Kaprow at Grand Central, "Fabiola" Tour Continues, a Weiner Remix, etc. [Collected]

Installation view of Tracy Thomason, "Highlights, Low Fades, & Deep Cuts," at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, through August 28, 2011.

• Documentation of the 1965 Allan Kaprow happening Calling, which involved wrapping people Christo-style and carrying them into Grand Central. [ROLU]
  
  
• Francis Alÿs's Fabiola — an installation of more than 350 paintings of Saint Fabiola that Alÿs acquired from flea markets and antique shops around the world — is now on view at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland. Since appearing at Dia's branch at the Hispanic Society of America in Washington Heights in 2007, it has been touring around the world. [this is tomorrow]
  
  
• Christoph Büchel turned Hauser & Wirth's Piccadilly gallery into a community center — a community center with a really wonderful website, no less — last month. [Strange Messenger]
  
  
• WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL HOWSOEVER, a new print by Lawrence Weiner, is available through 20x200. The work is a remix of sorts of his commission for the Art Production Fund's mural project, covered here earlier. [Ms. Jen Bekman]
  
  
• "I’m going to break this down very simply, and as nonlibelously as possible." David Levine recalls his father's involvement in the Marlborough-Rothko scandal. This is the sleeper hit of the summer. [Triple Canopy]
  
  
• Artist Matt Connors intensely blogs a book on German artists in the 1980s. I'm a big fan of the Katja Hajek's — 'I'm just chilling by a grand piano' — portrait. Sadly, there's very little material about her (in English, at least) online. [And a Half/Und Eine Halbe]
  
  
• The Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired a painting by Allan D'Arcangelo earlier this year. It's a beauty. [Eyelevel]
  
  
• "Just as dusk settled over the brick hulk of the New York Security building on Laight Street in TriBeCa last Wednesday, figures in black began walking in, nodding to the guard, and taking the elevator to the fifth floor," Andrea Kannapell, The New York Times, April 9, 1995
  

Down and Then Out: 18 Murals on the Gates of the Bowery

Lawrence Weiner's painting at 134 Bowery, New York, for "After Hours: Murals on the Bowery," organized by the Art Production Fund. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

In December 2009, the New York City Council voted to require business owners to replace garage-style security gates with ones that allow views into the stores behind them by July 2026. "Roll-down gates are essentially large metal canvases," the New York Times' James Barron wrote in a report on artists who criticized the ban on the metal walls (which can no longer be installed after July 1 of this year). Barron noted that some painters have made their names on those gates, like octogenarian Franco Gaskin (also known as Franco the Great or the Harlem Picasso), who has painted scores of them around the world and more than a dozen along 125th Street in Manhattan. In other cases, a street-level mural may be one of the highlights of an artist's career. The city is filled with them.

All of which is to say that the Art Production Fund's latest project, which involved commissioning contemporary artists to design murals for 18 security gates along the Bowery, between Houston and Grand Streets, has an elegiac element alongside its more celebratory aspects. The works, which officially debuted on the evening of May 7 (they're only visible when the stores are closed: at night and on Sunday, in most cases), are on view for only two months, after which they'll be painted over, embodying the upcoming legislated disappearance of the gates across the city. A medium is slowly being ushered offstage.


Mary Heilmann's work at 220 Bowery, just feet from Prince Street

At a time when street art by its most famous practitioners is sometimes sliced off of buildings and sold, I'm a little surprised that no one has proposed auctioning off the soon-to-be-defunct gates to raise money for the APF or the nearby New Museum, especially since some of the works are really wonderful. Three of the most interesting are the abstract works by Mary Heilmann and Jacqueline Humphries and a characteristically manic, brushy text piece by Judith Bernstein, which could all be mistaken for the graffiti that appears on almost every other gate in the neighborhood. They appear to have been quickly and roughly painted, like many of the tags on the surrounding gates, and their work slips easily into the visual landscape of that stretch of blocks. Of course, the murals were in fact meticulously executed by teams of artists working from blueprints. They possess what art historian Rosalind Krauss, discussing Impressionist painting, calls the "codified sign or seme of spontaneity." They look easy, but they're hard-won: painting with the speed of a graffiti artist is difficult work.


A tricolor triptych! Jacqueline Humphries at 153 Bowery, inches from Broome Street.


Two people walking by the Judith Bernstein mural at 272 Bowery


The Kool-Aid man emerges: artists at work on Richard Prince's mural at 265 Bowery.

In other cases, the translation from contemporary painting to street mural is more awkward, as in Richard Prince's enormous Kool-Aid Man or Lawrence Weiner's gorgeous blue text piece. They're both stunning, particularly the Weiner, but they feel slightly out of place along the Bowery. This refusal of site specificity and the unique context and history of the street is a missed opportunity: these murals could be anywhere.


Ne travaillez jamais: Rirkrit Tiravanija's diptych at 180 Bowery

That can't be said of Rirkrit Tiravanija's piece, with its awkwardly shaped letters and occasional patches of sloppy painting, recalling the hand-painted "no parking" signs that adorn the storefront gates of many businesses around the city. It reads, "STOP WORK / NEVER WORK," a slogan plucked from the graffiti of Paris's 1968 revolts ("ne travaillez jamais") and sometimes attributed to Situationist International founder Guy Debord. That phrase also happens to be the text I had printed on the Tiravanija T-shirt that I picked up recently at the artist's "FEAR EATS THE SOUL" show at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Painted on the Bowery, on gates just a few blocks away from the Bowery Mission homeless shelter, it becomes far less easy to consume.


