Asya Says

Lisa Ross Catalog & Artist Talk

2011-11-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that the
Lisa Ross: After Night catalog is now available at the gallery. This has been a very exciting catalog to be able to produce, as Lisa's current series, on beds found in the desert landscape, is perfect for this format. The catalog is 22 pages, full color, $15: for inquiries please email the gallery at info@asyageisberggallery.com.

Lisa Ross will be giving an artist talk at the gallery on Saturday, November 12, at 1pm. A light brunch will be served.

The exhibition has also received press in aCurator magazine, Uprise Art, and soon in La Lettre de la Photographie. Check the NEWS section of the website for links.

"Salvajes"opening

2011-09-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

Left: Installation; "Salvajes".

"Salvajes", an exhibition of eight artists, opened September 15. Curated by Guillermo Creus, "Salvajes" is inspired by the lyrical, political and metaphorical themes in the writing of Roberto Bolaño , conceptually aligning the Chilean writer’s characters and motifs with the works of eight contemporary Latin American artists. Drawing parallels between these artists and Bolaño’s persona as a nomadic writer, “Salvajes” intends to be Latin American in its essence, and universal in its language. The title of the exhibition, “Salvajes” (savages), refers to one of Bolaño’s most important novels, Los Detectives Salvajes, and to the stereotypical image of Latin Americans as the uncivilized.

Right: Curator Guillermo Creus in front of "Stela of the Gods of New York" by Irvin Morazan.

Alberto Borea (born in Peru) was educated at Bard and Skowhegan, and has had solo exhibitions at Galeria Isabel Hurley and the Y Gallery. He is currently in the Museo del
Barrio biennial show, The S Files. Awards and residencies include ISCP, Art Omi, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Sculpture Space Residency.
Florencia Escudero (born in Argentina) has a BFA from SVA, and is currently completing her MFA at Yale University.

Left: Florencia Escudero (Left) by paintings by Ricardo Gonzalez.

Ricardo Gonzalez was born in Mexico City and completed his MFA at New York University, with exhibitions at Apexart, Kathleen Cullen, and LaMama Gallery.
Claudia Joskowicz was born in Bolivia and has an MFA from NYU. She has had solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg, Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Bolivia, and Momenta. She has received an AIM residency, LMCC residency, a Fullbright Scholarship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been included in group shows at LMAK Projects, the Sao Paolo Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the 10th Havana Biennial, and Socrates Sculpture Park.

Right: Asya Geisberg, Guillermo Creus, and Claudia Joscowicz, by photo of Alberto Borea.

Irvin Morazan was born in El Salvador. He has a BFA from SVA, and is completing his MFA at Hunter College. He is included in the current Museo del Barrio show “The S Files”. He will be performing September 30th for Salvajes, and will be included in Performa 11 with a performance on November 2nd.
Meyer Vaisman is an influential artist of the 1980-90s New York art scenes, and together with Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Peter Halley known as the ‘Fantastic Four’. Born in 1960 in Venezuela to Romanian-Ukranian Jewish parents, he brings a cross-generational aspect to this exhibition, as a pioneer Latin-American artist that reached the New York art establishment “from inside”. He has exhibited at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Leo Castelli, Jablonka Gallery, and Patrick Painter among others.
Manuela Viera-Gallo (born in Rome, grew up in Chile) received her BFA and MFA from
the Universidad Catolica in Chile. She had a solo exhibition at the Y Gallery in 2011 and is widely exhibited in New York, South America, and Europe.
Carlos Vela-Prado (born in Guatemala) is currently completing his MFA at Yale University.

For images from the exhibition, go to asyageisberggallery.com.

"Things Fall Apart" opens Thursday July 7 at SVA

2011-07-07T09:31:00.000-07:00

"Things Fall Apart"

July 5 - August 13, 2011
Reception: Thursday, July 7, 6 - 8pm

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents "Things Fall Apart," an exhibition of work by students and recent graduates of the MFA Fine Arts Department and curated by Asya Geisberg.

The exhibition's title reflects the mood of the world at large, as during the past few years economic and political tumult has produced financial 'corrections,' regional upheavals, and overturned assumptions of fealty among allies and enmity among foes. Decades of inertia have abruptly turned into revolutionary fervor in the Middle East, while at home political sureties have crumbled - the words 'gay marriage' have swung the polls in opposite directions. With no culmination in sight, this constant sense of repositioned status quo, of definitions and boundaries blown up, is reflected in art being produced today."

