Art Trend - Cars [Updated]

Jonathan Schipper, The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, 2007-2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Two cars crashing slowly together over the course of forty-five days in Jonathan Schipper's show at Boiler at Pierogi came to a halt yesterday evening. Windows were broken, chassis deformed, and the cars lifted into the air by the pressure of the powerful motors, pushing them forward at a glacial pace. Given the current status of America's auto industry, it's hard not to read it allegorically.

For our last Art Trend post, we discussed fire. This time, the topic is the car, which, as a subject and a material, has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in contemporary art.

Update: Anaba brought up the completely fascinating work of Salvatore Scarpitta, which I had never seen. Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron also highlight John Chamberlain, Chakaia Booker, and Dirk Skreber this month in Art Critical.


Richard Prince, Untitled, 2007. Photo: Richard Prince

Richard Prince played a major role starting all of this. After decades of photography using the imagery of the motorcycle and muscle car subcultures - and, more recently, brandishing car hoods as paintings and tires as sculptures - Prince decided to start fabricating his own muscle cars. Here's one of the non-pornographically-painted works, which showed at Freize.


DZINE, Pimp Juice, 2007. Photo: 16 Miles

Like Prince, Chicago artist DZINE is working with real, operating cars. Pimp Juice appeared at Miami Basel in 2007 and is part of The Pig show out at Deitch Long Island City (which we covered in a previous post). According to the Times: "Complete with 14 speakers, a custom video mix playing on five screens and special chrome and 24-carat gold hydraulics that make it buck and hop." Also, there's a great paint job that you need to see in person.


Nate Lowman and Dan Colen, Wet Pain [Exhibiton view], at Maccarone, 2008. Photo: Maccarone

Lowman and Colen reworked a 1971 Jaguar, while Jonathan Monk did a little mash-up of Prince form and Ruscha content.


Jonathan Monk, Rew-Shay Hood Project XVI, 2008. Photo: Casey Kaplan Gallery


Andrew Bush, Vector Portraits [Exhibition view], at Yossi Milo, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles

Meanwhile, Andrew Bush's show at Yossi Milo, which also just closed, featured portraits of people while driving. Super elegant but also a little scary: everyone looks vulnerable and trapped, like frames from Texas Highway Murderer film in Underworld.

Then there's the sub-genre of partnerships between car companies and artists. BMW has been doing it for a while with artists like Warhol (which makes sense), Rauschenberg (a little stranger), Holzer (awkward). This year, Robin Rhode was in charge. See them all. Fiat also got involved, commissioning Tracey Emin to produce four decorated cars.

Tracey Emin, Dark Dark Dark, 2007. Photo: Fiat

Finally, we get to the classics. Charles Ray's fiberglass replica of a destroyed car, easily one of my favorite pieces at the Walker, and Ant Farm's monument out in the desert.

Charles Ray, Unpainted Sculpture, 1997. Photo: Walker Art Center

Ant Farm, Cadillac Ranch [Installation view], 1974 [1997 Version] Photo: Brian L. Romig


Chris Burden, Trans-fixed [Performance view], 1974.

Finally, we end with the extreme ancestors of today's works. Burden's inclusion is a bit of a stretch, but he had plenty of options for sites, and he chose to nail himself to a Volkswagen. Arman's example, the earliest on our list (though please do send us examples of the works we missed), in which he takes the simplest and most direct approach, blowing up advertising executive Charles Wilp's MG convertible.


Arman, White Orchird, 1963. Photo: Archives Denyse Durand-Ruel

Contemporary Art in Madrid [Part 2 of 3: Chueca]

Darya von Berner, In Love with Unreality, 2009, at Galería Moriarty. Photo: 16 Miles. [more]


Ivan Perez, Bird's Nest, 2009, at Galería Moriarty. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Quaint pâtisseries sit alongside ancient bars and galleries abut chic boutiques in Chueca.  With a seedy past (prostitution, drugs, and so forth) and a monied present, it vaguely suggests today's Lower East Side.  It is also home to some of the stronger members of Madrid's younger art generation.

Galería Moriarty
Libertad, 22
Approaching age thirty, they’re one of the older galleries in Chueca, and, though their biggest star is probably Ryan McGinness, their fifteen artists generally occupy points far away from his manic effervescence. Chema Madoz, for one, detourns commonplace objects into eerie, sometimes frightening sculptures. For A Coney Island of the Mind, the group show we saw, he contributed a Gucci perfume bottle rebuilt as a hypodermic syringe. To enter, you had to use a subway ticket printed with poetry (provided by the gallery) to pass through Darya von Berner’s subway turnstile bathed in pink neon light. Thanks to the strength of the work inside (many from the gallery’s roster), it was a bit of theater that functioned perfectly. 


