Cooper Union: David Hammons, 1983 / 2010

David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983. Photo: Dawoud Bey


Cooper Union, June 5, 2010. Photo: 16 Miles

Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous System (Inverted), at 590 Madison Avenue

Installation views of Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous System (Inverted), 590 Madison Avenue. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

I got pretty excited walking by the old IBM building (now known as 590 Madison) earlier this month, spotting the glass-enclosed indoor park on the corner of 56th and Madison. I had been skimming Peter Schjeldahl’s reviews for the short-lived Seven Days a few days before (on Google Books, where it seems that I do most of my reading) and remembered him mentioning an atrium that was being built as part of a complicated deal to ensure the completion of a controversial Midtown building project. He wrote, “I don’t know about you, but I personally plan to enjoy the dickens out of that atrium, secure that tears of gratitude will not be expected of me.”



Unfortunately, I had my enclosed corporate parks confused. Schjeldahl was writing about Tower 45, which was built in 1988 down on 45th Street. The IBM building was finished in 1983. There were a handful of people enjoying the atrium on the Saturday I strolled through. On its ceiling, the British artist Conrad Shawcross has installed The Nervous System (Inverted), a machine that slowly weaves spools of thread into a thick, multi-colored rope that drops to the ground as it is completed. According to New York magazine, there will be 1,700 feet of rope accumulated on the ground by the end of the work’s run on July 10.

It’s an infuriatingly boring piece of art. The metal arms up above slide around every few minutes, adding another spin to the braid, but, unless you’re willing to hang out in the atrium all day, you’re not going to see much action. If you do spend a day there, a few extra feet of rope will pile up on the floor, but that’s all that will happen. If you’ll indulge some literalism momentarily: the work does indeed invert the nervous system, leaving it to rest passively, unable to discern much of the actual art-creation taking place.



As a work of public art, though, it is a clever little piece. If the goal of public art is to enlighten or entertain the public, to provide some culture for the laboring classes, The Nervous System (Inverted) pretty much refuses those aims, making a mockery of such public, avowedly munificent gifts of culture. Its viewers get to stare at the machine and perhaps see it twitch, but they don’t get much more. Employees who work in the building get to see the pile of rope grow larger and larger as they head in and out of the office every day. The art will happen without them. Eventually, it will disappear: the rope will be cut into pieces and sold off to collectors by Pace after the show closes.



Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous System (Inverted), 2010
590 Madison Avenue Atrium
New York, New York
Through July 10, 2010

Houston & Broadway: Joseph Kosuth, 1979 / 2010

Houston Street & Broadway: Joseph Kosuth, Text / Context, New York City, May 26–June 16, 1979. Courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery


Houston Street and Broadway, May 22, 2010. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Martin Creed at Gavin Brown's enterprise

Installation views of Martin Creed at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Photos: 16 Miles [more]









You may have heard about what is happening on this screen to the right. Unfortunately, I cannot say here, in the interest of keeping this a family-friendly site.









Martin Creed
Gavin Brown's enterprise
601 Washington Street
Through June 19, 2010

Kate Gilmore, Walk the Walk, 2010 [Review]

Kate Gilmore, Walk the Walk, 2010. Performance still of five-day performance piece, Bryant Park. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Kate Gilmore's remarkable performance project, Walk the Walk, closes Friday, May 14, after its five-day run in Bryant Park. I'd like to encourage someone to set up a fund to keep the work going forever. They could even set up a Felix Gonzalez-Torres' 1991 Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) nearby! In Gilmore's piece, a total of fourteen women perform for five hours each day, from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Since each women is paid $15/hour, running the project five days a week, for a year, would cost $273,000. That's not a modest sum of money, but it's only slightly more than someone paid for a 1992 Marc Newson table at Phillips de Pury & Company this evening.

Sadly, of course, Gilmore's piece is temporary. Here is an excerpt of a review I wrote about it for Modern Painters:

You can see them from a block away: seven women in yellow dresses walking back and forth on top of an eight-foot-tall yellow platform in Manhattan’s Bryant Park. They look straight ahead as they walk, unsmiling, unaware of the people below snapping photos and recording videos on their iPhones. One woman looks annoyed, another frustrated. Some stomp on the ground, while others shuffle and shimmy across the boards. They all look bored.

— "Kate Gilmore," at Modern Painters/Artinfo

Jonathan Horowitz, "Go Vegan!" at Gavin Brown's enterprise

Installation views of Jonathan Horowitz, "Go Vegan!" at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Gavin Brown's new gallery still smells like its former occupant, Pat LaFrieda Wholesale Meat Purveyors (the famous supplier of meat for Shake Shack and Minetta Tavern). Ammonia, bleach, and minute hints of animal carcass waft through the old meat lockers, where Jonathan Horowitz has recreated his 2002 Greene Naftali show "Go Vegan!"



