A "Neon Rainbow" in SoHo

Detail view of Tamara Zahaykevich, Ruth Peace, 2008. Polystyrene, foam board, paint, decoupage, 10 x 11 1/2 x 2 in., in "Neon Rainbow," curated by Amber Vilas, at 125 Crosby Street, June 25, 2011.


Tamara Zahaykevich, Ruth Peace, 2008


Installation view

On paper, the idea of blanketing the walls of a gallery with a fine layer of gold glitter reads as a deeply horrendous idea. But that's precisely what curator (and friend) Amber Vilas did for "Neon Rainbow," her one-night, ten-artist show in a subterranean crate shop at the corner of SoHo's Crosby and Jersey Streets. And it worked — at least this one time, lending a welcome background ebullience to work that included an angular polystyrene relief by Tamara Zahaykevich, a small acrylic on paper of a hazy, sun–filled sky by Roger White, and a tantalizing oval caked with pale pink paint by Jim Lee, whose work, one suspects, could withstand even the most radical exhibition experiments.


Jim Lee, Fleur du Mal (Scattered Remains), 2011. Oil enamel, paint shavings, and saw dust on wood, 24 x 28 3/4 x 3 1/4 in.

More: Joshua Abelow has a bounty of great installation photographs from the show, which also included Daniel Bainbridge, Donald Cameron, Erin Lee Jones, Jeffrey Scott Mathews, Sarah Mattes, Tracy Thomason, and Adrian Tone. [Art Blog Art Blog]

"Greater LA"

Edgar Arceneaux, Orpheum Returns — Fire's Creation, 2010. Wood shelf, clay, science book, sugar, in "Greater LA," at 483 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, through June 10, 2011.

"While many of the artists included have exhibited in ... New York, they’ve never been contextualized as a group that shares, however subtly, an identity based upon their geography," reads a curatorial statement by the organizers of "Greater LA," a sprawling show on view in a second-floor SoHo space through Friday. The show, it continues, "aims to be this contextualization, giving physical form to the oft-heard suggestion that the work made today in Los Angeles is some of the best in the World."

That's an ambitious statement, and one backed up by an equally ambitious show, with some 100 works by almost 50 artists, brought together by gallerist Joel Mesler, collector Eleanor Cayre, and curator Benjamin Godsill. Much of it is very large, very heavy looking. There is, for instance, an enormous, richly colored tapestry by Pae White, whose last New York solo show was almost 15 years ago, way back in 1997 at the I-20 Gallery. An installation by a relative newcomer, Alex Israel, is similarly epic, filling a space the size of many Lower East Side galleries with rented movie props: a row of metal lockers, a spinal column, and a standing gauze cast, among other items.




Liz Glynn, Capstone from III, 2010-11. Reclaimed forklift pallet stock.


Pae White, Studio A-Z, MMVII Tapestry 2, 2007. Cotton and polyester.



Many of the artists here are venturing — or have already been welcomed — into the upper tiers of the art world. They show on the contemporary art circuit, picking up ideas while on tour, and the geographic association offered sometimes feels incidental or forced. If there's an L.A. aesthetic or style, it's not discernible here, though there are some works that feel uniquely indebted to the city, like Alex Prager's rigorously staged melodramatic photographs, which are pure Hollywood product. Prager was featured in MoMA's recent "New Photography" show, and as Roberta Smith notes in her review of "Greater LA," she is not the only name that will be familiar to New Yorkers. Matthew Chambers has had solo shows at Mesler's New York galleries each of the past two years — at Untitled in 2010, and at Rental in 2009. He's represented here by a beige-colored triptych, with panels that — moving from left to right — ape the styles of Frank Stella, Eric Fischl, and Mark Grotjahn.

Patrick Hill is another familiar name, and a positively thrilling sculptor, but his work here is unusually weak, lacking the erotic charge of the marble-and-wood works he showed at Bortolami a few months back. (Another piece from that series, an exciting one, is at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, just a few blocks away, through July 8.)


Hill, Flirty Fishing, 2011. Wood, glass, rope, dye, and glue.


Matthew Chambers, Exacting Shorthand, 2011. Oil and acrylic on canvas.


Patrick Jackson, City Unborn (gold), 2008


Kaz Oshiro, Untitled Still Life (Abstract Painting with Duct Tape in Grey), 2009. Acrylic on canvas.


Mark Grotjahn


Partial installation view of Alex Israel, Property, 2011. Rented cinema props.


Partial installation views of Andrea Bowers, 14 Chairs, 2010. Fourteen metal folding chairs and spray paint. Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs.