In "Things Fall Apart," artists refuse to take easy categorizations or art-historical imperatives for granted. Andrew Brischler (current student, MFA Fine Arts Department) upends the essence of painting, Betty Hart (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) acts as a modern alchemist with photography, and Jenny Santos (current student, MFA Fine Arts Department) disrupts perceptions of stability and solidity with seemingly simple gestures. Theresa Friess (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) mixes ethereal materiality with functional paradoxes, while Kim Smith's (current student, MFA Fine Arts Department) surfaces spark a confusion of additive and reductive marks.

Sharona Eliassaf's (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) media-influenced conflations and Joey Varas's (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) deconstructed war mementos decontextualize recognizable elements of our current state of "always-plugged-in" and "always-at-war." Katie Cercone (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) takes sensory overstimulation into the performative realm, enveloping her actions and videos in equally cacophonic environments. Julie Schenkelberg's (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) sculpture absorbs knowledge into a symbolic dead-end.

Emily Weiner's (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) symmetrical paintings start with the broken tradition of exalted nature, while mocking the impossibility of reaching the Ideal. Gudmundur Thoroddsen (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) dissolves dichotomies of the sacred and the profane, leaving the Ideal behind altogether. Angela Branco (MFA 2011 Fine Arts) reenacts what some might consider the essence of destructive and ritualistic power. Miyeon Lee (MFA 2011 Fine Arts), seemingly wishing for things to be back together, tries to show us a world of cosmic infinity, pinning the unknowable within the picture plane.

----Asya Geisberg

Visual Arts Gallery: 601 West 26th street, 15th floor

Monday through Saturday, 10am - 5pm

NYT review of "Hearts of Oak"

2011-02-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

One simply cannot describe the feeling of going out in the cold morning, picking up a New York Times in one's sweatpants, throwing it on the kitchen counter, tearing a section rapidly in search of the page where one's name is found, not once, not twice, but...you get it. I know the review is of the Annie Attridge exhibition, which in addition to the reviews she received in the L magazine and Artlog she richly deserves. But, the ego is a sensitive creature, and when its fur is gently petted by the silken palm of "All the News that's Fit to Print", a gentle purr occurs.

In other words, yay!

Check out the Roberta Smith review below:

----------------------

February 3, 2011

ANNIE ATTRIDGE: ‘Hearts of Oak’

By ROBERTA SMITH

Asya Geisberg Gallery

537B West 23rd Street

Chelsea

Through Feb. 12

The British artist Annie Attridge shows a lot of awkward promise in her New York gallery debut. She works small and mainly in glazed porcelain, pushing traditionally demure tabletop figurines into compromising, often ribald positions while downsizing the heroic conventions of royal portraiture. The rearing horse is a favorite device, except that the rider tends to be a nude woman, a voluptuous breast or a pair of female buttocks swathed in frills, rather than a king.

There is not a man in sight here, only women offering up their bodies — or parts of them — in various ways. This can include being bound, possibly bleeding, to a truncated tree in the manner of Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings.

Ms. Attridge’s slurred forms are more immediately indebted to the British sculptor Rebecca Warren, who also works with clay, and the Swedish claymation genius Nathalie Djurberg. At this point their very different skills in combining abstract and narrative force exceed hers.

Nonetheless, Ms. Attridge has a sure way with materials and a perverse sense of form that extends into small charcoal drawings and also bronze sculpture, especially the gleaming variation on a cathedral termite mound that culminates in three breasts.

Most of all there is the sexual and sexualized defiance of her vision. She has women on the brain in ways that would probably be frowned upon these days were she not a woman herself. As it is, Ms. Attridge is extending a tradition of small lascivious sculpture that reaches back to ancient times.

Art LA Contemporary

2011-02-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

My first art fair as a participant brought about a few lessons on what to do, and what not to do. These lessons can be applied to anyone, whether hosting a party, or running a gallery, or doing any kind of dealing with the public.

