop. Admittedly, that's asking a lot of viewers. But if you can't make it, ask a friend. "How," they want you to inquire, "did the show end?" Or, at least, "Which ending did you see?"

1969 vs. 2011, Armory Show Beefsteak Dinner, Les Blank and Rauschenberg at MoMA, etc. [Collected]

2011-07-01T23:06:00.003-04:00

Anya Kielar in "Incongruent Sum," curated by Astrid Honold, produced by Mathematics Collective, at 111 Leroy Street, New York, 2nd floor, June 29, 2011. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

"There is yet another group of young artists who do not consider it necessary that their work should exist in any concrete form. The idea is all-important, and may remain an idea, or be executed, according to the desire of the artist — or the buyer." – Rosalind Constable, "The New Art: Big Ideas for Sale," New York, March 10, 1969. This article has everything, including photographs of driveway and lawn art by Lawrence Weiner; collector Robert Scull, sans socks, posing next to Michael Heizer's Nevada Depression; dealer John Gibson staring down the camera in a natty outfit, a 26-year-old Seth Siegelaub, a 280-feet-fall sculpture by Christo (its price in 1969: $187,000), and more. [Google Books]

"But Aaron and Barbara Levine, veteran collectors from Washington, D.C., were looking for rarefied work that was maybe more important than the showstoppers. And, as it happens, barely even there. ... [W]hen you buy a Weiner you don’t acquire the lettering itself, let alone the 3-D work it implies. You buy Weiner’s immaterial idea, as a certificate that lets you write his phrase in a room, or come up with the sculpture you think it describes." – Blake Gopnik, "Buying Art You Can't Take Home," Newsweek, June 27, 2011. [Newsweek]

The Eldridge Street–based Artist's Institute has posted recordings of Michel Foucault's 1983 UC Berkeley lectures on parrhesia — fearless speech — on its web site. [TAI]

New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton presents the finest diners and delis around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [NYT]

The menu for the beefsteak dinner held in honor of the Armory Show on March 8, 1913 — and more. [Art Works via Modern Art Notes]

Lost Art of New York: "A year later, perhaps unsatisfied, Bollinger rented a loft overlooking the Hudson River in the Starrett-Lehigh Building to mount a huge exhibition that financially ruined him and ended his working relationship with Klaus Kertess and others." [Frieze]

Les Blank's Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1979) is screening at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday, July 6, at 7 pm. [MoMA]

Also at MoMA: Robert Rauschenberg's sprawling 1970 Currents piece. Greg Allen takes a close look. [Greg.org]

Martin Bromirski visits the just-closed Alan Shields show at Greenberg Van Doren. [Anaba]

An App-based Dérive: Jacob Gaboury, of queer Internet art collective CTRL+W33D, discusses "queering Grindr." [Elastic City]

A "Neon Rainbow" in SoHo

2011-06-30T08:49:00.002-04:00

Detail view of Tamara Zahaykevich, Ruth Peace, 2008. Polystyrene, foam board, paint, decoupage, 10 x 11 1/2 x 2 in., in "Neon Rainbow," curated by Amber Vilas, at 125 Crosby Street, June 25, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Tamara Zahaykevich, Ruth Peace, 2008

Installation view

On paper, the idea of blanketing the walls of a gallery with a fine layer of gold glitter reads as a deeply horrendous idea. But that's precisely what curator (and friend) Amber Vilas did for "Neon Rainbow," her one-night, ten-artist show in a subterranean crate shop at the corner of SoHo's Crosby and Jersey Streets. And it worked — at least this one time, lending a welcome background ebullience to work that included an angular polystyrene relief by Tamara Zahaykevich, a small acrylic on paper of a hazy, sun–filled sky by Roger White, and a tantalizing oval caked with pale pink paint by Jim Lee, whose work, one suspects, could withstand even the most radical exhibition experiments.

Jim Lee, Fleur du Mal (Scattered Remains), 2011. Oil enamel, paint shavings, and saw dust on wood, 24 x 28 3/4 x 3 1/4 in.

More: Joshua Abelow has a bounty of great installation photographs from the show, which also included Daniel Bainbridge, Donald Cameron, Erin Lee Jones, Jeffrey Scott Mathews, Sarah Mattes, Tracy Thomason, and Adrian Tone. [Art Blog Art Blog]

Doubling Down: "Entanglement," at Regina Rex and ART BLOG ART BLOG

2011-06-28T14:20:00.001-04:00

Detail view of Ryan Jones, Untitled, 2011. Contractors chalk on wall, dimensions variable, in "Entanglement," at Regina Rex, Ridgewood, Queens, New York, one half of a two-part show curated by Regina Rex, also on view at ART BLOG ART BLOG, New York, through July 9, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Two galleries, one show: it's a rare spectacle and almost always a power play on the part of an artist, a dealer (or dealers), or both. Think of last year's Matthew Day Jackson double feature at Peter Blum's two New York branches or the recent transatlantic Gagosian doubleheader of John Chamberlain's mediocre, albeit awesome named, new sculptures. Often it signals hubris: Schnabel's 1981 outing at Castelli and Boone, for example, to say nothing of Salle's tripartite show, the following year, at Castelli and both Boone outlets. (A "three-gallery parlay," Peter Schjeldahl termed it at the time.) It is the territory of those whom Michael Lewis, in his Liar's Poker (1990), termed BSDs.

Dave Hardy, It's Grey, it's grey, 2009. Unique vacuum–formed styrene panels, fluorescent tubes, fixtures, aluminum, paint, 10 x 35 x 30 ft.

Left: Anna-Lise Coste, BM, 2011. Oil on wood panel, 24 x 18 in.; right: Dave Hardy, It's Grey, it's Grey, 2009

Stills of Adam Thompson, Slideshow 6a, 2011

Robot + Horse, Cumcoral, 2011. Semen and black glitter, 2.5 in. in diameter.

Louise Despont, No. 14, 2010. Graphite on antique ledger book pages, 16 x 23 in.

It's intriguing and refreshing, then, to see two of New York's youngest, scrappiest spaces mount just such a show. Through July, Chelsea's ART BLOG ART BLOG and Ridgewood's Regina Rex — both run out of artist studios — are presenting "Entanglement," a two-gallery group show that takes the notion of doubling literally, "exploring simultaneity, symmetry and seriality" at the same time that it doubles itself. (The 12-person group behind Regina Rex handled curatorial duties.) Each gallery contains almost identical pieces by the same ten artists. There's a radiant, bright blue chalk drawing by Ryan Jones on the walls of Regina Rex and another at ABAB. Slices of ledger paper with intricate pencil drawings of masks by Louise Despont hang in both locations, as do Anne-Lise Coste's monochromes, thickly slathered with black paint. And so on.

Installation views of "Entanglement," at ART BLOG ART BLOG in Chelsea. Another Ryan Jones wall drawing: LeWitt gone electric.

I went to the Regina Rex show on opening night, June 24, and visited ABAB the next day, which induced a gentle wave of déjà vu. "Haven't I been here before?" I thought. Yes and no. (But mostly no: ABAB's majestic views of the Manhattan skyline snap you into reality pretty quickly.) Describing such feelings in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny," Freud writes, "The 'double' has become a thing of terror." Thankfully, I felt little of that, beyond my normal background anxiety.

"Entanglement," at ART BLOG ART BLOG.

Hardy's piece at ART BLOG ART BLOG, made with funds from Art in General.

Robot + Horse: the twin.

Louise Despont and Robot + Horse once more

Anna-Lise Coste, Lisha Bai, and Carlos Reyes

With perhaps the exception of Jones's lustrous circle — or, I should say, circles — none of the art quite withstands the exhibition's clever curatorial conceit. (That would take a lot.) But that's fine. In their short existences, both ABAB and Regina Rex have shown that they can exhibit new art at a relentless pace, hosting two- and three-week-long exhibitions that recall the schedules of a long-past New York art world. With "Entanglement," and its cannily repurposed blue-chip tactic, they're taking a surprising conceptual turn.

Lisha Bai

Summer Arrives: Rose Kallal's "Lady of the Lakes" at Ramiken Crucible

2011-06-23T09:40:00.002-04:00

Excerpt of Rose Kallal, Joe Denardo, and Mark Beasley, Lady of the Lakes performance, at Ramiken Crucible, New York, June 21, 2011. Video: 16 Miles

Paula Cooper Gallery used to mark the end of each year with complete, non-stop readings of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans or James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "[P]eople have been reading ... aloud nonstop since Wednesday evening and should finish the 925-page novel this evening," the New York Times wrote, on January 2, 1981, of a reading of the former, advising those planning to catch the end of the marathon: "Bring cushions and dress warmly."

Joe Denardo and Rose Kallal

That tradition ended in 2000, but artists, their dealers, and curators have continued to consult the calendar for reasons to celebrate and perform. The summer solstice, for instance, has provided a few memorable art moments recently. In 2009, Frank Haines presented a series of appropriately occult happenings at P.S.1. on the pivotal day, and this year the Socrates Sculpture Park held its 10th annual solstice celebration, staying open until sunset. Further downtown, at Ramiken Crucible, Canadian artist Rose Kallal waited for night to fall to begin her performance, Lady of the Lakes.

Four 16 mm films were arrayed in a diamond on one wall, their projectors clicking and purring away from across the room as they looped. Each showed the same work, each slightly out of sync from the others. In the films, a gleaming sword spins smoothly across one frame, and returns moments later in another. Squares and rectangles — all pale yellows and salmon pinks — grow and recede. A body shoots quickly out of a pool of water. An accompanying soundtrack provides one gigantic, sensual, industrial throb — like that of a high-voltage early-sci-fi forcefield or the machinery of some sinister, secretive munitions factory.

As the soundtrack pulsed with disconcerting regularity, Kallal sat down at her drum kit, just below the films, and began stroking her cymbals with padded mallets, building huge waves of metal that shocked the crowd into realizing the show had started. Mark Beasley, the curator at the helm of Performa 11, strode up to a microphone and began reciting long streams of verse, incantations that were almost entirely indecipherable against Kallal's cascades. He faced toward the projections, as if he was addressing them.

Mark Beasley

Joe Denardo, of the Olympia, Washington, noise band Growing, approached the stage next and took up his guitar left handed, sending prickly, jagged loops through a spread of pedals and out into the room. He kept his back to the audience as well, as Beasley sauntered to the back of the room. Like the films, Denardo and Kellal seemed to be playing the same piece, but out of sync, despite being right next to each another. Their parts connected and then collided and then spun apart again.

After roughly twenty minutes, one of the projections shifted suddenly to a pure and brilliant white, blanketing the room with a warm, celestial glow. But it was an accident: one of the films had slipped from its projector. Kallal sprang from her seat and set to fixing it. Beasley returned and offered a few more lines, joined this time by only the films' soundtrack. After a few minutes Kallal switched off the renegade projector, ending the performance as informally and unexpectedly as she had begun it. The other three films continued looping as New York tilted into summer.

Mark di Suvero on Governors Island, and Things I Didn't Know About Richard Bellamy and Robert Morris

2011-06-21T14:26:00.002-04:00

Mark di Suvero, Figolu, 2005-2011, in "Mark di Suvero on Governors Island," presented by Storm King Art Center, through September 25, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"He's a bit of a maverick, and he's not that much interested in gallery shows," dealer Richard Bellamy told Lee Rosenbaum of Marco Polo "Mark" di Suvero, trying to explain, in 1993, why the widely lauded artist was less visible in the art world than he had once been. There was also, of course, the issue that few spaces — even outdoor spaces — could accommodate di Suvero's largest sculptures at the time. And once your local metropolitan sculpture garden acquires a monumental di Suvero — the one I grew up with, the Walker, owned a huge, awesome one with a wooden swing — it's perhaps hard for its curators to justify buying another.

Detail of Figolu, 2005-2011

Will, 1994

With the recent proliferation of large-scale galleries and gardens, di Suveros have found plenty of new homes. The latest place to take on that role is Governors Island, the 172-acre former military base just off the coast of Manhattan that has been converted into a park over the past few years, where the Storm King Art Center has installed eleven of the artist's works in a show that runs through September 25. It is in an insanely gorgeous exhibition, and a perfect reason to wander around the island on bicycle. So far, the reviews have been resoundingly positive. Writes the New Yorker, "Di Suvero's steel abstractions are so playful that this plein-air installation suggests a game of jacks strewn across the park by a giant hand."