In the most brutal section of the show, Horowitz displays a meat hook and a video of a pig being slaughtered. Elsewhere, the artist has included more light-hearted propaganda, like pro-vegetarianism quotations from Linda and Paul McCartney and Albert Einstein, a funny Norman Rockwell image splattered with the words "AMERICAN GOTHIC," and adorable photographs of farm animals with their names spelled out in a font that appears constructed out of pieces of wood: "lamb," "poultry," etc.







The posters outside are a little bit didactic, but Horowitz's general playfulness — the McCartney quotation, the cute photos, and the other charming poster (the third photograph below) — suggests that he's aware that aggressive agitprop won't win his cause many converts. However, providing delicious salad and coconut juice in room filled with the luscious smell of burning sage — a welcome contrast to the putrid mix of chemicals and meat in the other rooms — just might make a few people consider the eating style. I was convinced, at least temporarily.







It's unclear how long Brown plans to keep the meat plant installed ("I don’t want to be doing meat-cooler shows for the rest of my life," he tells Miranda Siegel). Whether he keeps it or tears it out, though, he is going to have an absurd amount of space available.



Jonathan Horowitz, "Go Vegan!"
Gavin Brown's enterprise
601 Washington Street
New York, New York
Through June 19, 2010

Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, "The Promise of Originality," at K.S. Art

Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether (Bad Adult), The Promise of Originality, K.S. Art, May 7, 2010. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Maybe people don't know whether they can experience the erotic or whether it exists only in commercials; but on stage, in the midst of rock 'n' roll, many thing happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment.

– Kim Gordon, “I’m Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams,” in Artforum, January 1983

Kim Gordon’s show at K.S. Art, “Performing/Guzzling,” opened last night with a performance by Gordon and artist Jutta Koether, who adopt the nom de guerre Bad Adult on stage. They used guitars, a keyboard, and a stick, rubbing those items against the walls, the floor, and the front window of the gallery, occasionally speaking into two microphones. From outside it was almost impossible to hear the music, creating a nearly perfect fishbowl effect: one could watch the music being made but couldn’t hear it. The crowd spilled out onto Leonard Street to watch, as taxi drivers gamely dodged the PBR-swilling masses. “Are they famous?” a passing businessman asked one of the art-student types in the audience, who shrugged.



Gordon’s new paintings aren’t far from the paintings that Merlin Carpenter’s quickly scrawled out at a Reena Spauling opening back in 2007. But instead of Carpenter’s aggressive, mannered insults (e.g. “Die Collector Scum” and “Relax it’s only a crap Reena Spaulings show”), Gordon offers up the names of noise bands in quick splashes of black acrylic: Pussy Galore, Secret Abuse, and, of course, Bad Adult. If you know the bands (Pussy Galore!), you get to revel in the knowledge and think about how great that band is. If you haven’t heard of those bands (Secret Abuse?), you’re left on the outside, contemplating only a single, disturbing phrase.



Identifying with — or feeling empowered by — art is a dangerous and perhaps dubious business, Gordon suggests. It can require venturing into small, hermetically sealed subcultures. Addressing your own alienation, you run the risk of alienating everyone else. She is, after all, the same art critic who argued, almost three decades ago: “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” Her performance with Koether, though, was free, and it was nice to see people believing in themselves after all these years.





Note the youngest Bad Adult fan in the center, arms crossed, a little skeptical of the audience's commitment.

Kim Gordon, "Performing/Guzzling"
K.S. Art
73 Leonard Street
New York, New York
Through June 12, 2010

Sam Durant, Dead Labor Day, at Paula Cooper Gallery

Sam Durant, Dead Labor Day, 2010. Wood, metal, water dispenser, 192 x 184 x 168 in. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Sam Durant, Dead Labor Day, 2010. Wood, metal, water dispenser, 192 x 184 x 168 in.


Sam Durant, Dead Labor Day, 2010. Wood, metal, water dispenser, 192 x 184 x 168 in.


Sam Durant, Break Room with International Mass Meeting, 2010. Lightbox with lifochrome Classic Display Film, 46 1/4 x 60 1/4 x 3 7/8 in.


Sam Durant, Gallows Composite C (Billy Bailey Gallows, Haymarket Gallows, Rainey Bethea Gallows, Saddam Hussein Gallows), 2008. Wood, metal, spray enamel, PVC, 26 x 40 x 35 in.