1. Do not have a trash can. This might seem counter-intuitive, as you would think trash should be kept away from the clean and elegant environment you no doubt wish to preserve. I bought a lovely minimal perfect-sized white trash can to sit daintily (and discreetly) under my desk. However, as the VVIP opening went into the VIP opening and then to the general opening, I found that the more "V"s were in front of the "IP"s, the more crudely did people think it permissible to throw coffee cups (with coffee) glasses (with bright red-colored alcohol) and food into my lovely unsoiled can, which by the way was inches away from my legs, so it felt particularly invasive and insulting. Some people spied the can from the hall and threw it from afar. I kid not.

Left: stuff...

2. The less stuff the better. I love information, and like to provide it so that people don't have to ask but can look for themselves. Not so at an art fair. Less is more I realized. Put everything in one notebook, and then sit back and relax. Or rather...

3. Sitting is the devil. My back each morning was more and more agonized- perhaps it was all the LA driving, but most likely it was the awful chairs that I sat in for hours. By day 3 I realized that the intermittent shuffling and fake IPhone-scrolling of the dealer opposite me was actually a back-saving strategy. While constantly standing and pacing outside the perimeter of his booth, he somehow managed to not look like a caffeinated tchotchke-seller at the suk, but a chillaxed dude, who just happened to be the dude you would contact at the booth.

Right: Angelina Gualdoni corner of booth, with uncomfy devil chair.

4. People expect Art 101 and want to "chat". I had a woman come back twice to have me explain "how long should I hold onto an artwork before I sell it?" Another man asked me about how value is defined in art and wanted a full debate. A grumpy old man attacked with "Is this the state of the art world today? If so, then my four-year-old could do a lot better." I was expected to debate the meaning of art, explain the point of art fairs, defend the ethics of dealers, and nutshell the art-as-investment theory, all on a busy Saturday. I have encountered this in triplicate at the gallery of course, but having 100 square feet makes one feel beleaguered. Hence, the beauty of the dealer pacing outside the booth.

5. Save the best outfit for de-installation. I had brought a variety of comfortable and unremarkable outfits to wear, which all proved wrong as the temperature at the unheated airplane hangar plummeted at about 3pm each day, so that some dealers were seen wearing furs and scarves (and coats!) all day. By de-install, I had switched into jeans, while a prominent French dealer was seen attacking a 6 foot crate with a massive screw-gun while in a tight dress and 4-inch stilettos (so very French). As half the lights in the booths were off, another dealer, with long hair and a tall lanky build, stood still holding a large framed piece. A spotlight shined on his immaculate fuschia suede shoe, making it leap from the quiet darkness: one of the more aestheticized moments of the entire fair.

Overall, a great experience!

Newsweek in print

2011-01-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

Newsweek article by Sameer Reddy out in print!

"Hot New York art galleries" p.49 - 51.

AGG mentioned on p.51, with two photos of paintings by gallery artists Angelina Gualdoni ["Fragment"] and Melanie Daniel ["Peacock"] on p.50.

AGG in NEWSWEEK!

2011-01-04T14:08:00.000-08:00

Around Christmas, a charming gent interviewed me for journalistic purposes, and lo and behold as the New Year arrived I found that Newsweek International published a feature, "New Galleries Heat Up Art Market", featuring Asya Geisberg Gallery, the ladies originally from Deitch currently involved in the Hole, and a new space called fordProject, all new NYC spaces.

Excerpt below, click on link to read full article. And whether you are traveling through Istanbul, Irkutsk, or Ougadougou, pick up the print issue!

By Sameer Reddy, January 2, 2011

...Several significant new gallery spaces have begun to open their doors in Manhattan. And with the freedom that comes from reinventing the system, they are pursuing unconventional curatorial programs and, in some cases, setting up shop in unexpected places. ...The shift encouraged Asya Geisberg to open her own eponymous ground-floor gallery on West 23rd Street, in a space formerly occupied by Goff + Rosenthal. Four of the five artists on Geisberg's evolving roster happen to be women, and she's conscious of the role she can fulfill in creating a more level playing field. "It's not something that I consider an overt mission, but I'm very happy that by definition there are more women artists out there that people can see and buy," she says. "[Women's artwork] doesn't need to be more interesting than [men's], but why shouldn't it be valued as much? I'd like to do whatever I can to eliminate any kind of bias that might be latent, but still exists." Geisberg is also trying to inaugurate a series of artist talks-the kind of opportunity typically available only to insiders who arrange for a studio visit.