Rather than add to that unanimous, deserved praise, then, let's talk about Bellamy for a bit, whom I somehow didn't realize had played an instrumental role in di Suvero's career, extensively documenting the artist's work in photographs, organizing many of his shows around the world, and even moving his second gallery, the amazingly named Oil and Steel Gallery, into di Suvero's Queens studio, in Hallet's Cove, in 1985. (A year later, di Suvero helped found the nearby Socrates Sculpture Park.)

Mahatma, 1978-1979

Rust Angel, 1995

Bellamy's involvement with di Suvero fascinates me since I've always thought of him solely as the radical proprietor of the Robert Scull-backed Green Gallery, which he ran from 1960 to 1965, showing Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual work by artists by Dan Flavin, George Segal, and Robert Morris, who writes in "Thinking Back About Him," a glorious tribute to Bellamy published in his book of collected writings, Have I Reasons: "A crooked taxi baron glitzed out real vulgar uptown and kept a stable of artists downtown. Dick [Richard Bellamy] floated somewhere between. Hovered mid-town maybe. Mediating. Plugged into other circuits. Listening for edges other never heard." ("A voice like a rich malted milk," Morris adds.) In my cursory conception of Bellamy, di Suvero and his resolutely extroverted sculptures didn't quite make sense.

Morris continues with a story from Bellamy: "'Philip Johnson was in,' he said, smiling that before-the-repaired-teeth smile. 'He saw your work and wanted to get a broom and kill it.'" This would be a great story by itself, but it's made even better by the fact that Johnson actually ended up buying works by Morris — first Litanies (1963), and then Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawl (aka Document) (1963), made by Morris to protest Johnson taking too long to pay for the first work — which speaks either to Bellamy's skills as a dealer, Johnson's willingness to buy art he hated, the overwhelming charisma of Morris's work, or some combination of those factors. Johnson donated both to MoMA in 1970.

She, 1977-78. To view a vintage photograph of the work in di Suvero's studio, scroll to the bottom this MoMA feature on Bellamy, "The Dealer as Co-Conspirator."

It turns out that Bellamy first showed di Suvero at the Green Gallery all the way back in 1960, three years before Morris's first show there (his first in New York). The two men went on to become very different artists — di Suvero an ebullient crowd-pleaser, Morris a continually confounding shape-shifter, a trickster par excellence — and today Morris is something less than a proponent of di Suvero's work. Describing the state of contemporary sculpture in Have I Reasons, Morris writes: "Aggressively large-scale, grand spatial occupation, the buzz of spectacle. A long list could be drawn up. From Pollock and Newman on down to Stella, di Suvero, Heizer, Turrell, Kelly, Serra." Those descriptors sometimes fit di Suvero's work, but they don't here. Placed in one of New York's most daring experiments in pubic space, they look as comfortable, nuanced, and subtle as the masses of people marveling at — and playing on — them.

DIS Magazine, Herbalife™, at Gresham's Ghost

2011-06-19T12:01:00.004-04:00

Brian Clifton, Us, 2011. Inflatable mattress, psychological dross, fat, blood, mattress cover, plastic, 80 x 60 x 34 in., in "Skin So Soft," at Gresham's Ghost, through June 25, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

If you have spent even a small portion of your life going to contemporary art galleries, you may occasionally have had the feeling that you have seen it all. Everything has been done, you may think. We're just playing out the endgame. But then, inevitably, for better or worse, something shocks that suspicion out of you — like, for instance, a group of five girls enthusiastically performing a variation of the official dance of the perhaps-dubious wellness company Herbalife to small groups in a TriBeCa office building as part of a pop-up gallery show. Which is what happened to me on Wednesday night.

The evening began in a compact second-floor office at 401 Broadway, where Gresham's Ghost, the itinerant art gallery, has set up its latest exhibition, "Skin So Soft," which was curated by artist Josh Kline and is on view through June 25. Guests arrived around seven and, as they waited for the performance by the "Tweens of Herbalife™" — as one announcement from the organizer, DIS Magazine, billed them — inspected the art on view, which includes typically tony photographs by Michele Abeles, a viscous–looking bed by Brian Clifton, and a self-destructing sculpture by Paul Kopkau, with a candle slowly melting away a block of ice.

Paul Kopkau, lodestone/narrator, 2011. Rubber, stainless steel, ice, galvanized metal, 26 x 12 x 12 in.

About a quarter past seven, word spread that we'd soon be whisked up to the sixteenth floor for the performance, and one group was ushered upstairs as the rest of us waited. After about ten minutes, I rode up for the second viewing, finding a seat in a long narrow room, along with about twenty other people. Once we were seated, the dancers burst through a door at the end of the room and performed as Herbalife's (apparently) model performer danced away in a projection behind them. Audience members recorded the action on their iPhones, cheered occasionally, and shared lots of nervous looks. After five minutes, the dancers skipped out of the room to applause, and we headed toward the exit, passing a mother waiting in the hallway, bottle-feeding a baby.

Excerpt of performance by Tweens of Herbalife™, choreographed by Richard Kennedy, presented by DIS Magazine and Alaina Feldman, June 15, 2011, in "Skin So Soft," organized by Josh Kline, at Gresham's Ghost, 401 Broadway, 2nd floor (performance on 16th floor), New York, through June 25. Video: 16 Miles

Still of performance by Tweens of Herbalife™, choreographed by Richard Kennedy, presented by DIS Magazine and Alaina Feldman, June 15, 2011.

"I have some problems with that," an audience member said on the street below, expounding on the exploitative nature of the performance. For a moment, I wholeheartedly agreed. Thoughts of Santiago Sierra came to mind. But then it occurred to me that the dancers — the tweens, to use DIS's term (its just-released "Tweenage Issue," was the justification for the performance) — may have known that the dance was obviously ridiculous, that they were mocking a bit of corporate cheerleading by dramatically parroting it. They may or may not known that Herbalife is considered by some to be a pyramid scheme that promotes medical quackery, and that its founder overdosed on alcohol and anti-depressants in 2000, but it seems possible that they knew that they were presenting a joke. With DIS and choreographer Richard Kennedy, they took a castoff cultural fragment with a questionable past and recast it in a space in which irony and sincerity coexisted and bolstered one another: the dance was terrible, and their performance was awesome.

That may, of course, just be wishful thinking. If that's the case, I shudder to think about what comes next.

The view from Gresham's Ghost, looking north on Broadway toward SoHo.

Ryan Trecartin, Trash Can Art, the Sumi Ink Club in Brooklyn, a 24-Hour McCall Film, etc. [Collected]

2011-06-15T08:14:00.003-04:00

Anicka Yi, Midcentury Olfactory Brutalism, 2010. Light box, transparency paper, potato chips, ground Cheetos dust, 24 x 21 x 5 in., in "Belief & Understanding" at Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, through July 28, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

In advance of his upcoming show at MoMA P.S.1, Ryan Trecartin is showing sections of his four-part piece Re'Search Wait'S online. Rhizome and DIS Magazine have posted pieces, and The Awl and Huffington Post will follow up later this week. [Rhizome, DIS Magazine]
Are public garbage cans the hottest thing in art right now? Klara Lidén has a trove of them at the Venice Biennale, David Bernstein is doing a performance with a New York bin at Sommerkampf in Piermont, New York, and L&M is showing a pioneering example, the 2003 Jeff Koons Walrus Seal Trash Cans at Art Basel. [Contemporary Art Daily, Sommerkampf, Art 42 Basel]
Related to the above: Kim Levin's ARTnews cover article, "Talking Trash," on the history of detritus and rubbish in modern and contemporary art. [ARTnews]
Robert Morris and Olivie Mourgue. [YHBHS]
Richard Prince on photographer Miroslav Tichý, from a book of Prince's essays that will be published in September. [Los Angeles Review of Books]
On Mark Fisher's recent explication of hauntology, Ariel Pink, and a lot more, at NYU. [Rhizome]
Jamie Sterns writes precise, honest classified ads for art-world jobs. [Ya Ya Ya]

Calendar

June 15: Herbalife is a controversial L.A.–based nutrition and weight-loss company with annual sales of more than $2.7 billion. A multi-level marketing company that some have accused of being a pyramid scheme, it is also, according to DIS Magazine, "the premiere commercial cult." At 7 pm, at the current location of Gresham's Ghost, DIS presents "a re-contextualization of the official Herbalife dance performed by tweens and choreographed by Richard Kennedy." [Gresham's Ghost]
June 15: A postcard for Demetrius Oliver's Argentum piece, available at the Studio Museum in Harlem, reads, "To observe this work gaze at the Harlem River after sunset." Below this text it lists four dates: March 19, April 18, May 17, and June 15. There is a full moon tonight. [SM]
June 16: With the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling 4-3 yesterday that the state's new collective-bargaining law can go into effect, it sounds like a good time to watch Native Land, the 1942 documentary by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand about labor struggles and American fascism. Skip work, if you can. It's at the Museum of Modern Art at 1:30 pm. [MoMA]
June 18: The Sumi Ink Club, the itinerant drawing project initiated by Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck, the founders of the estimable Lucky Dragons, visit Rawson Projects, drawing together 12 pm to 6 pm. [RP]
June 18: At noon, The Artist's Institute and Light Industry present Anthony McCall's Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) at Dia:Chelsea, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor. It runs until noon the next day. The work was first shown at the Idea Warehouse, a performance space created by Alanna Heiss's Institute for Art and Urban Resources at 22 Reade Street in 1975, the year before the opening of Heiss's next major project, P.S.1. "The work used no actual film or projector," McCall wrote of the piece. "Three distinct elements combined to form the ‘film,’ and no one of these was regarded as prior to the other two." Light Industry has a stunning archive of documents relating to the piece. [LI]
June 19: "Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever," opens. [MoMA P.S.1]

Liz Luisada and Shaun Krupa at Klaus von Nichtssagend

2011-06-14T08:47:00.000-04:00

The entrance to Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York. On view: Liz Luisada | Shaun Krupa, through July 3, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Shaun Krupa, Abandoned Mansion, 2009. Acrylic, house paint, and hair on canvas, 24.25 x 20.25 in.; Shaun Krupa, Coral Reef, 2011. 24.25 x 20 in. Oil on canvas.; Liz Luisada, Dang Dog, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

Liz Luisada and Shaun Krupa, both members of RISD's class of 2001, cover a fair amount of painting's charted territory in their modest two-person show at Klaus von Nichtssagend. Krup appears to be the more rigorous, hard-edged abstractionist of the pair, at least until you read his titles. Two small paintings — one black, one orange, both lined with white grids (pictured above) — are named Coral Reef and Abandoned Mansion. They're nearly identical, though the latter is stuck with a few patches of hair and its grid vanishes at its center, as if to ask how much difference can be wrought from only minute change.

Compared to Krup and even her own past work, Luisada offers a looser touch. Sourcing "imagery from dreams and mysticism," according to the press release, she builds almost-abstract canvases (there's always a hint of a face or a figure) that once would have been labeled lyrical. This may be a transitional moment in her work, her crowd-pleasing-Techicolor, Sonia Delaunay-in-a-blender style morphing into something breezier.

The most interesting painting in the show belongs to Krup and includes not a single drop of paint. It's a vivid rainbow of an umbrella that he has gamely stretched to a frame and titled Don't Open That Umbrella in the House! It's too late for that, but its bravado is a welcome exclamation point in an otherwise determinedly quiet display.

Liz Luisada, Star Chasm, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

Shaun Krupa, Don't Open That Umbrella in the House!, 2010. Umbrella, string, and wood, 60 x 50 in.

The Price Good Market Inc. at St. Cecilia's Convent

2011-06-13T10:45:00.004-04:00

Denise Kupferschmidt and Gina Beavers, Price Good Market Inc., in "Art Book Club Presents:," at St. Cecilia's Convent, Brooklyn, June 3, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"This past June … the hordes of half-wild, half-crazed, and fully degenerate individuals who keep pouring out of the 42nd Street subway had occasion to check out a whole building full of art that was just as raw, raucous, trashy and perhaps even as exciting as some of the more notorious attractions of the tenderloin," Jeffrey Deitch wrote in Art in America in 1980. He was reviewing the now-infamous "Times Square Show," for which dozens of artists, led by Cara Perlman and Tom Otterness, used a four-story building on the corner of 41st Street and 7th Avenue for — to quote Deitch — "a month-long party, business enterprise and loosely curated exhibition of art, film, fashion and exotica."