Another well-known figure is Andrea Bowers, who presents a witty fourteen-folding-chair tribute to seminal artists and art-world denizens. A chair for Sol LeWitt is covered with grids, one for Marcia Tucker is inscribed "Bad Girls," and Donald Judd gets immaculate, polished metal.

Other welcome sights include a super-fragile stacked-glass piece by Patrick Jackson (which was dutifully attended by a security guard at the opening); a trio of Grotjahn sculptures — messy, silly asides to the nine gorgeous and carefully wrought paintings now at Anton Kern; and a tiny annex space for the Dan Graham Gallery, a heady conceptual experiment in exhibition making that I would have expected to come from New York. I'm also intrigued by Eduardo Sarabia's contribution, less by the actual work — pretty photorealistic paintings of a woman in front of a verdant landscape covered with abstract daubs and blurs — than by his steadfast and admirable refusal to repeat his glorious 2008 Whitney Biennial homemade-tequila bar, which would no doubt be a certain success. (He's been absent from New York since then, and his last solo outing was at I-20 in 2006.)


Matt Johnson, American Spirits, 2010. Paper, plastic, foam, paint, and magnets. At the opening, this was set to the side of the pedestal; usually, though, aided by those magnets, it spins magically in the air.

Exactly 30 years ago, Peter Schjeldahl wrote a piece about the Los Angeles art world for the Village Voice. "This is never going to be a real art center unless, in the process, it ceases to be L.A.," he said. "The very word center is solecism here." "Greater LA" does not prove that the city has become an art center. There's no way it could: that term has become difficult to define, even meaningless, in the intervening three decades. There are centers everywhere today, in countless metropolitan areas and online, and they are almost as likely to be organized around web sites and curators as they are to be based in specific neighborhoods. Which makes the exhibition a refreshingly unusual and bravely retrograde affair, aiming as it does to identify and share the leading young artists of a single distant city. I hope it returns next year, with Mexico City as its focus this time, or perhaps Brussels or Brooklyn or Budapest.

Dr. Lakra at the Drawing Center

Installation views of "Dr. Lakra" at the Drawing Center, New York, February 24, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]





How is it possible that Dr. Lakra has never had a one-person show in New York? The Mexico City–based artist is one of contemporary art's most reliable, unrelenting showmen, and his work has been rampaging around the international circuit for more than a decade. Moreover, his drawings — which are often vintage pinups precisely détourned with elaborate tattoos — have a tendency to eviscerate neighboring works in group shows. It rarely seems to be a fair fight.

Regardless of the reason, that long-overdue Lakra exhibition arrived on Thursday, thanks to the Drawing Center, which also happens to have been the first institution to show his work in New York, back in 1995. Currently at the start of an admirably ambitious expansion project, the museum has handed over to the artist the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, at 3 Wooster Street, and he has responded with a tantalizing, trippy site-specific stunner that makes his wild 2010 outing at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, look comparatively restrained.

Black and brown blobs ooze around the gallery's walls and billow up into large clouds in some places, serving as frames for drawings on paper that present various indulgences: a glass of liquor and a hulking tribal artifact, for instance, or nineteen (I counted) naked young women staring out of a swirling chocolate fog. Elsewhere, Lakra's black and brown smoke morphs into subtle and supple portraits of androgynous figures or monochromatic silhouette cartoons of naked women or masses of unidentifiable organs that almost pulse and undulate on the walls.





Under the previous New York City mayor, Lakra's drawings may have provoked at least a moment of political grandstanding. They show a naked woman bending over and urinating, a topless woman smoking a long cigarette, and various women kissing. Admittedly, the taboos and private fantasies they deal in are largely those of straight males, but they can never be quite reduced to those interests. Lakra's work literally represents not only art's inherent erotic potential but also its use as a guard again death. There are plenty of pornographic elements, sure, but long shadows, snakes, and skulls are always just a drawing away.

After a "Blood Drive," Michael E. Smith Returns to New York

Michael E. Smith, Untitled (mlkw/blkvelcro), 2010. Plastic milk jugs, industrial foam, Velcro, milk jug left: 10 3/4 x 6 1/2 x 7 in., milk jug right: 10 3/4 x 7 x 7 3/4 in., Velcro: 39 x 1 in. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

You may remember Michael E. Smith’s work from the “BLOOD DRIVE” show that artist Kate Levant organized at Zach Feuer a little more than a year ago. That was one of 2009’s weirdest-looking Chelsea exhibitions, a summer experiment that seemed to have arrived from another planet, or at least a strange, hidden pocket of Yale, where Levant and Smith both studied. Smith’s work looked beat-up and abused but also rigorously constructed. In one piece, a cut of latex and part of a broken television screen nimbly swept over a copy-paper-sized photograph. In another, Smith and Levant together built two tables out of Styrofoam and some blinds. It was odd, and exciting.


Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2010. Industrial foam, plastic surgical gloves, T-shirt, blinds, plank, bucket: 11 1/4 x 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 in., blinds (3): 100 x 44 in. each.


Now Smith is back with a solo show down in SoHo at the rapidly ascendant newcomer Clifton Benevento (which showed the superb Ned Vena earlier this year). Smith’s blinds are back, too, propped over the gallery’s radiator with the aid of some plywood and topped with a bucket: a menacing Robert Morris felt coming slowly to life. He’s placed two milk jugs on a bookshelf, filling one with industrial foam, which the show’s press release promises will yellow and break down over the course of the exhibition. Frozen representations of decay, that jug is not a bad summary for the show’s prevailing look. Just don’t miss the strip of Velcro in between the milk containers; it’s part of the work too.

Finish your visit with a trip to the bathroom (or start there, that amenity is rare in SoHo these days). The flat and creepy sculpture Shamu is tucked away there. Nearly flat and constructed out of a rumbled T-shirt touched with plastic and enamel, it looks wet and almost moldy, foreshadowing its potential demise.


Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2010. Fishing hat, thermo rubber, grass clippings, 5 1/2 x 11 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.



Michael E. Smith, Shamu, 2010. T-shirt, plastic and enamel, 20 1/2 x 15 in.


Michael E. Smith
Clifton Benevento
515 Broadway
New York, New York
Through October 17, 2010

Cody Critcheloe & SSION, "BOY," at The Hole

Installation of Cody Critcheloe & SSION, "Boy," at The Hole. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The new gallery run by Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman down on Greene Street, The Hole, has a new Web site! It is fresh and clean, thoroughly stocked with information and pleasing to the eye. Sadly, they decided not to cart over the grating Warren Fischer theme song that plays — yes, it is still there — on the site of Deitch Projects (where Grayson and Coleman used to work).

In any sense, their current show is by Cody Critcheloe of the dirty and sloppy Kansas City punk band SSION (“shun”), who has turned the gallery into a psychedelic, Op-art catacomb-pleasure dome. Checkered diamonds line the ceiling, neons of every color cover the walls, and some comfy pillows have been scattered around the floor (next to tombstones, one adorned with a riff on Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine record cover).

The main draw here is Critcheloe’s new feature film, BOY, which details the band’s attempt to break out of the American heartland. There are performances in forests, some weird interviews, and some raucous scenes of automobile destruction. Critcheloe has also invited friends to show work: photographer Jaimie Warren and fashion designer Peggy Noland, whose miniature boutique is situated out front in a shop made of garbage (see below), a sort of contemporary Merzbau.

Noland has a runway show lined up for Friday, and SSION will close the whole affair down with a one-night stand on Saturday.






Peggy Noland's clothing rack at The Hole





Cody Critcheloe and SSION, "BOY"
The Hole
104 Greene Street
New York, New York
Through September 11

The Roofs of MoMA — and SoHo

View of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photos: 16 Miles

There is art hiding in these photos of the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture garden.




Rachel Whiteread, Water Tower, 1998. Translucent resin and painted steel, 12 ft. 2 in. high x 9 ft. in diameter.

Yes! It's up there on the roof: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower. The work was first installed in SoHo, in June 1998, by the Public Art Fund, which described it as "its most ambitious project to date." A year later, the Freedman Family donated it to MoMA in honor of Doris C. and Alan J. Freedman. According to a vintage Charlie Finch column (filled with all sorts of uncomfortable artifacts from a bygone art world), the work was made of "9,000 pounds of resin so toxic" that "Whiteread's team had to wear spacesuits." (MoMA has a nice little multimedia feature on the work, and it owns a preparatory drawing that Whiteread made on a photograph of SoHo, which is the real reason for this post.)

The piece was on the roof of 60 Grand Street, at the northeast corner of Grand Street and West Broadway. Curious to see if there was still any trace of the project, I stopped by the intersection on the way to the office this morning. It turns out that the platform for the tower is still there, still serving as a quiet memorial to — as Finch put it in 1998 — "the dead and gone SoHo art scene." (Which, it turns out, was not quite so dead after all.) The Coca-Cola ad that is visible in the photo that MoMA owns has faded with time, though a bright and brilliant mural advertising Coors' faux craft beer Blue Moon has been painted onto the building.


The northeast corner of Grand Street and West Broadway, SoHo, New York, July 14, 2010



Also, MoMA's placard for the sculpture features this fun depiction of it.