Click here to read the full article.

"Girls Just Want to Have Funds"

2010-11-17T13:58:00.001-08:00

Rema Hort Mann Foundation panel at PPOW Gallery.

On Tuesday night, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation sponsored a fantastic panel on the not very Cyndi-Lauperian topic of why women artists fail to achieve anywhere near the prices that men do, especially at the upper echelons of the market. To standing-room only crowds, the dedicated director of the Foundation, himself markedly not a woman artist, explained the need for the focus on women artists, and promised to have a similar panel in exactly a year to see where things stood. Indeed, the evening was full of numbers and near-scientific figures, a way to measure and gauge success over time. The moderator, the enlightening and clear-voiced Sarah Douglas, introduced the discussion with statistics that clarified that through all strata of the artist's career arc, men out-earned women, and were disproportionately represented in galleries. She noted that at the height of the market, in 2007, of the top 100 earning artists, only 4 were women, and the highest price for an American woman was $7 million for Joan Mitchell. And while 50% of all MFA students were women, even those galleries that showed emerging artists were already more focused on men in their roster.

Right: Marilyn Minter, "Parted", 2010, 30" x 24", enamel on metal, $35,000.

Indeed, Douglas said that several dealers complained that they were hard pressed to find the talent among women, which of course the mostly-female audience booed under their breaths. A more likely excuse was suggested by the younger artist on the panel, 20-something Xaviera Simmons, who said that women needed confidence, and a business-like approach, in order to succeed. When Sculpture Center Director Mary Ceruti was asked by trustees why her shows were mostly of women, she had to explain that the opposite was true: so many men who were talented already had weighty exhibition histories, while mature talented women were left out, and ripe for a non-profit museum. Amy Capellazzo, the head of Contemporary Art at Christie's, had the most "go-get-'em" approach of all: what women were missing was a sense of entitlement that men seemed to automatically have. If women just believe that they deserved more money, higher salaries, bigger studios with assembly line production, more critical acclaim and approval, then they too could break the $1 million dollar auction price barrier, and be a more saleable brand. Her advice had some resonance, as in her example of the change in women's attitudes over the past 30 years concerning their sexuality, and certainly it was refreshing to hear voices of encouragement and not empathetic coddling of the "woe-is-me" variety. Capellazzo even ended the evening with a reiteration of her call to arms: if you decide you want economic parity, you can achieve it, she coached the crowd. Still, to some of the audience, certain questions remained - for instance, the fact that some of the discrimination and insistence on male supremacy came from women in power. Marilyn Minter, a raucous addition to the roster, and an artist whose rise in economic power has been well-documented, mentioned that even a woman collector had questioned whether her prices were prudent, while dealer Tony Shafrazi claimed only men earned "that kind of money".

Right: Amy Capellazzo, Head of Contemporary Art, Christie's.

In fact, Minter was a good case study in success: her tenacity- creating art even when it was unpopular and not as rewarded -- won her a long wait-list of collectors, and the enviable position of having a studio with 6 assistants. Yet even she portrayed some traits that were a perfect example of why differences still remain, and why the path to success is perhaps slower (if not fully erased) for women: while Jeff Koons, Murakami, and Damien Hirst were well-known for having huge factories of assistants and therefore were able to earn disproportionately massive amounts of money, Minter had to be persuaded to increase her studio to 10 people, and she needed to know them personally, so that she could have a mentoring role. On the other hand, she spoke honestly and humorously about how hungry she was to get higher in the earnings department, and do her personal best to achieve parity with men.
Left: Suzanne Valadon, Self Portrait, 1927.

While the audience clapped most heartily when it was cruelly lured into thinking Cyndi Lauper herself had shown up to perform the titular song of the evening, the end of the panel's discussion beckoned the audience members to stay and dish about the topic of the night. Was pregnancy and motherhood adequately addressed? If Capellazzo claimed that biology wasn't destiny, then what else could women count on as definitive markers of lesser value? Prejudices that exist about the very nature of art made by women and men were not touched upon, and perhaps those very powerful ideas, found in both men and women, are the real reason behind the lack of financial potency in women's careers. I recalled the thesis I wrote on an artist of the turn of the century, Suzanne Valadon, and how her art was interpreted by critics and peers as uniformly "male", and not very saleable. Yet her son, Maurice Utrillo, with his run-of-the-mill paintings copied from postcards, went on to become a much higher earner, and today is a far more marketable name. Of course most women on the panel shared anecdotes about how times had changed from even 20-30 years ago. Let's hope that looking forward will define both progress in actual earning power and the underlying attitudes behind lesser representation.

