"NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" at the Queens Museum of Art

Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," curated by Jamillah James, at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

When you next visit the Queens Museum of Art, head straight to the second floor. If you have some time to spare, take the ramp that steadily rises up and around the Panorama of the City of New York, as I did on Sunday afternoon, arriving to find a reception filled with artists and their supporters enjoying a majestic aerial view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," a 16-artist exhibition curated by QMA fellow Jamillah James on the first floor. Even without that crowd, it is a thrilling place to begin. You can spot one of Brendan Fowler's multi-frame works from up there, all fluorescent pink flowers and lush green leaves, and a shelf of Jean Shin's altered trophies. There are more mysterious works, too: an empty display case, a pedestal bearing a dirt–covered shirt, and a collage assembled with just a handful of clippings, all things you will immediately want to see up close.


Left to right: Jean Shin, Altered Trophies (Everyday Monuments), 2009. Altered trophies, painted and cast resin. Dave Murray, 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond. 0.29-carat diamond. Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.


Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.

A wall of photographs greets you down below, an installation of Jason Lazarus's Too Hard to Keep Archive (2010–), which consists of images that fit the work's title, donated by people in the process of purging. (This is an increasingly rare privilege, as whole lives are archived online, digital photos never quite going away.) There are photos of a woman with a black eye, people kissing, and landscapes. A whole wedding album sits high on a shelf. If, in Bas Jan Ader's I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971), we watch the effects of private grief, we here see its myriad sources, though we're equally cut off from the details. Viewing these mute objects triggers our own associations, perhaps even our own pains, a process that recurs throughout the exhibition, which is filled with works that offer various glimpses of personal lives, though never complete confessions.


Installation view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Detail view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Zak Kitnick, The People Behind Our Products (Silver), 2009. Die-cut tin sheet, LDF, and other media.



That admixture of display and reticence is also present in Zak Kitnick's The People Behind Our Products (Silver), a row of three wall-hung white boxes, each fit with an aluminum radiator cover, which shields and obscures different types of product packaging, castoff material that takes on a sinister, eerie presence when blocked by the die-cut metal. Lauren Luloff's Striped also looks similarly uncomfortable and vaguely elegaic in this context. A red, white, and blue striped sheet wrapped messily around a green board, it is propped against a wall like an abject, abandoned record of a domestic dispute, some unknowable trauma. Luloff also has a piece on view at the Bronx River Art Center right now, a frame strung with wild bands of colored fabric: it is a raucous party, and this is the brutal morning after. Such fanciful readings aside, it is also a visual treat, a Buren come unhinged and folded in on itself. When I first read the checklist, I thought its title was Stripped. That would fit too.


Lauren Luloff, Striped, 2010. Bed sheet, acrylic, rabbit skin glue, and wood.


Bryan Zanisnik, video stills from Preserve, 2009. Two-channel video, 5 min., 15 sec.


Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008. Extinct heart pine¹, white high-density polyethylene², yellow HDPE³, black HDPE⁴, drywall screws⁵, fluorescent green acrylic⁶, fluorescent pink acrylic⁷, epoxy resin⁸, black resin dye⁹, aluminum¹⁰, brass screws¹¹, paint mixing stick¹², sticky wax¹³, graphite and colored pencil¹⁴ on newsprint¹⁵.


Wall label and footnotes for Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008.

Taylor Baldwin opts for extreme disclosure, or at least the appearance of it, in the wall placard that accompanies his intricate and finely polished assemblage Martyr Me a Little (2008). It lists, in a lengthy series of footnotes, the provenance for each of the materials he used to build the work. The black resin dye? "Bought from Woodcraft for too much money and felt guilty over." Those brass screws? " "Salvaged from the VDOT warehouse liquidation." The accumulated series becomes a kind of contemporary update of Richard Serra's Verb List Compilation (1967–68), with acquisition methods — given, retrieved, donated, traded, bought, found, bartered, swiped, salvaged, made from, stolen, borrowed — replacing actions. Of course, that surplus of information says nothing about the content of the skull–adorned monument. We are once again only given a sliver of a reveal.


Agathe Snow, Paper General, 2007. Mixed media assemblage.