The Bowery Mission at 227 Bowery


Adam McEwen at 212 Bowery


The Danish duo Elmgreen & Dragset's piece at 213 Bowery, right next to Rivington Street


214 Bowery: Deborah Kass and Pulp, Ink have painted the gate of The Chair Factory.

Happy Holiday

Tom Wesselmann, Expo Mouth #10, 1967. Oil on canvas, 119 x 106 1/2 in. Minneapolis Institute of of Arts. Photo: 16 Miles [more]


Lawrence Weiner, Gloss white lacquer, sprayed for 2 minutes at 40lb pressure directly on the floor, 1968, in "Contemporary Art from the Collection," at the Museum of Modern Art.


Doug Wheeler, Eindhoven, Environmental Light Installation, 1969. Light installation, 144 x 192 in., in "The Panza Collection," at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Americans, Happy Fourth of July. Posting will resume tomorrow.

PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones - Part 2 of 2 [Review]

Guido van der Werve, Number Seven: The clouds are more beautiful from above, 2006. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Part 1 of our PLOT09 coverage, a series of photographs, is also available.

In the press release for their 1978 exhibition Art on the Beach, Creative Time quoted O. Henry’s on Manhattan: “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” They were showing art on the Battery Park landfill, the center of the island’s latest transformation, created with dirt excavated for the building of the World Trade Center. Thirty years later, the organization has organized PLOT09 on Governors Island, just four hundred yards away from Battery Park in New York Harbor. A former Army and Coast Guard site, it is everything that Manhattan is not: pastoral, isolated, and historically static.

Curator Mark Beasley invited nineteen artists to contribute work for spaces on the island, and, perhaps not surprisingly, many of their responses attempt to puncture the island’s impermeable cultural wall, challenging the bureaucratic structures that underpin much of its past. Teresa Margolles contributes a bullet-ridden wall from her hometown of Culiacán to a quiet field. In a great photo-essay on the show Carefully Aimed Darts describes it as “bloodstained post-minimalism,” which is a neat summation. Violence, weapons, and death, all absent from this former military complex are brought into view.

Video scores the greatest triumphs and failures. In the former category, Bruce High Quality Foundation’s zombie film Isle of the Dead, shot on the island, is hilariously sublime, as is Judi Werthein’s The Land of the Free, which shows Colombian musicians, who have fled drug violence, singing their own translation of The Star-Spangled Banner. Presented inside an old Victorian house a quick hop across the water from Ellis Island, it merits repeat viewings. On the other hand, Adam Chodzko’s documentary about an imagined potlatch among children of military families stationed on the island, is a mess of ideas that never quite coheres.

Reviewing PLOT09, Roberta Smith wrote, “The world has an endless supply of sites, but more and more the specifics look very much the same,” arguing that some of weaker entries amounted to “garden variety Conceptualism … a tad obvious or exploitative." This could include Edgar Arceneaux, who channels low-frequency sounds through subwoofers, gently shaking the walls of one of the old mansions. Experiencing it is as exciting as listening to a washing machine run.

Insular Act, a piece by the collective Tercerunquinto, is at least a bit more curious. The three artists decided to throw a rock through the window of one of old administrative buildings for their contribution, documenting the act in drawings and a video. Happily, they first dutifully received all of the requisite governmental permissions. Institutions once vigorously resisted such institutional critique, as when the Guggenheim rejected Hans Haacke’s 1971 exposé on its trustees. Now they know it’s better simply to play along with the harmless fun. The window was replaced at a cost of $2,500, and the work amounts to a farce on the way in which bureaucratic institutions have come to operate in the service of purportedly radical, often-banal conceptual agendas. One hopes the satire is intentional.

One of the best moments comes from Tue Greenfort’s Project for the New American Century. To view it, one walks or bikes through Brick Village, a condemned field of tract housing straight out of Dan Graham’s Homes for America. Rounding the corner of one brick house, in the middle of this manufactured suburbia (slated for demolition to make way for recreation grounds), one encounters the logo for William Kristol’s organization emblazed across its side, along with a plaque celebrating its cause. It is a perfect tribute to its location and our uncertain time.

The real surprise, though, comes from Patti Smith and her daughter Jesse Smith, who proffer a fifteen-minute recording to listen to while exploring the exhibition. Over a slow, drifting piano accompaniment, Patti Smith recites a panegyric to the beauty of Governors Island, the soldiers and families it held in isolation, and the sacrifices those that passed through the area over the past centuries endured. In a field enamored of dissonance, it is a rare call for a sincere commitment to engaging the island’s complex historical legacy. This seems essential. Crowds from across New York are flooding the ferries. Large swaths of buildings will be razed over the next few months. The artist’s interventions will be removed and shipped away. Governors Island is finally changing. There are things worth remembering.

PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones - Part 1 of 2 [Photographs]

Lawrence Weiner, AT THE SAME MOMENT, 2000. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Teresa Margolles, Muro Baleado / Shot-Up Wall, 2008.


Guido van der Werve, Number Four: I don't want to get involved in this; I don't want to be part of this; talk me out of it, 2005.


Edgar Arceneaux, Sound Cannon Double Projection, 2009. CD players, subwoofers. Dimensions variable.


Tue Greenfort, Project for the New American Century, 2009.


Brick Village on Governors Island, site of Tue Greenfort's Project for the New American Century, 2009.

AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors Island), 2009.


Mark Wallinger, Ferry, 2009.

PLOT09: This World and Nearer Ones
Curated by Mark Beasley
Governors Island, New York
Summer 2009
Photographs: 16 Miles [more]