Opening Pix of Asya Geisberg Gallery

2010-09-30T12:05:00.001-07:00

"Angelina Gualdoni: Shadows Slipping" opened last week, and I have finally sat down long enough to post some opening night pix.

The images below were photographed by an assembly of "Asya Says" devotees, as Asya herself was distracted by "Saying" plenty in person.

Left: View onto 23rd street.

Right: The calm before the storm!

Warm weather and a smashing reception made for a great opening, followed by a lovely after-party or two.

I am so grateful for everyone's support and warm wishes!

And if I didn't have the opportunity to speak with you, my apologies...it was quite the turnout!

Left: Michele, Asya, and Diana.

Right: Pre-opening preparations...

Right: Angelina Gualdoni.

Left: Jerry Saltz perusing "Porosity".

I had to include at least one obligatory shoe/fashion shot, photographed on my behalf, so that the ethos of "Asya Says" endures.

Introducing Asya Geisberg Gallery!

2010-09-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

New Gallery Opening in Chelsea --- Asya Geisberg Gallery

537B West 23rd Street New York
Inaugural Reception September 23rd from 6-8pm
Angelina Gualdoni: Shadows Slipping

ASYA GEISBERG will open her new gallery on West 23rd Street in Chelsea on the ground floor of the Tate Building, joining Leo Koenig, Daniel Reich, Perry Rubenstein, Margaret Thatcher Projects and Pavel Zoubok.

Ms. Geisberg will present a conceptually focused program of young international artists working in all media. The inaugural exhibition will showcase new paintings by New York artist Angelina Gualdoni. Future exhibitions will include Israeli artist Melanie Daniel, winner of the 2009 Rappaport Prize for Young Israeli Painters, and British artist Annie Attridge, whose most recent work was featured in "Grand National-Art from Britain", Vestfossen, Norway.

Asya Geisberg brings her talents as a curator, writer and artist to her new gallery. She has worked with many artists, most recently in "Freedom's Discontents: Resistance, Subversion, and Survival" at Visual Voice Gallery in Montreal. Her coverage of art fairs and international exhibitions can be found at ArtBistro.com, as well as, on her blog "Asya Says" AsyaSays.blogspot.com.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Ms. Geisberg has lived in the US since 1977. She studied literature and history at Wesleyan and received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.

Ms. Geisberg looks forward to being part of the Chelsea neighborhood adding a challenging new group of international artists to this rich arts environment.

Asya Geisberg Gallery | 537B West 23rd Street | New York, NY 10011 | +212 675 7525 | info@asyageisberggallery.com www.asyageisberggallery.com

Freedom Week Art Auction--Please donate!

2010-08-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

The last week of September is Freedom Week, to bring attention to human trafficking, and we are organizing an art auction benefit. It's an under-reported cause, and one that I think deserves all the attention it can get. The benefit will be held on September 30, at Tele Design Studio, an event space in the Meatpacking District. It is sure to get press coverage, and will be the culmination of a week of events.

Please donate a work of art. The info on the project is below. If you are interested or have any questions about donation, please email:freedomweekbenefit@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Asya Geisberg, curator
Freedom Week Art Auction
-----------------------------------------

We are pleased to invite you to participate in New York City’s second-annual Freedom Week, September 25-October 2, 2010. Freedom Week is a citywide campaign to raise awareness about human trafficking and contemporary slavery, which is now the third-largest criminal industry in the world. According to the U.S. State Dept., at least 12.3 million people are trafficked and enslaved around the world, and that number is growing fast. Human trafficking is expected to soon surpass drug trafficking in scope and profit because it is a shadow industry that works under the radar. Most people do not know that it exists, let alone that New York City is one of the major portals for trafficking within the USA; this includes U.S citizens, especially children.

Our goal is to open people's eyes to this horrific industry and inspire the public to take action. As such, we are hosting an art auction to both raise awareness and funds to fight trafficking. Proceeds from the auction will go to organizations dedicated to eradicating human trafficking and providing after-care to victims who have been rescued.