The empty box you spotted from up above turns out to actually contain one tiny object when you inspect it more closely: a minute diamond forged from the cremated remains of Dave Murray's art. Its title is 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond, and it has the unique glory of twisting John Baldessari's famous cremation episode into something new, witty (it weighs in at a modest 0.29 carats), absurd (why only 85% of his work?), and laced with ambiguity (why do this at all?). Agathe Snow takes a more impersonal route, scavenging castoff materials from downtown Manhattan for her sculpture Paper General (2007), a slick black collared shirt and white paint mask caked with thick mud. Divorced from their original owners and combined in this new context, these objects become non-sites for Snow's neighborhood and free-floating signifiers for our own thoughts, our own memories.


Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED"

On first reading, the title "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" suggested to me the surprise one feels upon returning to a once-familiar place or being confronted by a once-familiar object: "That is not the way I remembered it being." But it could also denote a shift in the process of remembering, a rewiring of the way we process or access memory, a Barthesian prick, or even a loss of control: "I didn't want to remember that, I don't like to think about those things." There is that strange, spare collage still to see — a work by Amanda Ross-Ho, it turns out. She's affixed to a rectangle of Sheetrock a snapshot from Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, a photo of a wildly colored pillow, and a section of a page sliced from a party-supply catalogue. There is also a lone earring. What will you make of this?

Regina Rex, Texture.txt, at Regina Rex

Regina Rex, "Texture.txt" opening night, January 8, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

"Because of SoHo's sprawling character, I have yet to work out an effective system of taking it all in," critic David Bourdon wrote in 1977, describing his frustration at visiting all of the neighborhood's galleries. These days Bushwick (or Ridgewood, when that art area crosses over into Queens) feels like the trickiest expanse to navigate, and I have yet to work out an effective system for doing so. All of which is a roundabout way of admitting that, when, a few weeks ago, I visited the much-discussed Regina Rex gallery, which opened there in the middle of last year, it was — embarrassingly — for the first time.

The show on view at Regina Rex now is called "Texture.txt," it is up through February 13 (open Saturdays and Sundays only!), and it is a stunner, though viewing it took some patience and maneuvering at the wonderfully crowded opening reception. The most thrilling piece, for me, is New York artist Dona Nelson's double-sided painting Spacey Characters (2010). She has stained one side with masses and splatters of color and built up abstract figures around the canvas, which provides a thick, fibrous, and — yes — richly textured counterpoint to the stained "paint puddles and pools," as Jennifer Coates handily describes them in an accompanying essay.


Detail of Dona Nelson, Spacey Characters, 2010. Acrylic mediums on canvas, 90 x 120 in.


"Texture.txt" installation view


Detail of Dona Nelson, Spacey Characters, 2010. Acrylic mediums on canvas, 90 x 120 in.

In October 2006, artist Carrie Moyer wrote in the Brooklyn Rail, "Nelson has converted the last 50 years of painting history into her own private mosh pit," an idea that I'm not sure I can improve on. The discrete stains may say Morris Louis, but the winding flows of string and the wild and effervescent splotches of paint on the painting's back explode any fixed notion of genre. Nelson mines the past, as Moyer says, not so much to craft pastiches as to develop new visual weapons. Note the way the work is hung (you won't miss it). It has been propped gingerly on two plastic crates and then secured forcefully to the wall by two metal poles and screws, as if someone (quite understandably) feared the work could vanish from this world just as magically as it seems to have arrived. At the very least, would-be burglars will have some work to do. Thank goodness.


Mary Reid Kelley, Historic Sites blow the Dead, 2008. Crayon on paper, 12 x 18 in.


Kristen Kee, Beta, 2010. Soda, glass, rubber, canvas, digital print, 25 x 14 x 10 in.


David Humphrey, Clown Party, 2010. Paint, wood, and paper.

