An Orchid Sale, Hedda Sterne, Cinders Returns, Okiishi, etc. [Collected]

Very fragrant: Orchids raised by Helen and Charles Hersh, of Mount Prospect Orchids, on sale at The Artist's Institute, alongside a show of Jo Baer works, April 17, 2011. Photo: 16 Miles

• Lower East Side alternative space The Artist's Institute held a sale of absurdly gorgeous orchids yesterday as part of its season of programming inspired by Jo Baer's life and work. It seems that Baer was an expert orchid cultivator and won an Award of Merit from the Greater New York Orchid Society in 1973 for the flowers she raised while living in Greenwich Village. Can we have more events inspired by artists' extracurricular interests? A feast of crisp Coca-Cola and fresh falafel at the next Robert Irwin exhibition? A dog show at a future Pettibon outing? [TAI]
  
  
• Laura Gilbert highlights the radical parameters — the re-creations, exhibition copies, and croppings — of Richard Serra's drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [Art Unwashed]
  
  
• Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett reveal that, when they staged their Maurizio Cattelan retrospective at Triple Candie in 2009, "Maurizio Cattelan is Dead: Life and Work, 1960 - 2009," Cattelan actually came to visit the show and "generously arranged ... to ship it off to the DESTE Foundation in Athens," the nonprofit founded by collector Dakis Joannou. [Triple Candie in The Exhibitionist]
  
  
• "You know, artists are never close-knit. They are only close-knit for a while if it's necessary and helpful." — The late Hedda Sterne in a 1981 interview with Phyllis Tuchman that also covers her fights with Clement Greenberg, her interest in Surrealism, her adoption of spray paint, and more. [Archives of American Art, via Modern Art Notes]
  
  
• An interview with Pauline's proprietor Pauline Beaudemont. [Matilde Soligno]
  
  
• There is one week left to see a choice Hedda Sterne painting in MoMA's "Abstract Expressionist New York" show. Another is on view at the McCoy Gallery through May 20. [MoMA and McCoy Gallery]
  
  
• Cinders Gallery is reopening on Saturday, April 23, at 28 Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn. Its former Williamsburg location is becoming a bar. [Cinders]
  
  
• Ken Okiishi's very wonderful (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010), which appeared last year at Alex Zachary, is having its theatrical debut on Monday, April 25, at Anthology Film Archives. Okiishi will answer questions after the screening. [AFA]
  
  
• Seven on Seven returns to the New Museum on Saturday, May 14. This year's artist participants include Michael Bell-Smith, Liz Magic Laser, and Rashaad Newsome. [Rhizome via Art Fag City]
  

Recent New York Video Art Survives (on the Internet)

Still from Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, on view at Alex Zachary, New York. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

There is always a sense of sadness after watching a great work of video art in a New York gallery: barring a miracle, one is unlikely to see it again any time soon. We can snap photographs of our favorite paintings or sculptures and revisit them later (however imperfectly), but time-based work disappears after a show ends. Thankfully, the redoubtable media archive UbuWeb has been uploading just that type of work at a ferocious pace, including many works that were on view just this past season. Here are three favorites from that bunch, plus one classic New York-art documentary

1. Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010: This was the sleeper-hit of the the past year. After debuting at Alex Zachary, it made an encore performance this summer in Berlin, the setting of much of the film. While occasionally impenetrable, Okiishi's reworking of Woody Allen's 1979 panegyric to New York should be remembered as an elegiac document of a particular time in the contemporary art world, as it struggled through a recession and expanded into new cities.

2. Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007: This gem appeared at Invisible-Export's "A Vernacular of Violence" just a few months ago. A man applies a poster in a French subway. Then he applies another. And another. A slow-motion, highly mediated depiction of extreme destruction begins to appear, as commuters — unaware — go about their business.

3. Brion Gysin, Demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software, 2010: This computer-generated poem is not the most thrilling section of the New Museum's current "Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" show, the first U.S. retrospective of the artist, but watching the program slice apart a short text by Gysin and write out all of the possible permutations of its contents isn't a bad way to spend a few minutes.

4. Nigel Finch, Arena–Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988: Shot the year before Mapplethorpe died, this hour-long documentary includes footage of the photographer at work and features interviews with some of his subjects (not all of the enamored of his work). "Pay attention," gallerist Robert Miller says, when asked to define Mapplethorpe's artistic message. "Time's going by."

Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, at Alex Zachary [Review]

Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan lobby card (Ku'damm Karree and designer shoes), 2010. Framed inkjet print, 17 1⁄2 x 12 1⁄2 inches, edition of 5. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The aestheticization of urban spaces that occurred in the nineties represents a sea change. The very notion of a lifestyle… is an aesthetic concept and testifies to the transformation of urban life itself. The nineties delivered entertainment as a culture mall in those zones that begin with a few art galleries and quickly morph into upscale, high-end real estate spaces, fashion boutiques, espresso bars, and slick restaurants.

– Robert Morris, “Size Matters,” Critical Inquiry 26, Spring 2000

Woody Allen’s classic, Manhattan, begins with the director trying to work out the opening lines of a story set in the city, as images of New York flash across the screen. “Chapter 1,” he begins. “He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic.” But then he stops. “No, no, corny, too corny for a man of my taste!” He starts again, “He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture…” But, again, he falters. “No, that's a little bit too preachy.”

He’s writing in 1979, on the edge of the decade that would see New York’s professionals begin to embrace Morris’s consumption-based lifestyles en mass for the first time, in neighborhoods of unprecedented wealth and unbridled gentrification, which Morris bluntly declares “cultural ghettoes a step above the theme park.” Allen, playing a disillusioned TV writer meets a young Diane Keaton and then encounters her again at a political fundraiser at the Museum of Modern Art. They spend the night talking in a quiet, tranquil park along the East River.

Images from Allen’s Manhattan form the background in a new series of prints by Ken Okiishi at the Alex Zachary gallery. He has overlaid photographs of abandoned retail shops on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: a Jil Sander, a Sonia Rykiel Enfant, and an unmarked storefront on the corner of 86th Street and Madison Avenue, all empty. At least in some areas of the city, a lot has changed in the decade Morris’s condemnation of New York’s aestheticization, and Zachary’s gallery is an example of those shifts, slipping into an exhibition space deserted by its previous gallery owner. However, this is something of an exception: a sign in one window photographed by Okiishi reveals a much more common story: “Citibank Coming Soon.”

Okiishi's photographs of Manhattan island hover next to others that show Ku'damm Karree, an office and shopping center in Berlin, that fabled land of low rents, countless galleries, and an unrivalled art scene. As Karen Rosenberg puts it in her review of Okiishi’s show in the Times, “A few years ago it seemed as though the entire New York art world might move to Berlin.” Okiishi, though, seems to be equating the two cities, highlighting the idealized allure that each holds for residents of the other. A film playing in the gallery’s main room cuts back and forth between footage from present-day Berlin and Manhattan, a jump between a humbled present and a trilling, albeit naïve, past.

“Thirty-five years ago one could be comfortable and marginal in New York, survive on a part-time job, and have plenty of leisure for intellectual or aesthetic pursuits,” Morris writes. (Allen quits his job to write a book, and though he worries endlessly, it is clear he will survive the experiment intact.) “Today there is no margin in big-city life.” There was a notion for a while that that margin may exist in Berlin, and there is now a sense in the air that it could return to New York again. One hopes that Okiishi’s auspicious debut at what appears to be an ambitious new gallery on the Upper East Side is a first hint of that.

Allen, of course, finally gets it right. “He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this! New York was his town, and it always would be.”

Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan lobby card (Sonia Rykiel Enfant), 2010. Framed inkjet print, 17 1⁄2 x 12 1⁄2 inches, edition of 5.


Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan [still], 2010. DVD, color/sound, 72 min., edition of 5.


Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan lobby card (Ku'damm Karree / Jil Sander Coming Soon Citibank), 2010. Framed inkjet print, 17 1⁄2 x 12 1⁄2 inches, edition of 5.

Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan lobby card (Ku'damm Karree / 86th and Madison), 2010. Framed inkjet print, 17 1⁄2 x 12 1⁄2 inches, edition of 5.

Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan [still], 2010. DVD, color/sound, 72 min., edition of 5.

Ken Okiishi, "(Goodbye to) Manhattan"
Alex Zachary
16 East 77th Street
New York, New York