We would love to have you add your voice to those who are raising awareness by generously donating a piece of artwork to the auction. If you have any questions about Freedom Week, please feel free to contact me at annlien@gmail.com. Our website is below if you'd like to see a summary of last year's events, where we were able to feature such luminaries as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nicholas Kristof from the NY Times and the U.S. State Department's Ambassador Lou de Baca.

We hope you will join us in the fight against modern slavery and human trafficking.

Sincerely,

Ann Lien
Director, Freedom Week

http://freedomweeknyc.com/

Freedom Week Art Auction: Submission Guidelines

2010-08-22T14:34:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to be curating this year's art auction benefiting Freedom Week.

The auction will be held at the Tele Design event space on Thursday, September 30th, from 6 - 9. For information on Freedom Week, please read .

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

Works can be in any medium, framed or unframed, maximum 36" in any direction including frame, and must be able to be installed on the wall. If you have a framed work, please supply wire Sculptors may include a small shelf for display. We recommend a minimum bid below $1,000.

Please prepare a 150KB jpeg, and the following information for the checklist.

Please email AND include with your artwork:

Name, address, phone, email, and website of artist.

Title, year, medium, edition number if any.

Estimated Value, and Minimum Bid (we recommend one third to one half of the estimated value).

Selected artworks must be delivered on September 29 and 30, we cannot inconvenience our host with individual deliveries or storage of artwork. Selected artworks are donations and all proceeds from their sales support the work of several important organizations working on human trafficking, including History Starts Now. Included artists are welcome to attend the event for free. Tickets to the benefit are $25.

Drop-off: September 29 and 30, at location to be announced.

Pick-up of unsold artwork: September 30 and October 1.

Questions or concerns should be directed to freedomweekbenefit@gmail.com.

Thank you for your interest and support of Freedom Week.

Riding on the Back of a Pig into a Pool of Mud

2010-07-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

"Defrosted: a life of Walt Disney" opens June 29 at Postmasters

A few days before the start of the New York art world's summer lull, Postmasters opened a stellar group exhibition forcing vacationers awake. A conceptually taut revisionist riff on the life of Walt Disney, the show is organized by Adam Cvijanovic and David Humphrey, and features 14 additional artists. Summer in the city beckons most galleries to throw group shows, but this one, planned for 2 years, has thrown down the gauntlet.

Right: David Humphrey and featured artist Inka Essenhigh.

The entire main gallery is covered with a wall painting by Cvijanovic, with figurative parts painted by Humphrey, and additional canvases by Humphrey playfully hung throughout. By the entrance of the gallery, a timeline of Disney's life creates a comical leitmotif that throws the otherwise fantastical show into sharp relief, the kind of truth that our current reality-TV modernity finds prickly and illusive at best. Related works by artists both known and Ebay-anonymous hang on a scaffold recreating Magic Mountain, itself based on the Matterhorn.

Left: artist Nika Sarabi.

Right: detail of Nika Sarabi's work.

The crowded opening emphasized the room-filling expanse lushly imagined by Cvijanovic. An artist who makes painting seem as easy as brushing one's teeth, Cvijanovic continues to push his style into a modern reinvention of history painting. Humphrey's cartoony tendencies are also a perfect fit for this thematic exhibition. In cohesive yet distinctive styles, both artists re-imagine a workshop ideal, even asking Nika Sarabi, an artist familiar with graffiti, to add detail to an abandonned spaceship from Disneyworld's Tomorrowland.

Left: "Addio", Eva and Franco Mattes, aka 0100101110101101.org, hung on pedestal.

In the back room, several works were supposed to represent Walt Disney's crypt, and indeed it was a quiet somber room, with a video and giant Mickey sculpture. A truly ambitious undertaking, the entire exhibition concerned itself not just with the reinvention of biography and the collaborative process, but also the physical challenge of having imagery taking over the room. The exhibit placed the viewer in a warped Einsteinian time/space dimension, which particularly was pronounced during the packed opening. And yet as viewers looked up at the walls, they were brought back into the objecthood and subjectivity of each individual artist placing their work on the pedestal cum Matterhorn. A heady and yet perfectly summer-themed exhibit indeed--catch it before it closes on August 6!