Of Deitch's descriptors, it's the twin notions of a "month-long party" and a "loosely curated exhibition" that have congealed to form the show's storied legacy. "Several dozen of the organizers, participants and hangers-on virtually lived at the site for the show's duration," Deitch writes. Moreover, there were numerous performances and film screenings, alongside work by soon-to-be superstars like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and SAMO — the graffiti name of Jean-Michel Basquiat and friends. (Deitch described SAMO's work in the show as "a knockout combination of de Kooning and subway spray-paint scribbles.") But that other phrase, "business enterprise," is equally important. As Deitch himself says, this wild, unruly show had a gift shop, filled with affordable artist multiples. "To the right, a souvenir shop was stocked with all sorts of bizarre trinkets," he notes.

Let's jump forward 31 years. Earlier this month, the "half-wild, half-crazed, and fully degenerate" denizens of the New York art world had the occasion to see a whole building full of art once again. The site this time was the three-story St. Cecilia's Convent in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, instead of an abandoned massage parlor in Midtown, and in place of Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab), this show was organized by the Art Book Club, which handed over each of the three floors to a different curator — Fran Holstrom, Saira McLaren, and Carolyn Salas. And, once again, there was a gift shop, the Price Good Market Inc., which was helmed by artists Denise Kupferschmidt and Gina Beavers, which offered small works by many of the shows' participants at bargain prices.

Kupferschmidt and Beavers cited as their inspiration The Shop, the East London art boutique and bar run by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in 1993, which was included in Tate Modern's 2009 "Pop Life" show. Emin writes, in a piece published in advance of that show: "The recession was in full swing with hundreds of empty shops boarded up. Sarah and I looked at each other, more or less at the same time, and said, 'Let’s get a shop.'" They sold hand-made merchandise, like mugs and T-shirts, as well as small, affordable pieces by other artists. (The bestselling shirt, at least for a period, read "Complete Asshole," writer Gregor Muir mentions in this lively interview with a late-arriving Emin.)

Price Good Market Inc. had hand-painted works of their own: signs emblazoned with declarations like "NICE TO FEET YOU" and "NEW THING ARE HERE" alongside papers with more ambiguous messages — "ON THE RUN" and "TEQUILA SKIN," for instance. Cheap, store-bought jewelry hung next to a bright-yellow one-piece bathing suit by Beavers, a paper construction by Stacy Fisher, and a necklace and pillows by Sam Moyer. The décor was pure strip-mall class: bright fluorescent lights hung up above and wraparound walls were lined with black electrical tape or painted with quick black lines, mimicking perfectly the omnipresent plastic sheeting that fills malls across the land. It felt like a slice of suburban American — or, to put it another way, childhood memories of many of the show's young attendees, myself included — had somehow slipped into this defunct convent.

The Price Good Market Inc. was, of course, more a glorious gag than a workable business: would-be buyers at the Friday-night opening were turned away and told to return on Sunday, the lone day that the shop was open, and the prices were in some cases absurdly low. It was an excuse to show work, see friends, spin some records, and drink beers. However (and I know this will sound simplistic and perhaps naïve), in an economy that is only now slowly recovering after the failure of massive, complex financial instruments, the opportunity to exchange a few bucks for a handmade sign or a Sam Moyer net necklace sounds just right: radically straightforward and accessible. A lot has changed in the three years that have elapsed since Takashi Murakami placed another kind of gift shop, a miniature Louis Vuitton boutique, at the center of his Brooklyn Museum exhibition.

More: Martin Bromirski has tons of photos from the opening of "Art Book Clubs Presents:" at Anaba and on his Flickr account.

After 38 Years, Trisha Brown's "Roof Piece" Ventures from SoHo to the Meatpacking District

2011-06-10T08:35:00.001-04:00

Performance views of Trisha Brown Dance Company performing Trisha Brown, Roof Piece, 1971/2011, on and around The High Line, New York, June 9, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Excerpts from Trisha Brown, Roof Piece, 1971/2011, on and around The High Line, New York, June 9, 2011. Video: 16 Miles.

The gods favor Trisha Brown and her dance company. That's the only conclusion I can draw after watching a devastating torrential thunderstorm suddenly clear just moments before 7 pm last night, right before the scheduled start of a performance of Brown's seminal 1971 Roof Piece along the southern stretch of The High Line. The piece was performed without a hitch, and the storms resumed within hours of its conclusion. Unbelievable.

It's hard to believe, but this is the first time that Roof Piece has been performed on outdoor rooftops since 1973, when it was staged in — or above — SoHo. Earlier this year, some New Yorkers saw a modified version of the piece, titled Roof Piece Re-Layed, at the Museum of Modern Art, with Brown's dancers sending choreographic signals around Yoshio Taniguchi's airy atrium. Each performer watches another in Roof Piece, miming the movements they see, creating a chain of slowly evolving dance over the course of about 30 minutes. Even in the austere environment of MoMA, it was a thrill to see. But a thought lingered: What would this look like outside, with a dancers transmitting the piece along an expanse of roofs?

We now know that it looks gloriously fresh — and wonderfully strange.

Brown's dancers, all sporting bright red outfits were positioned throughout the area. There was one high atop a building just south of Gansevoort Street, and two standing on the long, low roofs of the DeBragga warehouse (one of the last remaining meat companies in the Meatpacking District). They were secreted in semi-hidden positions along the elevated park and the base of the Standard Hotel — did passersby think the large crowd had gathered to watch one of its notorious displays of flashers? — and arrayed across the buildings to the east of the walkway, where Sperone Westwater once resided.

When Roof Piece was performed in 1973, viewers watched the string of dancers from the top of a building on Wooster Street. The High Ligh, though, allows for a more participatory spectacle. You can spot dancers through the leaves of the thick shrubbery along the bottom of the path — enjoying a personal show — and then wander up to the Standard, where the largest crowds gathered last night. If you go, walk back and forth between the sides of the park and follow the passage of the dance's movements. Seeing every dancer requires some work, but as you suddenly spot each one — shimmying, popping, and swaying away — you may feel a refreshing shock of recognition, a humane sense of alarm.

Another 7 pm show is scheduled for tonight, and 5 pm and 7 pm performances are to follow tomorrow. There are reports of incoming thunderstorms. Keep your fingers crossed.

"Greater LA"

2011-06-08T09:24:00.002-04:00

Edgar Arceneaux, Orpheum Returns — Fire's Creation, 2010. Wood shelf, clay, science book, sugar, in "Greater LA," at 483 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, through June 10, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"While many of the artists included have exhibited in ... New York, they’ve never been contextualized as a group that shares, however subtly, an identity based upon their geography," reads a curatorial statement by the organizers of "Greater LA," a sprawling show on view in a second-floor SoHo space through Friday. The show, it continues, "aims to be this contextualization, giving physical form to the oft-heard suggestion that the work made today in Los Angeles is some of the best in the World."

That's an ambitious statement, and one backed up by an equally ambitious show, with some 100 works by almost 50 artists, brought together by gallerist Joel Mesler, collector Eleanor Cayre, and curator Benjamin Godsill. Much of it is very large, very heavy looking. There is, for instance, an enormous, richly colored tapestry by Pae White, whose last New York solo show was almost 15 years ago, way back in 1997 at the I-20 Gallery. An installation by a relative newcomer, Alex Israel, is similarly epic, filling a space the size of many Lower East Side galleries with rented movie props: a row of metal lockers, a spinal column, and a standing gauze cast, among other items.

Liz Glynn, Capstone from III, 2010-11. Reclaimed forklift pallet stock.

Pae White, Studio A-Z, MMVII Tapestry 2, 2007. Cotton and polyester.

Many of the artists here are venturing — or have already been welcomed — into the upper tiers of the art world. They show on the contemporary art circuit, picking up ideas while on tour, and the geographic association offered sometimes feels incidental or forced. If there's an L.A. aesthetic or style, it's not discernible here, though there are some works that feel uniquely indebted to the city, like Alex Prager's rigorously staged melodramatic photographs, which are pure Hollywood product. Prager was featured in MoMA's recent "New Photography" show, and as Roberta Smith notes in her review of "Greater LA," she is not the only name that will be familiar to New Yorkers. Matthew Chambers has had solo shows at Mesler's New York galleries each of the past two years — at Untitled in 2010, and at Rental in 2009. He's represented here by a beige-colored triptych, with panels that — moving from left to right — ape the styles of Frank Stella, Eric Fischl, and Mark Grotjahn.

Patrick Hill is another familiar name, and a positively thrilling sculptor, but his work here is unusually weak, lacking the erotic charge of the marble-and-wood works he showed at Bortolami a few months back. (Another piece from that series, an exciting one, is at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, just a few blocks away, through July 8.)

Hill, Flirty Fishing, 2011. Wood, glass, rope, dye, and glue.

Matthew Chambers, Exacting Shorthand, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

Patrick Jackson, City Unborn (gold), 2008

Kaz Oshiro, Untitled Still Life (Abstract Painting with Duct Tape in Grey), 2009. Acrylic on canvas.

Mark Grotjahn

Partial installation view of Alex Israel, Property, 2011. Rented cinema props.

Partial installation views of Andrea Bowers, 14 Chairs, 2010. Fourteen metal folding chairs and spray paint. Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs.

Another well-known figure is Andrea Bowers, who presents a witty fourteen-folding-chair tribute to seminal artists and art-world denizens. A chair for Sol LeWitt is covered with grids, one for Marcia Tucker is inscribed "Bad Girls," and Donald Judd gets immaculate, polished metal.

Other welcome sights include a super-fragile stacked-glass piece by Patrick Jackson (which was dutifully attended by a security guard at the opening); a trio of Grotjahn sculptures — messy, silly asides to the nine gorgeous and carefully wrought paintings now at Anton Kern; and a tiny annex space for the Dan Graham Gallery, a heady conceptual experiment in exhibition making that I would have expected to come from New York. I'm also intrigued by Eduardo Sarabia's contribution, less by the actual work — pretty photorealistic paintings of a woman in front of a verdant landscape covered with abstract daubs and blurs — than by his steadfast and admirable refusal to repeat his glorious 2008 Whitney Biennial homemade-tequila bar, which would no doubt be a certain success. (He's been absent from New York since then, and his last solo outing was at I-20 in 2006.)

Matt Johnson, American Spirits, 2010. Paper, plastic, foam, paint, and magnets. At the opening, this was set to the side of the pedestal; usually, though, aided by those magnets, it spins magically in the air.

Exactly 30 years ago, Peter Schjeldahl wrote a piece about the Los Angeles art world for the Village Voice. "This is never going to be a real art center unless, in the process, it ceases to be L.A.," he said. "The very word center is solecism here." "Greater LA" does not prove that the city has become an art center. There's no way it could: that term has become difficult to define, even meaningless, in the intervening three decades. There are centers everywhere today, in countless metropolitan areas and online, and they are almost as likely to be organized around web sites and curators as they are to be based in specific neighborhoods. Which makes the exhibition a refreshingly unusual and bravely retrograde affair, aiming as it does to identify and share the leading young artists of a single distant city. I hope it returns next year, with Mexico City as its focus this time, or perhaps Brussels or Brooklyn or Budapest.

Asher Penn, "2005," at Ground Floor Workshop, Brooklyn

2011-06-05T22:30:00.005-04:00

Installation views of Asher Penn's "2005" at Ground Floor Workshop, Brooklyn, New York, June 3, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

An Inspectah Deck T-shirt: Gang Starr, "Above the Clouds" (featuring Inspectah Dek), 1998

New York–based artist Asher Penn is one of today's most interesting — some might say most flagrant — appropriators. He has used magazine images in paintings, adorned portraits of Kate Moss with Rorschach blots, and bedecked skateboards with Diane Arbus photos. (A show of those latter works was canceled after Arbus's estate objected.) In his latest exhibiton, at Williamsburg's Ground Floor Workshop, Penn steals from more low-key sources. One wall of the unusual corridor space is lined with extra-large T-shirts — thrift-store finds — hanging on long wood dowels, a method of presentation borrowed from Hermann Nitsch, who often hangs his effluvia–soaked robes in the same way after performances, Penn explains in the press release. Along the other wall are crayon rubbings the artist made against a stretch of sidewalk carved, in long, bold strokes, with the number "2005." "My first guess was that someone graduating from High School did it," Penn writes. Attacking his paper with bright patches of color, he captures one anonymous gestural act in the process of creating another, a copy as mysterious as its original.

Free Bert: Hockey player Todd Bertuzzi, who was suspended from the NHL in 2004 for punching an opposing player, Steve Moore, from behind.