There are two sculptures here, David Humphrey's Clown Party (2010) and Kristen Kee's Beta, that look especially strong and refreshingly new. The former is a sloping box built from planks of wood and painted white and blue, its ends adorned with texts that read, alternately, "CLOWN PARTY" and "DOG BEHIND BARS." Kee's work is a glass vase filled with orange soda — a medium and texture we could all stand to see some more of inside art galleries — that supports a wooden panel covered with letters from some ersatz language. Not far away, Lucy Kim's oil-on-aluminum-foil portrait of Lil' Wayne, his head balancing on his upturned fist, looks out into the room and ever so slightly to the sky. He looks pensive and strong, and I think he would like it.


Leeza Meksin, My Rack, 2011. Spandex, racks, chain, spray paint, sand, sewing machine, found objects, site-specific installation.


Lucy Kim, Lil Wayne - Flat, 2009. Oil paint on aluminum foil, 15 x 21 in.


Partial view of Leeza Meksin, 5 Paintings, 2010-2011. Oil, acrylic and dye, on spandex stretched over canvas on wood.




1717 Troutman Street, Queens, New York


Mira Stroika at Tandem, 236 Troutman Street, Brooklyn, New York

As the crowd was cajoled out shortly after 9 pm, many trekked south on Troutman Street, crossing Cypress Avenue, from Queens to Brooklyn. A few blocks down, the admixture of people flowed into an already-packed Tandem, where the impressively multilingual Mira Stroika played accordion and kazoo, regaling a large crowd in the back room as fresh snow began sticking to the ground outside.



"Texture.txt"
Regina Rex
1717 Troutman Street
Queens, New York
Through February 13, 2011

The World's Fair, Censorship, and a Bizarre "Warhol" Mosaic

Mosaic in Passerelle Plaza, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York. Photo: 16 Miles

August 23 Update: New York City Department of Parks & Recreation spokesperson Vickie Karp and John Krawchuk, the department's Director of Historic Preservation, have confirmed that the mosaics were installed about ten years ago and were restored last year. Mosaic maker Michael Golden was the design consultant on the project. I have spoken with Mr. Golden, and there will be more details to follow soon.

_____

This is a weird one. Walking through the Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Flushing, Queens, over the weekend, I came across this mosaic not far from the new Mets stadium. It's New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses (the hard-charging bureaucrat investigated in Robert Caro's devastating biography, The Power Broker), as depicted by Andy Warhol. But it's not that simple: Warhol's silkscreened portraits of Moses are believed to have been lost or destroyed, the mosaic may have been installed in 1998, and the image ties into a much more complicated, infamous episode in the Pop artist's career. First, some quick background information.


Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964. Silkscreen ink on Masonite, New York World's Fair, 25 panels, each 48 x 48 in., overall 20 x 20 ft.

For the 1964-65 New York World's Fair (one of Moses' pet project), architect Philip Johnson was hired to design the New York State Pavilion and commission 10 artists to create work to decorate its exterior. He asked Warhol to participate, and the Pop artist responded by creating Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), a large mural with photos of criminal suspects collected by the New York City Police Department. However, before the fair opened, someone asked Warhol to remove it, and he had it covered with silver paint. As Richard Meyer writes in his remarkable 2002 book, Outlaw Representation, no one could quite agree about what happened. Here is a quick rundown of explanations from various people, via Meyer:

1. Initial reports claimed that Warhol himself asked for the work to be removed. The Times reported that "he did not feel that it achieved the intended artistic effect," citing Johnson for that explanation. In the Herald-Tribune, Warhol's gallerist (Eleanor Ward, whom he would soon leave for Leo Castelli) concurred: "Andy just didn't like the way it looked," she said. Warhol, for the record, is not quoted in the article.


2. A few months later, the Times quoted Warhol saying that the mural was removed because some of the men in the photographs had been "pardoned," and there was a fear of a lawsuit coming from one or more of them.


3. In 1970, Johnson told art historian Rainer Crone that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was concerned that most of the men were Italian, making the mural less than politically palatable. In addition, because some of the men had been exonerated, "we would have been subject to law-suits from here to the end of the world," he said.

More likely, Meyer argues, politicians (probably Moses or Rockefeller or both) could not accept reputed criminals being presented at a fair that was supposed to reflect the glory of New York, the United States, and the future. And then there is, of course, that matter of the group of men being described as "most wanted," a description that is rife with homoerotic implications.