Left: Paula Wilson, "After All", mixed media on wood, on pedestal.

Freedom Sparks in Montreal

2010-07-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

"Freedom's Discontents: Resistance, Subversion, and Survival"

A triumverate of curators--Irys Schenker, myself and gallery director Bettina Forget put together a video exhibition at Montreal's Visual Voice Gallery. The show is up only through July 17, but viewable online at Visual Voice Gallery. My selections and essay (reprinted below) are viewable at LightCube Video.

The response to the Freedom Sparks open call for videos has been overwhelming, and has garnered submissions from all over the world. This is indeed the beauty behind a show such as this: curators from New York have looked at videos from Brussels, Japan, and Arizona, among others, and the works will be viewed in a gallery in Montreal. This process has informed the interpretation of the concept of freedom, and provided a range of reactions - personal, national, or abstracted, and with these examples we can glimpse the expanse of our world.

Biying Zhang abstracts black and white footage of the Pan Asian Games in China with abrasive editing and sound, into a reflection on the calamity and destruction behind the facade of governmental control. In a place where freedom has a nuanced history, a propaganda machine aims to portray a happy and modernized China, which the artist counteracts with his pointed video.

Elise Rasmussen similarly delves into local history: the disappearance of native culture in Newfoundland. Her poignant, meditative approach, combined with bilateral framing, gives a nuanced viscerally-felt evocation of place. In a free society, without overt warfare or pursuit of genocide, an ethnic group nonetheless slowly is eradicated. What can freedom mean when a groups survival itself is so tenuous?

Tobias Rosenberger investigates another disappearance: of landscape and its inhabitants, an erasure brought about by the results of commercial freedom. A development, the height of material choice, brings about a sudden death, and Rosenberger shows us the end result of deadening conformity.

Daniel Stitts provides a personal and hauntingly beautiful nugget of personal and sexual freedom. Motifs of hiding, disappearance, and even the use of recorded voice all create layers of obstruction to personal liberty. Simone Patterson's fun brightly-colored piece subverts her underlying themes of feminity submerged in domesticity, vanity, and modern womens forced juggling of roles. And finally, Robby Rackleff's humorous lecture, toying with the ease of home-made video fakery, posits freedom as something that each generation fears and resents.

Cuchifritos: bootie-licious

2010-07-01T12:37:00.001-07:00

Left: The entrance of Cuchifritos Gallery, Installation view: "Collected:Working Space 10". Courtesy of the artists and Cuchifritos Gallery/project space. Photo: Scott Taylor.

On yet another sweltering NYC day, while gallery-hopping through the Lower East Side, I decided to stop by Essex Market, a wonderful locavore outpost that reinvents a neighborhood paradigm from the turn of the century into a thriving food-based marketplace. Luckily for me, I wandered into the cozy corner space of Cuchifritos Gallery, just as the opening for its new exhibit "Collected:Working Space 10" began.

Right: Crocheted floor, by Olek.

Curated by Erin Riley-Lopez, the exhibit features work of the artists in the Lower East Side Rotating Studio Program, housed nearby. The show managed within a confoundingly small space to be a testament to the high caliber of the artists, as well as the range of conceptual work within. Although the works were in video, painting, sculpture and performance, the idea of mark-making outside the boundaries of conventional drawing was profoundly felt.

For instance, Chris Yormick used Connect Four checkers to create a blunt facial pattern, and Natsu's red filament-and-bead web took over a corner of the space. Echoing its organic/cosmic patterning was Olek's camouflage-meets-sportswear carpet, which covered the entire floor. The one actual drawing used marks to extend beyond the paper: Blane de St.Criox's "Gitmo: abandonned camp x-ray" pushed past political authority by using barbed wire's thwarted beauty as mark to suggest freedom's grand schemes unravelled.

Left: pile of used booties.

The artist Olek sat by the entrance offering slippers to all entrants, pantomiming as her mouth was embroidered shut. Her crocheted carpet effectively thrust mark-making into the three-dimensional realm, and labeled each guest as participant. The gallery was taken over by the mark, and within its womb-like space, a sea of pink and purple, each foot trod carefully on the art, each leg yet another mark, extending upward.

Right: Olek, at right, silently waiting to proffer slippers.

"Painting with Pictures": loco con sabor!