Asher Penn, "2005"
Through June 19, 2011
Ground Floor Workshop
327 Grand Street
Brooklyn, New York

Picasso and Arianna, Kröner and Bernstein, Sifton and Art, etc. [Collected]

2011-06-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

Sam Falls, Untitled, 2011. Digital C-print and collage, 31 x 24 in., in "Out of Practice," curated by Nudashank, at Art Blog Art Blog, New York, through June 18, 2011. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

"The Picasso Wars": Arianna Huffington and her "portrait of the artist as a bad man." A "dog of a book," says Robert Hughes, in 1988. [New York on Google Books]

Sharon Butler on career advice for artists and "Reverie," a group show curated by artist Stephen Westfall at Galerie Zürcher that includes Shirley Jaffe, Stanley Whitney, Patricia Treib, Westfall, and others. "Yeah — it's OK to include your own work if you're curating the show," Butler writes. [Two Coats of Paint]

"A Complete Guide to Seinfeld's Sneaker." [Complex via @Cory_Arcangel]

Magdalena Kröner interviews Judith Bernstein: Kröner: "Why does the subject matter of your work continue to be controversial?" Bernstein: "The connection between screw and phallus, present in much of my work, touches upon many sensitive aspects that exist in the subconscious. Men especially can feel intimidated by the scale of a work... [ART BLOG ART BLOG]

"Invitations are style statements in a minor key, ancillary artworks of a collective sort. Designed by artists, by graphic designers, by art dealers and museum curators — usually a combination of the above — they are the advance guard for the real thing. Their merit is judged in the very act of reading one's mail." — Roberta Smith, "Art Invitations as Small Scraps of History," the New York Times, May 16, 1993

The Class of 2011: Curator and writer Jamillah James posts highlights from recent New York MFA exhibitions. [Frontiers]

"Tom Harris ... cooks lamb sweetbreads with butter beans and wild garlic that can set off an episode of synesthesia if you are so inclined: a Constable landscape of flavors and textures, of menacing clouds and plump trees and soft grass for the lamb, Britain on a plate." New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton's art references are growing deeper and richer and continuing to flow. [16 Miles]

June 4: "Leverage," with Sonja Engelhardt, Luke Stettner, Gustabo Velazquez, and Claudia Weber, opens at Jo-ey Tang's Notary Public space on the Upper East Side. [TNP via ROLU]

June 4: In SoHo, Los Angeles–based artist Wu Tsang unveils his New York solo debut, which includes a video about a 15-year-old Salvadorian refugee who arrives in L.A. in 1985 and is befriended by trans women at a local bar. [Clifton Benevento]

June 5: "A+" — a three-day group show at Bushwick's ARCH Production & Design NYC Studio with work by Ivin Ballen, Evan Collier, Meghan Petras, Adriana Santiago, and more — closes. Curated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne, the exhibition includes "allusions to dome culture, inflatable architecture, minimalism, kitsch, the surf and skate subcultures, abstract expressionism, mid-century modern design and obsolete technology." [Bushwick Open Studios]

June 6: The Museum of Modern Art's "Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914," the most entrancing museum show of the New York season, closes. It feels like it only just arrived. [MoMA]

"Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006" in City Hall Park

2011-06-02T12:20:00.003-04:00

Sol LeWitt, Splotch 15, 2005. Acrylic on fiberglass, 12 ft. x 8 ft. 4 in. x 6 ft. 8 in., in "Sol LeWitt: Structures: 1965–2006," through December 3, 2011, in City Hall Park, New York, organized by the Public Art Fund, curated by Nicholas Baume. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Painted aluminum, various dimensions, roughly 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in.

This winter, let's hope that snow starts sticking to the ground in New York City before December 2. The Public Art Fund's epic "Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965–2006" exhibition is set to close in City Hall Park on that date, and it is a show that one suspects is going to look gorgeous against a thick blanket of crisp white snow. The Fund's director and chief curator, Nicholas Baume, a longtime LeWitt scholar, has filled the hamlet's greens, pathways, and surrounding sidewalks with a trove of the artist's work. There's a large, austere 1969 modular cube, a pair of towering concrete-block works (one making its public U.S. debut, having appeared in the 1987 edition Skulptur Projekte Münster), and even a late, effervescent Splotch piece that resembles a Lynda Benglis latex pour pulled twelve feet into the air, which anchors the southern tip of the park.

Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Painted aluminum, various dimensions, roughly 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in.

That first date in the show's title, 1965, also happens to be the year that LeWitt's longtime gallerist, Paula Cooper, met him for the first time, via artist Walter De Maria. She was working as director of the Park Place Gallery then, and three years later she opened her own gallery in SoHo — or Hell's Hundred Acres, as it was called at the time. For her inaugural show, a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam that was organized by Robert Huot, Lucy Lippard, and Ron Wolin, LeWitt publicly displayed one of his wall drawings for the first time. The work didn't sell.

Cooper shared all of this at a talk organized by the Fund early last month (now available online) at the New School. She also told this story, about that first exhibition: "At the end of the show, I asked him, 'Well, what do I do?' And he said, 'Oh, just paint it out.' And I said, 'I can't do that!' ... But anyway, I did." (The wall drawing sold years later she mentions.)

Complex Form 6, 1987. Painted aluminum, 8 ft. x 12 ft. 8 in. x 4 ft.

Tower (Columbus), 1990. Concrete block, 26 ft. 4 in. x 10 ft. 8 in. x 10 ft. 8 in.

Tower (Columbus), 1990. Concrete block, 26 ft. 4 in. x 10 ft. 8 in. x 10 ft. 8 in. In back: Frank Gehry's new 8 Spruce Street building.

If you have even the slightest interest in LeWitt's work, you should watch the video, which includes some wonderful stories and moving reminiscences from Baume, Cooper, painter Pat Steir, and the artist's longtime assistant, Jeremy Ziemann. Here are some highlights:

Says Steir, in a story that I would like to hear in its entirety, "I met Sol because I was being stalked. Not by Sol, but somebody was stalking me. And one evening a man knocked on my door — and I never saw him before in my life — and he said, 'Don't worry, I chased away your stalker.' And that was Sol. He rescued me." She adds at another point, "If you were ever his friend, you were always his friend. And if you were never his friend, you were never his friend."

Asked about the difficulty of realizing some of LeWitt's ideas, Ziemann says, "Sometimes he would ... draw something that couldn't be done in reality. We'd say, 'Sol, but this block is floating.' And he's like, 'Oh, well, put three underneath it and it should be okay!'"

Cooper, relaying what happened when LeWitt discovered that his cancer was terminal: "The doctor gave him very bad news, and was quite direct with him, and told him that he really had not that much longer to live, and he said, 'But that's impossible, I have a show in June!" (The show, "A cube with scribble bands in four directions," was presented posthumously.)

Baume explains LeWitt's practice, and, I think, nails his driving motivation. "I think there's always a desire on Sol's part to create something that he couldn't imagine," he says. "He needed to set in motion a series of ideas or coordinates, so that the result would be surprising to him, and would take him and his work ... to a new place."

And let's close with this, from Cooper: "People who worked with him were devoted to him."

Complex Form 6, 1987. Painted aluminum, 8 ft. x 12 ft. 8 in. x 4 ft.

Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Painted aluminum, various dimensions, roughly 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 6 in.

Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes 3 3 2, 1967/74. Painted steel, 4 ft. 6 in. x 22 ft. 6 in. x 1 ft. 6 in.

Pyramid (Münster), 1987. Concrete block, 13 ft. 4 in. x 13 ft. 8 in. x 13 ft. 8 in.

Stars, 1989–90. Painted aluminum, various sizes, roughly 4 ft. x 4 ft. x 4 ft.

Splotch 15, 2005. Acrylic on fiberglass, 12 ft. x 8 ft. 4 in. x 6 ft. 8 in.

"Control Alt Delete": A One-Night HKJB Show in Bushwick

2011-06-02T08:18:00.003-04:00

Graham Collins in "Control Alt Delete," curated by HKJB, at 840 Broadway, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, New York, May 27, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The official start of summer may still be three weeks away, but HKJB, the curatorial nom de guerre of artists Benjamin King and Jay Henderson, has already delivered what feels like the first show of the season: a one-night-only affair held last Friday on the fourth floor of 840 Broadway in Bushwick. It was, for one thing, gorgeously hot up there. My camera fogged up for a few moments as I tried to photograph the revelers, who were keeping cool with large, cold beers bought in the bodegas below. More to the point, though, the show, "Control Alt Delete" (a Windows reference from the art crowd!), had the raucous, anarchic spirit that we expect of the city's summer shows, with roughly fifty works by fifteen artists installed around the premises.

Matt Jones

A few participants had enough work on view to fill entire solo shows of their own, like Wayne Adams, whose trademark paintings of repeating chevrons were installed around the walls of the room. There were also two small ones leaning against a wall and an enormous one, ominously titled Ask Me No More Questions, Tell Me No More Lies, hanging off the side of a column. Matt Jones had a bounty on offer, too, mostly paintings that were propped up like sculptures and scattered around the floor. (Jones has already produced a book of photos of the show that he snapped with his iPhone; its available in a full-color or a thrifty black-and-white edition.)

Stacy Fisher

Though brutally outnumbered by the painters, the sculptors (or, at least, the sculpturally-minded) fared well. The California transplant Ernesto Burgos delivered on the promises of the work he showed at Kate Werble Gallery at the beginning of the year. His best piece (partially pictured below) was a curiously crumpled sculpture balanced against a wall that features an image of a hand proffering a stiff-looking cocktail. Yes, please! He also had two wall-hung constructions — one silver, one black, both sleek — that looked like immaculate, high-gloss seat cushions.

Left to right: Ernesto Burgos, Vince Contarino, Benjamin King

A new name for me: Graham Collins, whose painted slab of wood on top of a cinderblock (pictured at top) was a welcome moment of smart, quiet presentness, matched in that regard only by work of a trusty established name, Stacy Fisher, whose intimate black constructions held their ground impressively, tempting viewers to touch them.

With so much work placed on the floor and hung low on the walls, there were ample opportunities to admire the paint-splattered floors, the slow, steady work of Lauren Luloff and Tisch Abelow, who both use the space as their studio and had work in the show. Luloff offered a large painting (pictured below) with sections of bunched-up fabric — filled with white-on-dark-green leaves and snakeskin prints of umber, amber, and ocher — that abutted a swath of flowing, potable abstraction, all smooth grays and tans that almost tilted into peach. It looks like two or three or maybe four pieces seamlessly spliced into a single work, a multitude of divergent ideas operating in unison — not a bad metaphor for any successful group show.

Lauren Luloff

Top row: Ernesto Burgos, two paintings by Halsey Hathaway; middle: Wayne Adams, Ernesto Burgos, Wayne Adams; floor: Matt Jones

Matt Jones

Tisch Abelow

Floor left: partial view of Brion Nuda Rosch; center: Maria Walker; right: Wayne Adams

Lauren Luloff

Lauren Luloff

Lauren Luloff in the stairwell

Excepting the paint-bedecked floors, the joyous heat, and the strange indoor garden, the best part of the temporary, makeshift gallery may have been that it was on the fourth floor, meaning that twice — coming and going — visitors received a bonus show in the form of stairwells lined with art, mostly large canvases holding their walls against the streams of people visiting friends and eying their latest work.

The stairwell of 840 Broadway

Previously: HKJB's first show, "Personal Abstraction," held in May 2009, out in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with the likes of Jim Lee, Wendy White, and Chris Martin.

Georgia Sagri, "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης," at Real Fine Arts

2011-05-30T13:50:00.004-04:00

Georgia Sagri, Hold on to your Ego (stolen song title from...?), 2011. Forged steel chain, master lock, garbage cans, in "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης," at Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn, through May 15, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles.

Center: It rained milk yesterday outside the city, 2011. Painted foam core, garbage can lids, chain, milk, leaves, flower petals, granola bar wrapper, dimensions variable. Margins: Detail of Four crosshatches and two lines, 2011. Semi-gloss paint on floor and wall.

Google Translate renders "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης," the title of Georgia Sagri's recent show at Real Fine Arts, in English, as "Model Julia." However, working one word at a time, it offers "Model of Antigone," which is likely a more accurate rendering since the show's press release includes, in large capital letters, the phrase "ANTIGONEMODELL 1948." That's the name that Bertolt Brecht gave to his version of Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone, which he adapted from a translation of the play by Friedrich Hölderlin. Those three names — Sophocles, Hölderlin, Brecht — are included in the release, too, each situated beneath an image, two of which are identifiable as screenshots from Yorgos Javellas' 1961 film version of the play. (The source of the third is a bit more mysterious.) There is, to put it mildly, a lot going on here.