Warhol had a novel solution to the censorship, proposing the creation of a new mural with 25 portraits of Moses, replacing the desired men with the bureaucrat that may have blocked their appearance at the fair. Warhol produced a few trial silkscreens all of the silkscreens, though Johnson vetoed the idea, saying later that "taking potshots at the head of the fair would seem to me very, very bad taste." The image below is an extant photograph of one of those trial portraits. August 23 Update: Former Warhol associate Mark Lancaster wrote in, saying that he helped the artist print all 25 portraits of Moses. He also photographed the works.


Andy Warhol, Robert Moses, 1964. Synthetic polymer paint silkscreened on canvas.

Thanks to the magic of Google Books, and its archive of old Life magazines, it seems safe to say that Warhol used a photograph of Moses that ran in a 1962 profile of the parks commissioner in Life. (Warhol used a mirror image of the bureaucrat: the original from the magazine is below.)


Photograph of Robert Moses from "Disputatious Dirt-Mover," Life magazine, October 5, 1962

With that history in mind, the Flushing Meadows mosaic looks even more bizarre. The anonymous artisan responsible for the work (the Parks Department is looking into who made them) made the rather unorthodox choice of using Warhol's lost, censored mirror image to (at least ostensibly) pay tribute to Moses and the World's Fair. However, labeling it a "Warhol" is a bit of a stretch since the artist had no involvement in the work: it's really just a mosaic of a mirrored photograph from Life. That said, one does suspect that the mosaic maker knew the story, particular since he or she bothered to dig up an image of Warhol's lost Moses portrait. Also, look back at the mosaic at the top of this post: Moses' mouth has been enlarged to a comic scale. He looks balder and fatter than in the Life photograph, just a little bit unhinged. Is it intended as a satirical caricature, a pro-Warhol critique masquerading as an innocuous piece of public art? What is going on here? (Also, it seems worth noting that there is a very real risk that visitors to the park, unaware of Moses' possible role in censoring Warhol, may take the portrait as a legitimate celebration of the autocratic fair director, though one hopes not.)


Mosaic in Passerelle Plaza, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York

Just in case that wasn't strange enough, another mosaic depicts Johnson's Theaterama, the part of the New York State Pavilion that was decorated with the ten artists (more on that later). Yes, Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men seems to be depicted, even though it was painted over before the start of the fair. (It was subsequently covered with a tarp and later removed). It shows the 1964 World's Fair as it never officially looked. Rather, it is an imagined, idealized vision of a fair without censorship and of a society that was willing to accept Warhol's men.

If you made the mosaic or know who did, please send me an email. I would love to speak with that person (or those persons). Thank you!


The Queens Theatre-in-the-Park, formerly the New York State Pavilion's Theaterama

MoMA P.S.1's Carrot Cake [16 Miles of Sweets]

Carrot cake at MoMA P.S.1 Photo: 16 Miles [more]

16 Miles of Sweets is an irregularly appearing column that searches for the best desserts in and around art destinations. Previously, baklava in the East Village.

Steven Spielberg supposedly once said that watching Stanley Kubrick’s period film Barry Lyndon was like “walking through the Louvre without lunch”: beautiful but exhausting. The idea of getting through the messy, sprawling “Greater New York” at MoMA P.S.1 without the aid of a hearty meal is even more daunting. Thankfully, the art center’s Le Rosier Cafe never fails to provide the sustenance necessary to endure even the most video-art-heavy shows.

While the cafe's encyclopedic beer menu and homemade sorbets have major supporters, its carrot cake is equally worthy of a fan club: two moist layers adorned with a thick coat of cream-cheese frosting. Flecks of rich orange carrot are scattered throughout the amber cake, muting the potent sweetness of the frosting. It’s a model dessert and easily deserves 6 out of 7 taste points. However, aesthetically, it's a rather typical cake, and while $5.96 is slightly pricey for a slim slice, that is a quibble: good art is expensive (16 Miles of Sweets does not award points based on value), and MoMA P.S.1’s carrot cake is a solid investment.

Taste: 6 out of 7
Look: 1.5 out of 3
Total: 7.5 out of 10