Christopher Muller and Alex Jasch, Das Ding Ding [installation view], at Heinrich Ehrhardt. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Heinrich Ehrhardt
San Lorenzo, 11
Part of Heinrich Ehrhardt’s office is located above the floor of the gallery, overlooking the main space like a sentry tower. At first it felt awkward, as if we were being watched from above. After overcoming that feeling, though, viewing art here was a pleasure, especially because the space is tucked within a quiet courtyard off of San Lorenzo. Ehrhardt represents Ulrich Rückriem, Pedro Reyes, Anselm Reyle, and Tobias Rehberger, among others, with roots going back to the early 1980’s.

Galería Elba Benítez [exterior]. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Galería Elba Benítez
San Lorenzo, 11

Also hiding off San Lorenzo, Elba Benítez shows work by Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, and Vik Muniz (who must have more gallery representation than any other living artist), along with nearly a score of other artists.  David Goldblatt was showing photographs taken in South Africa for his In the Time of AIDS project when we visited.  They’re celebrating their twentieth birthday next year. 


Travesia Cuatro [exterior]. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]


Yuri Masnyj, Everybody's Concerns [installation view], at Travesia Cuatro. Photo: 16 Miles.     [more]

Travesia Cuatro
San Mateo, 16
My stellar Spanish skills (honed largely via extensive use of Google) can tell you that their name means “Crossing Four” or “Passage Four”, a reference to the location of their shop when they opened back in 2003.  Yuri Masnyj, an American who shows with Metro Pictures in New York, had sculptures and drawings on display when we went.  Most of their other artists are early to mid-career artists from Spain.  Wires from some sculptures pierced into walls and remerged a few inches away.  Plywood pieces, spray- and hand painted, then fused together, balanced precariously around the space.  They just moved into a new space.  Ambitious material in every way. 

Lien Carrazana, De la serie Hábitat: Untitled, 2007, at Luz & Suárez del Villar. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Luz & Suárez del Villar
San Lorenzo, 3

Lien Carrazana and Lindomar Placencia Padron, two young Cuban artists, had a show up at this tiny, young (founded in 2008) space when we wandered in, looking for the mysterious courtyard on San Lorenzo featuring Elba Benítez and Heinrich Ehrhardt.  The former provided still life, color photographs of subtle mysteries (a Matryoshka doll sitting comfortably in an ice box), the latter two short videos: an endless loop of a woman descending an escalator, a series of windows.  It turns out the entire roster is Cuban with birthdates floating in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  I assume they can ship your purchase surreptitiously back to America.  Let’s hope this works.    

Galería Oliva Arauna [exterior]. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]


Alfredo Jaar at Galería Oliva Arauna. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Galería Oliva Arauna
Barquillo, 29

The heavy, towering door of metal and opaque glass here makes even some formidable Chelsea venues seem comparatively inviting.  Inside, though, it’s all warmth and friendliness.  Volver, a group show of hefty sculptures and paintings, was up when we visited.  Alfredo Jaar popped up again and again around Spain, and it seems that Oliva Arauna is a major reason for that.  They've been showing his work for twenty years.  

Gavin Turk, Jazzz, at Sean Kelly Gallery [Review]

Gavin Turk, A Night at Bird Land [detail], 2009. Photo: 16 Miles    [more]

At first, it seems that Gavin Turk is following his usual formula, adopting Jackson Pollock as his latest macho disguise.  (Previous projects have explored Guevara, Presley, and Sid Vicious, most famously).  There are copies of Pollock drip paintings with manic, sardonic titles in the main space (Something Different!!!!!, Ascension, both 2009), while the side galleries contain various curiosities: 2008’s Ash, actually composed of bronze, and 50/50 (2007), a mirrored table with a continuously spinning copper coin.  A video features Turk dressed as a chess-playing automaton (The Mechanical Turk, 2008), moving the same, single piece around an empty board.  It’s a dangerously apt metaphor for Turk’s career of camouflage conceptualism.  If his parodic approach to art history seems tired – a caricature of itself – that’s the point.  The results, the Pollock copies especially, are intensely pleasurable, and, in photographs modeled on Hans Namuth’s mythologizing portraits of Pollock at work, Turk appears to be having the time of his life.  