There were garbage can lids inside the gallery — one held in the air by an old grey chain, hovering as if it were covering some phantom can, the others resting on a slice of foam core painted a rich purple, deep burgundy in its densest sections. There was a pool of milk inside one lid, and the checklist promised that leaves, flower petals, and a granola bar wrapper there also there, though I couldn't spot them. Its title is It rained milk yesterday outside the city (2011), and it is one of the most wonderfully strange works of art I have ever seen. Outside the gallery, Sagri offers something of a companion work (or is it the site to It rained...'s non-site?), wrapping a heavy gold–colored chain around a pair of garbage cans, threading it through a D-ring screwed to the gallery's front stairs and securing the whole contraption with a lock.

Unethical nests #1, 2011. Blue dog transporter, bungee cord.

The show spilled out still further into the neighborhood, sneaking up onto the steel beams beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where Sagri strapped down three dog transporters without their cage doors and titled each Unethical nests (2011). They easily blended into the surrounding structures, until you spotted them and couldn't believe no one had raised some questions about those strange plastic crates perched high above the ground. They could be concealing security cameras, one might think, or harboring explosives or serving some other devious purpose — harming animals, if one chooses to believe one possible reading of their titles. But they're just sitting there, empty and innocent.

What all of this has to do with the Antigone plays — or, for that matter, Antigone, the character, the woman, the shining role model of civil disobedience — is not at all clear. Sagri presented a performance on Thursday, May 12, which I'm embarrassed to say that I missed, so there may have been some clues there. (The estimable Flickr user thefuturistics has photos.) Regardless, she has left us with a set of bewildering objects and situations: a local, homespun site/non-site construction in the form of the two garbage can works, a lofted architectural intervention (with vaguely sinister overtones), and a handful of other peculiarities, including a one-minute PowerPoint show and a modestly sized, jerry-rigged Liam Gillick sculpture.

Unethical nests #2, 2011. Brown dog transporter, bungee cord.

In an intense interview published in Idiom, Sagri tells Alex Kitnick, "Also I am more interested [in] peripheral actions, the unexpected ones, the hidden when it is exploded, the unreasoning." That's roughly how I think about "Μοντέλο της Αντιγόνης": as a series of strange, quiet, even invisible gestures, and some that seem entirely unreasonable in their flouting of popular reference and easy access. I like what's going on here in an indistinct, unintelligible way, but I can't pretend that I understand it.

The chained garbage cans, at least, have a clear title: Hold on to your Ego (stolen song title from...?). The answer is the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, an oblique nod, perhaps, to the dog crates installed across the street. The song title to which Sagri refers, "Hang on to Your Ego," has its own obscure history, having been changed to "I Know There's an Answer" in order to conceal its apparent reference to hallucinogenics. It opens with the lines: "I know so many people who think they can do it alone / They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones." These are not words that could be sung of Sagri and her myriad, ambitious projects. That said, however filled with potential, the periphery provides its own innate form of safety. I want to know what a Georgia Sagri show would look like in a big, plush contemporary art museum.

Anthony Caro, the Met's Roof, and the Clement Greenberg Problem

2011-05-25T23:50:00.008-04:00

Anthony Caro, After Summer, 1968, in "Anthony Caro on the Roof," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through October 30, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"They wanted us out at 5 o’clock," artist Mike Starn told the New York Times last year, referring to administrators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he said bristled at the rather free-spirited approach that he and his brother, Doug Starn, brought to Big Bambú, the sprawling installation that the pair built on the museum's roof last year. "But we’re not just here working," he continued. "We’re a part of it. They didn’t like that — the beers. We finally got them to understand that this piece wouldn’t exist if it were too controlled. The vibe is important.”

This year's summer rooftop installation is comparably modest, even quiet, compared to the Starns' project. Five sleek metal sculptures by British artist Anthony Caro have been installed for the summer, and there have been no reports of Caro staging unauthorized parties or swilling beer atop his sculptures late at night. Though it is not as overtly subversive as its 2010 pick, the Met's choice shows an admirable level of nerve, choosing to reconsider largely historical work instead of commissioning a grand, crowd-pleasing installation. And, happily, there is a discernible vibe to the affair, after all.

The Starns installation offered an organic, provisional form of visual pleasure — their installation was constantly changing, growing and contracting in various sections — while Caro's works present a sharp, compact, and carefully ordered playfulness. His sculptures are sexy in the same sense that prized vintage cars are sexy: they are paragons of a specific time's collective aesthetic desires, and while we don't want to ride in them every day — they look strangely fragile despite their confident curves and strong welds — it's a pleasure to walk by one on the street.

It's even more thrilling to see one cruise by at full throttle, which could be said of Caro's rich-yellow Midday (1960), consisting of three thick steel sheets that are temporarily frozen as they dance down a smooth, gently sloping slide that is propped on two legs. The all-grey After Summer (1968) is even better. What appear to be huge, sturdy flower petals are lined up in two rows, each balanced on two long, thin slabs of metal. It's simultaneously monumental and sensual, ambitious and intimate: rare feats. Despite its materials, it looks eerily delicate. As you circle around it, you may feel that the whole piece is fluttering in the wind.

Blazon, 1987–90

All that praise aside, the past half century of Caro's career has long been haunted by the looming presence of, as Ken Johnson puts it in his review of the show in the Times, the "authoritarian, arch-formalist critic Clement Greenberg," who was an "admirer, friend and studio consultant." (The emphasis is mine.) Goodness. Even in a 1975 Village Voice review that called Caro's 32-sculpture show at the Museum of Modern Art "timely, dazzling, and important," critic David Bourdon felt it necessary to note that "Greenberg paid an apparently apocalyptic visit to Caro's London studio" in 1959. The artist was making figurative work at the time. "After their discussion," Bourdon writes, "Caro decided to 'rethink' his attitudes toward sculpture."

Bourdon continues the story:

"Later that year Caro visited the United States, met most of the Greenberg–approved artists, including David Smith, and upon his return to London purchased oxyacetylene welding gear. From then on, Caro's sculpture would be constructed of scrap metal, girders, and sheet metal. ... After Smith's death in 1965, Caro purchased from his estate various pieces of metal and some tank ends that he incorporated, somewhat cannibalistically, into his own work."

That artistic cannibalism renders this comment, which Caro makes in an awesome interview (to which Johnson links), considerably more intense: "The two father figures for me were [Henry Moore] and David Smith, and David Smith was a competitor," he says. "Henry was a father. ... You always had to come up against David." So he decided to consume his leftovers. (As an aside, Smith's death in a car crash is quickly becoming one of modern art's major birth moments, giving Caro raw material for his sculptures, and giving art historian Rosalind Krauss a dissertation topic at Harvard, which did not encourage students to write on living artists.)

Caro is entirely open about the productive relationship he shared with Greenberg. "Clement could somehow get you to develop it," he says later in the interview. "Get you to go that one stage further. That, I think, was his thing. He was in the studio, it was in the studio he was good. But you had to do it. He didn't do it." I cannot think of any other interview in which an artist emphasizes that a sympathetic critic is not actually making his work. Caro also suggests that Rachel Whiteread would be a better sculptor if she had a working relationship with a critic like Greenberg. (What does Bruce Nauman think? "She's a good artist," he once said. "There was more to that idea that I used.")

Midday, 1960

Odalisque, 1984

It may be that what fascinates us about the Caro-Greenberg relationship is that it was the last of its kind: a major artist and a major critic at work together, forging art and theory in unison. It looks strange and unsettling today, in large part because of the subsequent defenestration of Greenberg and his writing. (Deserved or not, your legacy is not doing well when one of your intellectual descendants — Krauss — uses this line that you said as the lone blurb on the jacket for her latest book: "Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters.") Writers and artists don't cozy up together quite so comfortably today. When Benjamin Buchloh and Gerhard Richter chat, or when Nicolas Bourriaud writes about his European posse, we are looking at far different models.

Perhaps as time passes, and Greenberg becomes a less spooky figure in the public imagination (the polemicist who drank himself to death as art passed him by), we'll find new reasons to swoon over Caro's work, and be able to marvel at his influence on scores of younger artists, who are taking his vintage cars for long, leisurely rides. Already I think Caro is present in the work of Patrick Hill, especially when Hill stretches his work across the floor and lets it breathe a bit, and I think it's also possible to see it in the nimble just-right balance that Sarah Brahman fights for and nails in some of her best work.

End Up, 2010

Another unlikely fan, mentioned by Johnson, is Los Angeles–based sculptor Charles Ray, who tells critic Michael Fried (in another interview that Johnson highlights) that he once proposed photographing a nude woman riding Caro's stunning and fragile 1962 Early One Morning. Sadly, the plan never came to fruition. "Caro agreed in principle," Ray tells Fried, though he notes that Caro, understandably, "did not want a public image of it that would suggest it might be strong enough to be sat on." But Ray is still enamored of Caro's work. "His work was, and is, so alive," he says. "It bridges a gap between the inside and outside of my mind."

"In Back of the Real": Around the International Studio & Curatorial Program

2011-05-23T10:40:00.003-04:00

Carolyn Salas, Second Sight, 2011. Wood, transparent vinyl, paint, dimensions variable, at the St. Nicks Alliance, Jennings Hall, corner of Bushwick Avenue and Powers Street. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.

— Allen Ginsberg, "In Back of the Real," 1954

Around the corner, more bursts of color, more floating planes.

"Are you looking for the speaker?" a middle–aged man asked me as he walked into the Powers Street Garden in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on May 15. I certainly was looking for the speaker. I had been standing at the entrance to the garden for four or five minutes, helplessly trying to find the Uri Aran audio piece that a map I had picked up at the nearby International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) building promised was playing in the area. "It's right over there," the man said, with a kind but amused smile, pointing to the corner of the park, just a few feet away. "It goes on occasionally. Just wait for a minute." He paused to listen. "There it is now."

A dispassionate man's voice was emerging from that leafy patch of the garden, filled with low trees and green bushes. "The mongoose, the hen, the cow," he said, naming a long series of animals. "Head lice, rats, mice, cockroaches." There were two lists, one of "good animals," the other of "bad animals," the pamphlet with the map explained, a guide to Turkish-German curator Necmi Sönmez's exhibition "In Back of the Real," titled for the eponymous Ginsberg poem, which brought the work of nine artists to the ISCP building and the streets that surround it.

"The neighborhood is characterized by an enigmatic relationship between its manual laborers and artist community, with an 'invisible border' between economic production and the artistic imaginary," Sönmez writes in the pamphlet. To put it more simply, it is a neighborhood in the process of gentrifying, where automobile repair shops and community gardens sit alongside hip new bars and, as Sönmez notes, a former factory that has been converted to house studios for an international cast of artists. Like the Art Production Fund's current "Murals on the Bowery" project, Sönmez's show feels like an inevitable step in the very transformation that it seeks to address.

Tanja Roscic, Rosarium, 2011. Textile sculpture, 14 x 7 1/2 ft., on Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic Church, on Olive Street, between Powers and Devoe Streets.

Sönmez's transformation was fleeting. The exhibition was on view for only three days, March 13 through 15, and most of the works carried a light touch. Some were very thrilling temporary additions, like Carolyn Salas' Second Sight installation — translucent vinyl rectangles that she painted with angular planes of color and hung along a fence at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Powers Street. The panels oozed with strong–willed joy, even underneath Sunday afternoon's grey sky, even dappled with dewy moisture left by the morning's rain. Tanja Roscic's fourteen-foot-tall Rosarium was similarly majestic, hanging with restrained glory on the side of Olive Street's Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic Church. If I lived in the neighborhood, I wouldn't mind seeing those two pieces every day.

A painting of Jesus that was not part of the exhibition.

Luisa Rabbia, Emergence, 2011. Textile and porcelain, dimensions variable, in the Olive Street Garden, corner of Olive and Powers Streets. A locked gate meant that viewers could only see the work by peeking through the surrounding metal fence.

An intricate mosaic, also not part of "In Back of the Real."

Katie Holten, Nature, 2011. Paint on metal, 22 x 60 in. on All About Automotive, 319 Devote Street.

Ana Santos, Untitled, 2011. Thirteen painted MDF boards, 30 x 50 in. each, on ISCP Building, along Morgan Avenue.