On Artists That Quit and Charlotte Posenenske at Artists Space

Installation view of Charlotte Posenenske, Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), 1967, at Artists Space. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Installation view of "Charlotte Posenenske" at Artists Space

For its current Charlotte Posenenske show, Artists Space has made the superb decision to invite an artist to reconfigure her mutable 1967 sculpture Series D Vierkantrohre (“Square Tubes”) every two weeks. This allows visitors to see the work, composed of a series of steel boxes, in a variety of different ways over the course of the show. It also provides the opportunity to enjoy four separate receptions. Last night, Ei Arakawa’s installation was the cause for celebration, and the party earned a solid turnout, particularly for a Tuesday night opening devoted to work that has already been on display, albeit in a different form, since June 23.

Along with her open-ended air-vent-style sculptures, Posenenske is remembered for her decision to quit art in 1968 to study sociology. This is something that almost everyone who writes about her work manages to mention. (Ken Johnson did it in 2008, Andrea K. Scott did it this week, and I did it last month.) “It is difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to solving urgent social problems,” she wrote in a 1968 manifesto that was published in Art International, explaining her decision to leave the art world. She died in 1985.

There are few things more unsettling in art history than artists who choose to quit their profession, or even simply choose to withdraw from the art world, since it seems to cast doubt on the hard work of all the artists, critics, historians, gallerists, auctioneers, theorists, and other inhabitants of the industry. It points directly to the fear in everyone that this whole art thing may actually be a big waste of time. One wonders, “Did Charlotte Posenenske face up to and accept something that we’ve all been trying to deny?” It also feels unnatural: an artist abandoning her supposedly God-given calling: it is like a mother killing her child.

It turns out — according to some vigorous searching on Google — that a Berlin theorist named Alexander Koch has thought a lot about this issue and coined an efficient German term for the phenomenon for such quitters: Kunstausstieg, which he translates as “dropping out of art” and Google translates as “exit art.” Fair enough. In an interview, Koch contrasts Posenenske with Lee Lozano, saying that the former “chose social science to pursue her inquiries on participatorial practice,” while the latter instead “chose retirement in resignation.” (Poor Lee Lozano.) While there have been few major art-world dropouts, there have certainly been plenty of art-world suicides, though Koch has that covered, ruling that action “an exception, because it both is and is not a withdrawal.” There goes one idea for a dissertation topic.

The Artist Space show — the first American museum show devoted to Posenenske, following her inclusion in Documenta 12 in 2007 and a solo show at Peter Freeman in 2008 — is remarkable. There are two more opening receptions left: Rirkrit Tiravanija is scheduled for July 20, and an artist “yet to be announced” is on tap for August 3. It would be wise to attend both.


Installation view of Charlotte Posenenske, Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), 1967


Detail view of Charlotte Posenenske, Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), 1967



Posenenske's sculpture earned a devoted fans in the form of corporations like Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank. Artists Space has a set of booklets showing her work looking rather perfect in airplane hangars and corporate meeting rooms.






Installation view of Charlotte Posenenske, Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), 1967

"Charlotte Posenenske" (Installation of Series D Vierkantrohre, 1967, by El Arakawa)
Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, New York
Through August 15, 2010

The Village Voice Archive: Conflicts of Interest and Gallery Ads

Advertisement in the Village Voice, January 17, 1974

While hunting around for essays by the late critic David Bourdon earlier today, I had the happy pleasure of discovering that Google has kindly scanned a good chunk of the Village Voice's archive. It's not complete, and it's not searchable, but it's still a wonderful resource.

It turns out that Bourdon, who earned a spot in art history by helping Warhol make Elvis silk screens in 1963, was also a hell of a writer, capable of free-spirited whimsy and deadpan humor. In a 1976 column, more than 30 years before the recent New Museum debacle, he reports on the Guggenheim's decision to feature work by eight artists Castelli artists in "20th-Century American Drawing," as the show's lone contemporary artists. "Diane Waldman's husband is a painter who also happens to be represented by Castelli," he notes. "In some sectors of the business world, this would be called conflict of interest."

That bit of history-repeating-itself aside, it's amazing to see the amount of space the Voice once gave to criticism, classifieds, and gallery advertisements. Even Gordon Matta-Clark's 112 Greene Street space (which later became White Columns) was placing ads, like this one for a series of "video performances" at its SoHo space in 1974. Classy line-up: Acconci, Beuys, Burden, etc. Classy start time: 9 p.m., when even the heartiest of today's openings are being brought to a close. Keith Sonnier, of course, one-ups everyone with a formidable 10:30 p.m. start.