Sam Durant, "Dead Labor Day"
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
New York, New York
Through April 17, 2010

Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967, at Sperone Westwater

Otto Piene, Hängende Lichtkugel, 1972. Chrome-plated brass, 89 3/8 x 27 1/2 in. Photos: 16 Miles


Otto Piene, Hängende Lichtkugel, 1972. Chrome-plated brass, 89 3/8 x 27 1/2 in.


Installation view. See list of works below; left to right: 1, 2, 3, 4


Installation view. See list of works below; left to right: 1, 3, 2

Update: Greg Allen points out that the titles of some of these sculptures may not be what Piene intended!

List of Works
1. Otto Piene, Lichtballett, 1961. Mixed media, 67 5/8 x 59 3/4 x 28 in.
2. Otto Piene, Light Ballet on Wheels, 1965. Aluminum drum, four wheels, glass, flat black paint, 16 1/2 x 30 in. in diameter.
3. Otto Piene, Electric Anaconda, 1965. Brass globes, flat black paint, glow lamps, 66 1/2 x 16 x 16 in.
4. Otto Piene, Little Black Lighthouse, 1965. Brass globes, flat black paint, 27 1/2 x 7 x 7 in.

"Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967"
Sperone Westwater
415 West 13 Street
New York, New York
Through May 22, 2010

Julie Mehretu's Mural at Goldman Sachs, New York

Julie Mehretu, installation view of Mural, 2010, at Goldman Sachs, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

There are better ways to spend $5 million than buying a single work of art. That said, if America's most notorious investment bank is intent on spending that kind of money to decorate its new office building at 200 West Street in New York, there are certainly worse artists to commission than Julie Mehretu. (The head of the commissioning committee, Jeffrey Deitch, can be thanked, in part, for that choice. The firm also funded a large Franz Ackermann mural for an incomprehensible $10 million.) Mehretu reportedly used $4 million of her handsome fee to cover fabrication costs, meaning that a fair number of assistants and supply companies made a fair amount of money as a result of the project.

The work, entitled Mural, is absurdly, gloriously gigantic, measuring 23 by 80 feet. It is fully visible from the sidewalk outside the building's lobby, though turnstiles near both entrances mean that only Goldman employees and their guests can see the work up close, which is a shame since so much of the appeal of her work is in its dense, layered intricacy. Wealthy, powerful institutions generally like large, flashy artworks, and she certainly seems to have delivered the goods. It's strange that Goldman employees supposedly don't like the work, which is one of the most fun — and painfully innocuous — pieces of art that I've seen recently.









More information is available at:

• The New Yorker, which has a profile of Mehretu by Calvin Tompkins (though, sadly, reading it requires a subscription);
• Art 21, which features videos about Mehretu's studio assistants and the conservator charged with installing the hulking panels (thank you to Joy Garnett!); and
  
• Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog, which has some sporty photos and commentary. Fallon smartly contrasts the visual networks in Mehretu's work with those in Mark Lombardi's drawings and declares succinctly: "Not very public, this public art." Agreed.
  

Oscar Tuazon, "My Flesh to Your Bare Bones," at Maccarone, New York

Oscar Tuazon, installation view of "My Flesh to Your Bare Bones," at Maccarone


Oscar Tuazon, [detail] I went out there and spent a night out there. The light died out while I walked and so I stopped, 2010. Welded steel, clamps, acrylic, laminated safety glass; floor: 96 x 144 x .25 in.; ceiling [not visible]: 96 x 144 x 16 in.


Oscar Tuazon, I gave my name to it, 2010. Steel plate, fluorescent lamps, 98 x 36 x 6 in.


Oscar Tuazon, I want to put something inside my body and carry something in it. I want to get inside my body and get carried in it, I'd like to get buried in it, put my head in it and get in it, I'm not scared of it, 2010. Welded steel, clamps, canvas, plastic tubing, water, 84 x 192 x 12 in.


Oscar Tuazon, [detail] I want to put something inside my body and carry something in it. I want to get inside my body and get carried in it, I'd like to get buried in it, put my head in it and get in it, I'm not scared of it, 2010. Welded steel, clamps, canvas, plastic tubing, water, 84 x 192 x 12 in.


Oscar Tuazon, I use my body for something, I use it to make something, I make something with my body, whatever that is. I make something and I pay for it and I get paid for it., 2010. Concrete, rebar, mesh, dimensions variable.

Oscar Tuazon, "My Flesh to Your Bare Bones: A duet with Vito Acconci"
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street
New York, New York
Through April 24 Street