Thirteen yellow boards hovered mysteriously on a wall of the ISCP building, each adorned with a black triangle that seemed to be slowly fading away. They could have been mistaken for now-indecipherable signs of some forgotten industrial project. Reed Seifer (whom 2010 Armory Show visitors may recall as the artist hawking $25 bottles of an an elixir called Spray to Forget) addressed the industrial site even more directly, plucking a stone from ISCP's courtyard and installing it inside its gallery, where the show continued. Seifer filled in the empty space in the courtyard with Herkimer diamonds — also known as double-terminated quartz crystals — that were free for the taking.

Faded geometric abstractions — Ellsworth Kellys or Blinky Palermos or naval flags — disappearing in the rain.

Gereon Krebber, Out of Site, Out of Mind, 2011. Color tape, 30 feet long, at the ISCP loading dock.

The mass of tape from above, viewed from the building's second-floor gallery.

Reed Seifer, Neither Didactic nor Pedantic, 2011. Cobblestone and Herkimer diamonds, dimensions variable, in the ISCP Gallery and courtyard.

Sönmez writes that these cobblestones may have served as ballast for ships as they journeyed to the New World in the 1600s, before being converted into material for the courtyard. According to an English inscription printed on some of them ("PAT'D JUNE 17 / 84"), the stones may have been in use in one form or another in the 1680s, when control of the community moved from the Dutch to the English — an earlier and even more radical transformation of the area than the one now underway.

"Tilted Arc" and Drawing, Koons and the Met, Childe Hassam, etc. [Collected]

2011-05-19T09:30:00.003-04:00

Koo Jeong A, Mystral, 2010, in "Koo Jeong A: Constellation Congress," at Dia at the Hispanic Society, New York, through June 26, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The United States Government destroys art: Greg Allen on Richard Serra's post-Tilted Arc drawing show at Castelli in 1989. [Greg.org]
"If it looked like an anti-tank fortification, it was ahead of its time." — John Perreault on Tilted Arc, in a piece on Serra's current drawing show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [Artopia]
Jeff Koons is loaning paintings to the Met, Laura Gilbert notices. [Art Unwashed]
Tyler Green surveys recent and proposed arts-funding cuts in the U.S. and asks, "Why aren't Americans angrier?" [Modern Painters]
Mark Grotjahn, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jonas Wood, et al.: Picks from "Greater LA," the giant show now on view on the second floor of 483 Broadway in SoHo. [Two Coats of Paint]
Hotelier Andre Balazs is looking forward to the extension of the High Line. "As you walk along it, the intimacy and titillation is very tactile, very suggestive,” says Balazs, of the elevated park. "It’s a sexual way of interacting with the city. ... Walking from 13th Street to 30th Street along 10th Avenue is utterly banal. ... But walking from 13th to 30th Street on the High Line feels like you’re on your way to an orgasm.” [NYT]
1918: "CHILDE HASSAM ARRESTED." — "Mr. Hassam then congratulated the policeman, saying that if every one was as alert there would not be so many dangerous enemy aliens traveling about the country." [NYT]
May 19: "We Regret To Inform You There Is Currently No Space Or Place For Abstract Painting," featuring Daniel Turner, Ben Schumacher, Sarah Crowner, and more, at Martos Gallery, 6–8 PM. [MG]

May 20: David Reed, Katy Siegel, and Lynne Cooke discuss Jo Baer's work, at The Artist's Institute, 6:30 PM. [TAI]
May 21: Hilary Lloyd at Artists Space, 6–8 PM. [AS]
May 22: Spring Open House 2011 at MoMA PS1, 12–6 PM. [MoMA PS1]
May 23: "Fünf Räume" ("Five Rooms") at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 6–8 PM. [ACF]

"Stone Soup": Esther Kläs and Thomas Fougeirol at C L E A R I N G

2011-05-16T12:13:00.003-04:00

Esther Kläs, Untitled, 2011. Plaster, pigment, concrete, in "Stone Soup," at C L E A R I N G, Brooklyn, New York, through May 16, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

If artist Olivier Babin, the proprietor of the nascent C L E A R I N G gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, hadn't told me that his current show, "Stone Soup," is a two-person affair, I would have guessed that three artists were involved in its making. There are two austere black canvases on the walls — one large, one small, both clearly the work of a single artist. And there are two tall, solid abstract sculptures — one yellow, one mint green and concrete grey, seemingly created by another single pair of hands. But there is one more work — quite different from the other four pieces — that consists of a long, narrow rug, with almost its entire interior sliced away, hanging from the ceiling and a plaster cast of a forearm balancing on the ground beneath it, holding a partial handstand.

Left: Esther Kläs, Untitled, 2011. Aquaresin, pigment; right: Thomas Fougeirol, Untitled, 2010. Oil and spray paint on canvas.

The paintings are the work of Thomas Fougeirol, a French-born artist with studios in New York and Paris. Fougeirol coated them with thin, slick layers of paint and then pushed objects up against them — a pegboard in the case of the larger work and a bundle of string in the smaller one, according to Kaleidoscope. The resulting marks are indexical records of those materials, traces of simple, rote actions. Your opinion of the works will depend on your view of the strain of vanguard painting to which they resolutely belong, which favors a handcrafted — occasionally battered and frequently chilly — minimalism, sometimes ornamented with machine-wrought dysfunction. Think Ned Vena or Wade Guyton or Jacob Kassay (who was in C L E A R I N G's inaugural show) or at least half of the works in the Journal's current "One Dozen Paintings" show. I'm fan of that field, but I'm beginning to suspect that it is one that today's best artists will soon need to leave fallow.

Front: Esther Kläs, Untitled, 2011. Plaster, cut-out rug; back: Esther Kläs, Untitled, 2011. Plaster, pigment, concrete.

The two standing sculptures belong to the German–trained and Brooklyn–based Esther Kläs, who presented another, similarly playful and mysterious sculpture at Bureau earlier this year. Her yellow piece suggests a tumescent John McCracken or an Anne Truitt that has grown a tumor. That sounds scary, and the work is a little scary at first — imposing in size and heavy–looking — but it also projects a charming vulnerability, swelling awkwardly at its crown and spashed with incomplete, drippy coats of yellow paint. You will want to love it. Kläs's mint piece is a comparably elegant sight, and it shows her again gamely playing with viewers' sense of scale, placing a life-size cast of her knees on top of a lofty pedestal. (I want to place it next to Dan Walsh's mint-colored painting now on view at the Journal and eat a pint of mint ice cream as I stare at both.) As you stand in front of it, a strange figment or ghost of a person seems to float in the air in front of you.

Front: Esther Kläs, Untitled, 2011. Plaster, cut-out rug; back: Thomas Fougeirol, Untitled, 2010. Oil and spray paint on canvas.

And then, seeing this, it may occur to you, as it did to me, that another part of this uncanny, fragmentary body is on view behind your back, balancing on one hand underneath that hanging rug, which is also, it turns out, by Kläs.

Thomas Fougeirol, Untitled, 2010. Oil and spray paint on canvas.

Installation views of "Stone Soup"

Looking across the room and out the window across Johnson Street

More: Babin is also an artist; his work was on view at Marian Goodman in 2009.

Liz Magic Laser's "Flight" in Times Square

2011-05-11T23:10:00.006-04:00

Performance stills of Flight (2010–) on May 7, 2011, 8 pm performance, the eighth of the week's nine performances. Video: 16 Miles of String

Performance stills of Flight.It was previously performed at MoMA P.S.1. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

It was difficult to tell when it happened, but a few minutes after 8 pm on Saturday a performance of Liz Magic Laser's Flight (2010–) began on the iconic, red TKTS stairs in Times Square. Tour groups were climbing the steps, couples were posing for photographs, families were lounging, and people were waving off into the distance. After a few moments, you realized that those wavers — six of them — were really waving, flailing their arms from side to side, standing on the tips of their toes and letting loose. And then they stopped waving and started sprinting down the crowded steps, dodging the seated tourists. Viewers who had been handed a single-page "table of scenes" for Laser's piece by a Times Square public safety officer could consult it to learn that we were watching a scene from Battleship Potemkin (1925), the famous Odessa Steps sequence, in which czarist soldiers gun down civilians. The actors were running for their lives.

One very angry performer heads toward the stairs.

Twenty-two more classic film scenes, most involving epic chases, were staged over the following 30 minutes, including snippets of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Cinderella (1950), and Vertigo (1958). "I'm so sorry I dropped you. I had to save the Declaration," one man told a woman, as they enacted part of National Treasure (2004). "I would have done exactly the same to you," she replied, earning laughter from the audience. This took place low on the stairs, not far from where I was standing at the bottom, but other scenes took place far above the street, almost out of sight. A man strangled a woman at the top of the stairs. Another crept slowly up the far side, quietly stalking a woman at the top who was frantically dialing for help on her cell phone. One moment an actor would be screaming or falling in front of you; the next, he or she would be off in the distance. Terror and excitement came and went, growing rapidly and then receding just as quickly.

A fight on the top deck of the bleachers. Viewers watch as a woman is strangled.

For Laser fans, there were familiar figures among the cast, namely Liz Micek, Michael Wiener, and Max Woertendyke, who all appeared in the artist's chase (2010) video, which was shown at Derek Eller Gallery last year. That work had a theatrical foundation as well, being a contemporary version of Bertolt Brecht's 1926 play Man Equals Man that shot inside the ATM vestibules of various New York banks. It ran for almost two and a half hours, and many complained that it was too long, though that seems more Brecht's fault that Laser's. Regardless, Flight felt perfectly paced. Some people left the stairs during the show, no doubt moving on to other affairs (How were they supposed to know that a performance piece would break out during their evening in Times Square?), but others stuck it out, and most of them looked thrilled.

A tragedy unfolds.

When people did leave, Laser's trusty stage manager Boman Modine directed those waiting below up onto the stairs one or two at a time, leading them into the action as if he was orchestrating a delicate military operation. "You two, head halfway up to the far right," he whispered. Then, "I need one. One right there," pointing to a spot that would almost immediately after be the site of the next showdown. The public safety officers also looked excited, and one grinned wildly as he just barely dodged an actor dashing past him.

Looking south from the bottom of the steps as the action unfolds.

Laser had ripped a tiny hole in reality and then grafted on tiny slices of popular culture in its place. (The Shining (1980), The Fugitive (1993), and Titanic (1997)!) Delightfully, there was no clear censorship in this most public of places. A performer smoked a cigarette and others tossed off an occasional expletive, leading one mother to hastily cover her daughter's ears. Earmuffs! In other words, it looked in many ways like an ordinary day on the streets of New York, albeit one in which a young woman's screams for the police go unanswered and a man is stabbed in the neck in the middle of one of the city's most densely trafficked areas.

After about half an hour, every actor that I could see was sprawled out dead on the stairs. No one was moving. I consulted my table of scenes. "Is this really how Final Destination 4 ends?" I wondered. Finally a middle–aged man reached out and tapped one of the female performers on her shoulders. "Thank you!" she shouted happily, suddenly coming to life and leaping to her feet. "Are you a doctor?" Other members of the audience followed the man's lead, and within moments the whole cast was jaunting down the steps as the crowd applauded.

Down and Then Out: 18 Murals on the Gates of the Bowery

2011-05-09T09:51:00.003-04:00

Lawrence Weiner's painting at 134 Bowery, New York, for "After Hours: Murals on the Bowery," organized by the Art Production Fund. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

In December 2009, the New York City Council voted to require business owners to replace garage-style security gates with ones that allow views into the stores behind them by July 2026. "Roll-down gates are essentially large metal canvases," the New York Times' James Barron wrote in a report on artists who criticized the ban on the metal walls (which can no longer be installed after July 1 of this year). Barron noted that some painters have made their names on those gates, like octogenarian Franco Gaskin (also known as Franco the Great or the Harlem Picasso), who has painted scores of them around the world and more than a dozen along 125th Street in Manhattan. In other cases, a street-level mural may be one of the highlights of an artist's career. The city is filled with them.

All of which is to say that the Art Production Fund's latest project, which involved commissioning contemporary artists to design murals for 18 security gates along the Bowery, between Houston and Grand Streets, has an elegiac element alongside its more celebratory aspects. The works, which officially debuted on the evening of May 7 (they're only visible when the stores are closed: at night and on Sunday, in most cases), are on view for only two months, after which they'll be painted over, embodying the upcoming legislated disappearance of the gates across the city. A medium is slowly being ushered offstage.

