"Productive Steps" at Mount Tremper Arts

Grayson Revoir in "Productive Steps at Mount Tremper Arts, through August 21, 2011.

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

Colin Snapp and Daniel Turner at Martos Gallery

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


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.

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

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]
  

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

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.

Daniel Turner Is Also Having a Great Summer

Daniel Turner's site-specific wall drawing in "Saturn Return" at Wallspace, New York. Photo: 16 Miles

Yesterday, in the first part of a series devoted to artists with work in more than one New York group show this summer, we took a look at painter Ned Vena’s smart, tightly lined paintings. Today, let’s take a peek at the work of Daniel Turner, which is featured in a trio of shows: “Saturn Return,” curated by Elizabeth Lovero at Wallspace; “Other Spaces,” curated by Jayne Drost at Center 548 (the new name of the Dia Chelsea/X Initiative building); and “Over Before It Started” at West Street Gallery, curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Matt Moravec.

Turner has a wide range that includes long, rolled sheets of silver paper that nod toward Walter De Maria and beautiful, glossy, richly textured paintings that look like Robert Morris felt pieces shrunken down and shellacked by Steven Parrino. However the pieces on view at Wallspace, Center 548, and West Street are all similar: wall drawings made with various substances. When I first saw one, at West Street, I thought that proprietors Gartenfeld and Moravec had damaged their wall when moving in Grayson Revoir’s wonderful nail- and screw-filled picnic table.

According to West Street, Turner worked as a security guard at the New Museum and wasn’t allowed to lean on the walls while working, spawning his interest in bodily contact with walls. It’s pretty remarkable that no one thought of the trick before — they look weird, unsettling, and just a little bit sexy, three traits that come together these days.


Daniel Turner's site-specific wall drawing in "Other Spaces" at Center 548, New York.


Installation view of "Other Spaces" at Center 548, New York