Gavin Turk, Ash, 2008.  Photo: 16 Miles   [more]


Gavin Turk, The Mechanical Turk, 2008.  Photo: 16 Miles   [more]


Gavin Turk, 50/50, 2007.  Photo: 16 Miles   [more]


Gavin Turk, Ascension, 2009.  Photo: 16 Miles   [more]

Gavin Turk, Jazzz
Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street
New York, New York
Through May 2, 2009

Art Trend - Fire

Juan Zamora, Untitled, 2009, at A Coney Island State of Mind, Galería Moriarty in Madrid. Photo: 16 Miles.

In the past three days, in three cities, we have seen open flames in three different works of art. First we entered Galería Moriarty in Madrid to find a gentleman igniting the candle on the installation / drawing by Juan Zamora [above], who just had a solo show at the gallery that was reviewed in Artforum this month. It marks time - looking at the piece, wandering the gallery, running the space (the wax has accumulated on the floor) - and becomes the source of anxiety for the little man standing precariously on his plank.

Cildo Meireles, Volatile, 1980-1994, at Cildo Meireles, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Photo: 16 Miles

On to Barcelona, where Cildo Meireles's manic retrospective (which was just at the Tate Modern and also reviewed in Artforum) at MACBA featured his creepy Volatile (1980-1994) installation in a neighboring building. A dark room, anonymous powder lining the floors and floating in the air (which appeared to be flour but was later revealed to be talcum powder by a friendly guard), the faint smell of gasoline, and a single open flame. Suddenly we have become Zamora's terrified figure.

AIDS-3D, OMG Obelisk, 2007, at The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, New York. Photo: 16 Miles

Returning to New York and the New Museum's triennial, we saw that AIDS-3D had returned the open flame to its primordial associations, staking torches around their OMG Obelisk (2007) a site that appears destined for some sort of mysterious, prehistoric ceremony.

Though I am sure that I am missing dozens of examples, two precedents come to mind: Urs Fischer's Untitled (Branches) (1995) [below], which was featured prominently at the 2006 Whitney Biennial (and before that at the Palais de Tokyo) and Gina Pane's 1973 piece, in which she laid on above a bed of candles for thirty minutes (extended by Marina Abramović in 2005 to seven hours, broken into intervals, as part of her Seven Easy Pieces performance). Fischer's piece defines the ritualistic possibilities for the candle, while Pane's action more clearly hints of danger and violence - the startled surprise - that Meireles seems to covet.

Zamora's quirky drawing piece ends up standing out as the hardest to place and easily the funniest. After being activated by an observer, it runs a slow-motion play: the figure staring nervously at the candle until it completely burns down, uninterested in our presence.

Urs Fischer, Untitled (Branches), 2005, at Palais de Tokyo. Photo: suncana


Marina Abramović performing Gina Pane's 1973 piece,The Conditioning, 2005. Photo: The New York Times

REGIFT, curated by John Miller, at Swiss Institute [Photographs] [Closes April 4]

Maria Eichhorn, Gift, Regift, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]


Greg Parma Smith, Science Classicism Lycanthropy, 2007. Photo: 16 Miles [more]


Fabrice Gygi, Christmas Tree, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]


Sophie Calle, Birthday Ceremony (1980) [detail], 1997. Photo: 16 Miles [more]


REGIFT at Swiss Institute [installation view]. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

REGIFT, curated by John Miller

Swiss Institute Contemporary Art

495 Broadway, Floor #3

New York, New York

Through April 4, 2009

[Top 10 of 2008] #4 - Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Wolfgang Tillmans, Turner Prize Room, 2000, installation.



Wolfgang Tillmans, Truth Study Center, 2007, installation.

[Top 10 of 2008] #6 - Jennifer Steinkamp: Daisy Bell and Left Clavicle

Jennifer Steinkamp, Daisy Bell, 2008, video projection, dimensions variable.

Jennifer Steinkamp, Daily Bell and Left Clavicle
Lehmann Maupin - 201 Chrystie Street
September 7 - November 2, 2008

The show’s press release offered some heavy theory and oblique references (to early computing and science fiction) to explain Steinkamp’s animated walls of sumptuous, scrolling flowers. Somehow, though, I don’t think anyone who visited Lehmann Maupin’s beautiful new warehouse space on the Lower East Side were so easily distracted from the rarity on display: beautiful video works about color, scale, and perspective, the original cornerstones of art. This was one of the only times that I’ve ever walked into a gallery and felt there was too much to take in, too much to see. It was certainly the first time a single piece had made me feel that way.


Jennifer Steinkamp, The Invisible Man, 2007, video projection, dimensions variable.