Mary Heilmann's work at 220 Bowery, just feet from Prince Street

At a time when street art by its most famous practitioners is sometimes sliced off of buildings and sold, I'm a little surprised that no one has proposed auctioning off the soon-to-be-defunct gates to raise money for the APF or the nearby New Museum, especially since some of the works are really wonderful. Three of the most interesting are the abstract works by Mary Heilmann and Jacqueline Humphries and a characteristically manic, brushy text piece by Judith Bernstein, which could all be mistaken for the graffiti that appears on almost every other gate in the neighborhood. They appear to have been quickly and roughly painted, like many of the tags on the surrounding gates, and their work slips easily into the visual landscape of that stretch of blocks. Of course, the murals were in fact meticulously executed by teams of artists working from blueprints. They possess what art historian Rosalind Krauss, discussing Impressionist painting, calls the "codified sign or seme of spontaneity." They look easy, but they're hard-won: painting with the speed of a graffiti artist is difficult work.

A tricolor triptych! Jacqueline Humphries at 153 Bowery, inches from Broome Street.

Two people walking by the Judith Bernstein mural at 272 Bowery

The Kool-Aid man emerges: artists at work on Richard Prince's mural at 265 Bowery.

In other cases, the translation from contemporary painting to street mural is more awkward, as in Richard Prince's enormous Kool-Aid Man or Lawrence Weiner's gorgeous blue text piece. They're both stunning, particularly the Weiner, but they feel slightly out of place along the Bowery. This refusal of site specificity and the unique context and history of the street is a missed opportunity: these murals could be anywhere.

Ne travaillez jamais: Rirkrit Tiravanija's diptych at 180 Bowery

That can't be said of Rirkrit Tiravanija's piece, with its awkwardly shaped letters and occasional patches of sloppy painting, recalling the hand-painted "no parking" signs that adorn the storefront gates of many businesses around the city. It reads, "STOP WORK / NEVER WORK," a slogan plucked from the graffiti of Paris's 1968 revolts ("ne travaillez jamais") and sometimes attributed to Situationist International founder Guy Debord. That phrase also happens to be the text I had printed on the Tiravanija T-shirt that I picked up recently at the artist's "FEAR EATS THE SOUL" show at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Painted on the Bowery, on gates just a few blocks away from the Bowery Mission homeless shelter, it becomes far less easy to consume.

The Bowery Mission at 227 Bowery

Adam McEwen at 212 Bowery

The Danish duo Elmgreen & Dragset's piece at 213 Bowery, right next to Rivington Street

214 Bowery: Deborah Kass and Pulp, Ink have painted the gate of The Chair Factory.

Alchemy and Inquiry: Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Terry Winter at Wave Hill

2011-05-07T22:25:00.008-04:00

Installation view of works by Terry Winters in the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill in the Bronx, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Terry Winters, Wave Hill, 2011. Oil on paper mounted on composite board, 32 1/8 x 44 1/8 in.

Bringing together Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, and Terry Winters for an exhibition in the luxurious galleries of the Wave Hill garden and estate in the Bronx is an idea that feels so right that it is a wonder that it had not been done before "Alchemy & Inquiry," which opened there last month. Each artist, after all, has spent decades honing a rich pictoral language that channels and sometimes embodies the complexities of nature. Think of Taaffe with his intricate, organic patterning and washes of color; Winters with his rough-hewn, almost grimy geometries; and Tomaselli with his swirls and bursts of pure abstraction. They're all natural intoxicants.

The three artists produced most of the work on view after making a joint trip to Wave Hill last fall, so many of the pieces were, at least to some degree, designed with the fine interiors of the 1927 Glyndor House in mind. How they will look when they hang in the James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai, the show's next destination, is an open question. Most of them look superb in this tranquil domestic setting, but its Winters' paintings that hold up best — earthier, but equally gentle, counterpoints to the room's low ceilings and elegant moldings. Every fireplace should have one above it.

With each artist featured in a separate room, it's easy to see their three distinct visions clearly. My favorite in the tripartite melee is Taaffe, whose paintings are populated with forms that recall amoebae and deep-sea creatures. They almost appear to pulse and vibrate in front of you. That description also applies to the essay by artist and poet Peter Lamborn Wilson in the show's gorgeous, free catalogue, which was printed in an edition of 3,000 and is currently available online as a PDF. In it, Wilson positions the three artists in the lineage of Hermeticists — "Paracelsus, the Rosicrucians, Bruno — as he lobbies for "a secret avant-garde, for the re-enchantment of aesthetic vision." (Sign me up.) Forthwith, some highlights from the text:

For Winters, abstraction holds a key to the mystery of evolutionary origins — origins revealed to us in the advance mathematics of Chaos and Complexity Theory and the "other possible states" of Painting. For him Nature is not only flora and fauna but the deeper principles on which the world is structured.

Fred Tomaselli works hang above the fireplace; a trove of Taaffes resides in the next room.

If psychedelic art had become the actual folk art of an isolated community, say in the hills of North California, and this 1968 Shangri-La had lived on unvisited by the outside world for several centuries, you would expect their art to have remained psychedelic but to have evolved, been refined and rectified, become intricately craftier and more anonymously baroque over generations of tribal tradition. In effect, you'd expect something like a picture by Fred Tomaselli.

Tomaselli is our shaman, and our Archimboldo, the LSD generation's house-artist, of course now slightly amused, always, by how much has gone down, but also always (once again) ecstatic. Sees All, Knows All — but is not bored.

The most effervescent room: four walls of Taaffe paintings.

A tiny Taaffe in the corner, another above the hearth.

Philip Taaffe, Opuntia Variegatus, 2011. Mixed media on canvas mounted on panel, 53 1/2 x 59 in.

Detail view of Philip Taaffe, Opuntia Variegatus, 2011

The work is also about movement, or how we see in a constant series of glimpses. What do I want my art to accomplish? What do I expect it to be like as a physical encounter? I think the best thing one can hope for is to be able to enter into another world. – Philip Taaffe

That “other world” Taaffe refers to would of course be the Mundus Imaginalis, according to the philosopher Henry Corbin, the world of Archetypes, or the Creative Imagination. Nothing could be more germane to our consideration of all three artists as — can we say, deeply influenced by Hermeticism — or would it be fair to call them something like the “New Hermeticists”? Nowadays, most artists and writers shun the label “avant-garde” and refuse to belong to any movement or school — but for me Hermeticism is, indeed, the “eternal” avant-garde, the everlasting rebellion of love and beauty against oppression and enforced stupidity.

SoHo v. Berlin, Wave Hill, Public Art in Times Square, etc. [Collected]

2011-05-03T23:25:00.006-04:00

Installation views of Meghan Gordon, Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh would have liked to explore the Palisades, 2011, at Wave Hill in the Bronx, through May 8, 2011 Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Michael Kimmelman compares 1970s SoHo and contemporary Berlin. "Lately, in the former East Berlin, a private club for upwardly mobile art types, of the sort that used to be anathema to Berliners, has opened," he writes. "It’s called ... Soho House. The club could be anywhere in the world, anywhere the new rich live. That’s its point. [NYT]
As long as it lasts... is a temporary tattoo parlor in Berlin that offers works by Lawrence Weiner, Cao Fei, Christian Jankowski, Dr. Lakra (thank goodness), and others. [Arratia, Beer via ROLU]
Van Hanos chats in his Harlem studio with Alex Hubbard and Ryan Kitson. [The Highlights]
Never miss a film screening in New York ever again. [Alt Screen via @AviZenilman]
Classic Throwback: "For a six-year run beginning in 1987, Christian Leigh was one of the most visible — and ambitious — independent curators in the international art world. Then he vanished." — Alexi Worth, 2003 [Artforum]

The exhibition is inspired, in part, by the belief of some that a lengthy set of murals in Wave Hill's Ecology Building may have been painted by Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh. Others say it was Howard McCormick. Another inspiration: an underground tunnel on the Wave Hill estate.

May 4 and 5: "Is Basic Instinct 2, routinely derided as a cine-atrocity, a Lacanian reworking of Ballard, Baudrillard and Bataille in service of the creation of a 'phantasmatic, cybergothic London'?" Mark Fisher at NYU. [K-Punk]
May 6 and 7: Liz Magic Laser and company perform on the TKTS stairs in Times Square. [LML]
May 7: Van Hanos at West Street Gallery. [WSG]
Through May 7: Jules Marquis, the nom de plume of Colin Snapp and Daniel Turner, has a video playing on American Eagle Outfitters' video screen in Times Square every 15 minutes, at 5:40, 17:10, 37:05, and 52:05 after the hour. [Nuit Blanche]
May 13: Artist Joshua Abelow, the man behind Art Blog Art Blog, has temporarily acquired an exhibition space in Chelsea, and will be hosting fortnight-long shows there. Up first is "Gold Records," a group show of artists assembled by curator Jon Lutz that appeared on his late blog, The Old Gold. Expect Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Stacy Fisher, Jaime Gecker, and others. [ABAB]

Gordon has lined the walls with hand-painted wallpaper, styled on circa 1865 designs.

Just outside the Sunroom Project Space housing Gordon's work there is an exhibition of work by a trio of hallucinogenic masters: Terry Winters, Philip Taaffe, and Fred Tomaselli. A few blocks away, a train station with art by Dennis Oppenheim.

Dennis Oppenheim at a Train Station in the Bronx

2011-05-02T23:36:00.001-04:00

Dennis Oppenheim, Rising and Setting Neighborhood, 2006. Painted steel, perforated steel, 22 ft. x 2 ft. x 80 ft. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"Some warm June night this summer I will wander down to TriBeCa and wait for Dennis to run past me in the night — the outlaw bad-boy artist no one can catch."

– Alice Aycock, Artforum, May 2011

While perusing Dennis Oppenheim's web site in the days after his death in January, I was surprised to learn that he had completed a work of public art at the Metro North train station in the Riverdale section of the Bronx less than five years ago. Somehow, despite riding past that station numerous times, I had completely missed it. Spurred by the tribute penned by his second wife, Alice Aycock in this month's Artforum, I visited the work, Rising and Setting Neighborhood, 2006, over the weekend. It is an odd and beautiful piece, though not as odd and beautiful as some of Oppenheim's other public art pieces. (One can only get away with so much in genteel Riverdale, I assume.)

"The piece evokes the houses of the neighborhood in the light of daybreak and dusk," Oppenheim wrote of the piece. "It greets commuters as they begin their journey leaving in the morning as the sun rises, returning in the evening with the setting sun." I buy all of that, but, as is almost always the case with the Oppenheim's public work, there is another, more sinister, darker element. The houses have an anthropomorphic feel: note the two square eyes and the large square mouth. They may be greeting commuters, as Oppenheim said, but they are not the friendliest ambassadors. They are not smiling. Rather, their mouths are wide open, as if they're screaming or shouting. "Don't leave!" At the same time, they're painted with a family friendly range of colors, and they could be just seven separate, irregular pentagons.

I only met Oppenheim once, for a few minutes, last year at the opening for "The Original Copy" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured his 1970 work Parallel Stress. Never one to approach an artist I don't know, but having just finished reading Lucy Lippard's Oppenheim–filled Six Years, I decided to say hello after spotting him just outside the sculpture garden. After offering some sort of awkward congratulations, I showed him the book, which he started flipping through, ostensibly excited (though it occurs to me now that he may have just been generously indulging the curiosity of a fan). He stopped on a page with a photograph of Robert Kinmont doing one of his 8 Natural Handstands (1969) — a possible influence on Parallel Stress, in the way that it combines bodily performance and photographic documentation — and said something to the effect of, 'This was a great piece, but he stopped making art shortly after this and just disappeared. These photographs and a few works were all that was left.' Which is where we now find ourselves in regards to Oppenheim.

Thankfully, he has left us with a fascinatingly idiosyncratic body of work, much of it public art that we'll be able to stumble onto for some time to come. Here is a quick roundup of other writers' responses to his passing.

In the Guardian, Michael McNay positions Oppenheim in relation to his peers and followers:

"It might have been expected that the grand calmness of Oppenheim's earth art would lead to sculpture somewhat akin to Rachel Whiteread's understated monumentality, but instead he seems to have followed the example of Claes Oldenburg's monumental pop sculptures of everyday objects and the tainted route of Jeff Koons's urban vulgarity."

Jerry Saltz shares what he found compelling about the artist's work:

But the wild, labyrinthical ways Oppenheim put things together, the way he allowed thought to unspool ever-outward in involuted configurations, was inspiring nonetheless. His ideas of artistic experimentation, theoretically driven art, the merging of sculpture and science, his absolute unwillingness to create a visual style, his aesthetic and material dislocation — all of it wowed me.

Roberta Smith connects his early, ephemeral work to his later, more grandiose efforts (and has a few anecdotes, which are delightful to read):

"Belonging to a generation of artists who saw portable painting and sculpture as obsolete, Mr. Oppenheim started out in the realm of the esoteric, the immaterial and the chronically unsalable. But he was always a showman, not averse to the circuslike, or to courting danger."

Judd Tully remembers almost being killed by an Oppenheim piece:

"I managed to escape with a pack of coughing scribes through an emergency exit just before a retinue of fire equipment and fire fighters arrived to save the day. Oppenheim somehow avoided arrest for what seemed to be an exceptionally dangerous happening-slash-performance. As he said later, 'It wasn't supposed to be so much like Vietnam.'"

Finally, one more line from Aycock:

"Dennis was a trickster, a shape-shifter, a flimflam man, a snake-oil salesman for art, and a rascal. He was highly intelligent, charismatic, and witty."

Art Books on the Runway: Publication Studio in the East Village

2011-05-01T23:43:00.004-04:00

Performance excerpts from "The Spring Line: Publication Studio in New York," at Heathers, April 28, 2011. Video: 16 Miles

Collaborations between the art and fashion worlds have become de rigueur in recent years, but I was nevertheless surprised to read an email from the scrappy Portland imprint Publication Studio that announced its plan to have authors and artists "walk the Spring Line runway" at a book celebration last Thursday at the East Village bar Heathers to celebrate the company's newest publications. Murakami joyfully designing Vuitton bags is one thing, but asking writers to take to the catwalk sounded inhuman, a bizarre and disconcerting embrace of a fashion ritual.

Thankfully, instead of seeing an exploitative spectacle, an audience of a few dozen people watched a bewildering art-book fashion show, with Publication Studio founder Matthew Stadler announcing brief synopses of the new books as each respective author (or a surrogate) walked along the length of the bar, brandishing the bound volume in his or her hand and showing it to the crowd. A baby, held in his mother's arms, carried proudly above his head a new art book by the fast-rising Ruby Sky Stiler. A young man held a blinking red light in front of Joseph Redwood-Martinez's event statements as he walked the improvised runway, showing the book, which was produced from, as Stadler put it, "utterly riveting [e-flux] emails." A photo-illustrated work of fiction by artist Colter Jacobsen and Berkeley Art Museum director (not to mention 2002 Whitney Biennial curator) Lawrence Rinder was paraded through, as was a photo book by Ari Marcopoulos.

Matt Keegan discussed his book, A History of New York, which was inspired by Ric Burns's PBS documentary, New York.

There would be no strutting for artist Matt Keegan, who instead took to the stage to present a slide show about his new 365-page tome A History of New York, which contains images that have culled from Ric Burns's documentary film New York and stripped of their identifying captions, left to viewers to identify. (Keegan currently has a — sort of — New York–themed show up at D'Amelio Terras, which sports a press release that includes an interview that he conducted with graphic designer Milton Glaser: well worth a read.) Publication Studio had been "a pleasure to work with," Keegan told the crowd. "They weren't concerned with image copyright." He then added quickly, "I hope I didn't just get anyone into trouble."

Stadler returned to the stage. "The circulation of new material is the best response of artists and writers," he said, articulating his company's copyright ethos. He emphasized that he always aims to work "ethically and effectively," and that he asks that anyone who has an intellectual property claim with one of his company's books to notify him. Burns has apparently not yet made that call.

Christine Shan Shan Hou read an excerpt from her poetry book, Accumulations.

There would be no such concerns for writer Christine Shan Shan Hou, who concluded the evening's festivities by reading aloud excerpts from her first book of poetry, Accumulations, which includes drawings by Hannah Rawe. People sat and stood quietly, as she spoke, closing with a new piece. It was the first and only time that it felt like a book reading was taking place.

The Holiday Inn and Martha Rosler's Toilet Paper: Anton Vidokle at Parsons

2011-04-28T14:30:00.007-04:00

A still from Anton Vidokle's New York Conversations, 2010, which was screened during his lecture at Parsons, April 27, 2011. The lights were off during the lecture, so picture Vidokle sitting in the lower-right corner using a small light to read his statements. Photo: 16 Miles

An email announcement from e-flux just landed in my inbox a few minutes ago. I opened it, read it, and learned about the debut of a new German and English version of frieze, succinctly titled frieze d/e, which will cover the contemporary art scene in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. As with many of the products presented by e-flux, I think it sounds awesome. I read e-flux announcements at least once a day, and there are, according to my Gmail account, thousands of press releases — trumpeting museum exhibitions, professorships, gallery shows, publications, biennials, and museums — currently residing in my email archives.

Over the past 12 years, e-flux has morphed from a modest listserv into a global empire, achieving in the art world what companies like Groupon are hoping to achieve in a wider marketplace: a global reach and a system for effortlessly disseminating specialized information to an audience that yearns for it. Meanwhile, it has used some of the profits from that enterprise to fund a variety of projects: an art-video rental service, an exhibition space, and, more recently, a journal. Last night, e-flux co-founder and artist Anton Vidokle visited Parsons as part of the school's visiting lecture series to discuss his company's projects. Here are some highlights from the occasionally provocative talk, which doubled as a brief primer on the history of e-flux and its manifold activities.

The Holiday Inn
Add e-flux to the list of art projects launched in a hotel room (like the Gramercy International Art Fair and the Dependent Art Fair). Vidokle noted (as he had told Hans Ulrich Obrist in a 2006 interview) that the idea for e-flux originated in November 1998, when Vidokle, Regine Basha, and Christoph Gerozissis decided to hold a one-night exhibition, titled "The Best Surprise Is No Surprise," from 10 pm to 10 am, in a Holiday Inn in Chinatown. (Add it to the Lost Art Map.) Unable to afford a mass mailing of press releases, they opted to send emails to their few dozen friends who had email accounts . (At Parsons, Vidokle revealed that he was a Hotmail user at the time, so a free email service — one owned by Microsoft, no less — is part of the success story.) The organizers told hotel staff to expect some foot traffic throughout the night because they were holding auditions for a reclusive Japanese film director who was in town for only a single night. The turnout was sizable, and in January 1999 e-flux announcements began.

The Video Rental Shop and Martha Rosler's Toilet Paper
In 2004, artist Julieta Aranda convinced Vidokle to give up a studio they shared and open a street-level space on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. They inaugurated an art-video rental shop, which eventually traveled as an exhibition to a variety of museums over the course of five years. A visit by Vidokle to Marfa, Texas, where the Judd Foundation maintains Donald Judd's massive library in the exact configuration that he left it on the day that he died, inspired one of the next e-flux projects in its space, an exhibition of more than 8,000 books from Martha Rosler's personal library. Many of the marginalia–filled books harbored toilet-paper bookmarks, according to Vidokle, apparently because Rosler likes to study while in the restroom. "You really get to enter her world!" he said.

Essex Street and Gentrification
As Martha Schwendener notes in the Village Voice this week, e-flux can be seen as a factor in the rapid, ongoing gentrification of the Lower East Side. The e-flux office moved from Ludlow to Essex Street, and it now resides in a building nearby many that feature illegal apartments with poor living conditions. As e-flux hosted a three-day series of conversations in 2008 theorizing "de-material labor," one of their neighbors was going through the detritus left by a Rirkrit Tiravanija cooking session, foraging for bottles and cans to recycle in exchange for cash – "very manual labor." That neighbor appears in a few instances in the film produced during those talks, New York Conversations, which played silently on a screen above Vidokle as he spoke.

Some Thoughts on the Festival of Ideas for the New City
All of this talk about non-art taking place in an art context led one audience member to ask Vidokle about the Festival of Ideas for a New City, an initiative scheduled to run from May 4 to 8 that will bring together scores of arts and community organizations to, in the words of its organizers, "effect change" in downtown Manhattan. According to Vidokle, e-flux was approached by the planners of the festival, which is being led in large part by the New Museum. "It sounded okay," Vidokle said. The idea almost sounds like it could be another e-flux project, redirecting and reusing the art world's existing infrastructure and resources to new ends. But then Vidokle learned that the festival was not actually providing any funding in most cases, only asking groups to organize various projects that it could then publicize as a special event. It is a spectacle, Vidokle said, and spectacles have become integral to fundraising at contemporary art museums. He added, speaking of the festival, "It's a new model of being a parasite."

There and Back Again: Robert Whitman's "Passport" in Beacon, New York

2011-04-25T13:05:00.003-04:00

Pre-performance view of Robert Whitman's Passport, 2010, at Riverfront Park, Beacon, New York, April 17, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"It’s not written in scripture that everyone has to see the same thing at the same time."

– Robert Whitman, interview on the Art21 blog, 2011

"Why am I here and not over there?"

– The Dirty Projectors, "Stillness Is the Move," 2009

"This is just like the opening of the final act of Hamlet," a woman said to a young boy as they sat together on bleachers awaiting the start of Robert Whitman's Passport (2010) on Sunday, April 17, in Beacon, New York. We were just a few yards from the Hudson River, not far from Dia:Beacon, and two poncho-clad men with shovels — gravediggers of a sort — moved about a dirt mound as a yellow backhoe stretched its limb and growled. Lightning had forced the cancellation of the previous night's performance, and it felt like thunderstorms could break out again at any moment, shuttering this second, final show. "What's Hamlet?" the boy asked. "It's a play by the English writer Shakespeare," his mother said. She didn't mention that it ends badly.

I arrived by bus from the city just before 8 pm and entered Beacon's Riverfront Park to find Dia director Philippe Vergne handing out ponchos and directing people toward the haunting scene along the water. Another contingent of Passport viewers was filing into the Alexander Kasser Theater, in Montclair, New Jersey, some 60 miles away, at the same time. Whitman planned to stage two different performances simultaneously, beaming video of the actions in between them. As the clouds grew darker and the temperature dropped, the New Jersey theatergoers seemed like the far smarter group, but we were in this together: if a storm started, both parts of the performance would be canceled.

Another pre-performance view, with the diggers hard at work and the horse trailer at the ready.

"I like things that stay pretty abstract, even though you could put meaning," Whitman tells Joan Waltemath in this month's Brooklyn Rail, and Passport proved to be nothing if not abstract, a series of slow–moving, seemingly unrelated episodes floating through the space in front of us. A video projected on the side of a horse trailer showed fire spewing from a faucet, an image that Jonathan T. D. Neil explores in his take on Passport in ArtReview. Whitman's poncho-clad crew used rope to hang three gigantic white shirts from trees, which served as screens for video projections of rotating, flaming orbs. People ran up the dirt mound from behind, jumped over the top and rolled slowly down the other side, the soil sticking slightly to their plastic clothing. A man to the left of the audience shouted a lengthy definition of the word "word."

A man piloted a rowboat along the river from right to left (north to south). Its edges were limned with a roaring fire and another person — a woman, it seemed — sat still inside. "[A] boat on fire is probably one of the worst things in the world," Whitman tells Waltemath. Still burning, it returned later, heading in the opposite direction, a mirror image, a repetition undermining any traditional sense of narrative progression. Repeated, it seemed caught in a moment of perpetual destruction, a representation of terror. This doubling recurred throughout the piece. A white horse appeared twice carrying a young woman, once with her upright, the other time with her on her back, her eyes closed. Two screens made from white fabric served as a backdrop for video footage, close-ups of eyes and mouths that recalled Marilyn Minter.

The formal aspects of Whitman's work were filled with doubles as well: the two scheduled performances (Saturday and Sunday) and the two locations, Montclair and Beacon. Segments of the Montclair performance were beamed into the Beacon show onto the side of a horse trailer. We watched as white–clothed performers brought a brown mound on stage in the video. In front of us, our performers did the same. Both of the strange brown constructions spewed paint in a rainbow of colors, gushing down the sides like lava flowing from a volcano. The video footage was grainy and occasionally halting, the interruptions making the images seem more live, more real, underscoring our partial view and perhaps even carrying political connotations. "It has that look of cell phone reports that we are getting from these war zones," Whitman says to Waltemath, perfectly accurately, of the film stream.

The footage from Montclair was sparse and often closely cropped. We could not see the audience there or hear the sounds they were hearing, and one wondered what they were seeing of us, and our performance, on the video that they were receiving from our end. Could they see or hear the Metro-North trains shooting by behind us? Did they know that rain was beginning to fall up north? This devoutly non-programmatic pitch of Passport — with the mysteries that surround its content and form — sharply departs from the straightforward, rule–based structures of today's most popular performance works. Like our times, Whitman's work was instead provisional and fractured, literally — and generously — dispersed.