2010-05-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

I am very excited to announce the show I co-curated with David Gibson and Savannah Spirit, "Painting with Pictures", opened last night at the Casita Maria Center in the Bronx. The show of 32 artists revisits the concept of collage, and will have a follow-up "Part II" in the winter. Casita Maria is a gorgeous building, a few minutes walk from the 2, 5, and 6 trains, and the show is on the top floor, affording lovely views of city rooftops, sunsets, and the elegant stream of ever-present traffic on the Bruckner Expressway.

Right: Hector Madera-Gonzalez installation of collage on found posters.

Left: Artists Tim Rollins and Conrad Vogel.

After a lovely opening, the madding crowd assembled at a Mexican restaurant across the street, and supped on deliciosos Camarones a la Mexicana, freshly-chopped guacamole, and endless glasses of "apple juice" (code for beer). I could barely hear anyone as the jukebox regaled us with forlorn ditties in Spanish, and as I stumbled into the wrong door to have a breath of fresh air, I was pleased to be mortified by a posse of 6 decked-out gals, who clearly felt I had stumbled not only into the wrong door but perhaps the wrong neighborhood. I look forward to revisiting the show in the light of day, as the art changes in the daylight, and the neighborhood beckons with fruit vendors, vibrant graffiti, and a street culture that encourages interaction. Casita Maria has been a fixture in the neighborhood for over 74 years, but the building is only 2 years old and looks it, with gleaming floors, brightly colored walls, and kids energized by their exposure to art and culture.

Right: Director of Development for Casita Maria David Dean adjacent to a matching collage by Amelie Chunleau.

The exhibition continues through July 21, and features works by: Michael Anderson, Melissa Barrett, Chris Bors, Lesly Canossi, Amelie Chunleau, Nancy Drew, Chris Fennell, Carla Gannis, Liam Hanna-Lloyd, Halsey Hathaway, Daniel Kayne Scott, Kiernan, Isolde Kille, Elissa Levy, D. Dominick Lombardi, Hector Madera-Gonzalez, Leah Oates, Sarah Olson, Deborah Pohl, Alexander Reyna, Elizabeth Riley, Ron Rocheleau, Pamela Saturday, Raven Schlossberg, Kaeko Shabana, Jennifer Shepard, Mary Ann Strandell, thefactory101, Austin Thomas, Conrad Vogel, and Michael Zansky.

This exhibition explores the use of collage as an artistic medium, dissecting its impulses and agendas while providing a wide cross-spectrum of its usage in contemporary art. It addresses the role of material culture in mediating our shared view of reality, the notion of a borrowed aesthetic, and how specific visual agendas express differing cultural attitudes. It includes a variety of mediums and aesthetic agendas, presenting not only traditional collage, but works which establish a collage mentality in the liminal forms of photography, video, digital manipulation, painting, sculpture, printmaking, children’s books, commercial signage, portraiture, and others. In the end, it will posit collage as a cause, rather than a symptom, of both artistic style and generational meaning.

Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education; Casita Gallery, 6th Floor
928 Simpson St (Bet Fox/Baretto St & 163rd St)

For more information, check out their website: Casita Maria Center.

Right: Savannah Spirit, Lyla Rose, David Dean, and Asya Geisberg.

The Last Days of Chez Deitch, Part II

2010-05-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

Line of people waiting to get into Deitch Projects, at opening night, Shephard Fairey, May 1, 2010.

Like his gallery openings with their crowds of people in the streets, Jeffrey Deitch himself is equal parts NYC and LA ,and always has been, sans silicone and fake tans. At Shephard Fairey's opening on May Day, Mr. Deitch wore a characteristically pastel pink suit, and (as seen on YouTube) caught swearing with a venom not unlike that of Ari Gold in "Entourage", Mr. Deitch will fit right into LA.

Left: barricaded at the entry, nervous people fret.

Shephard Fairey's opening, on a warm Saturday evening, was a scene straight out of "Exit at the Gift Shop". Crowds lined up hours before the start of the official opening, and the line was an event in itself, stretching around the block, 10 hipsters thick , and slow to move. Opposite the line was an unfettered block party, with fancy motorcycles whose shapes, colors and collaged naked ladies vied for attention with the staid flat graphic art within the gallery.

Posing and preening among the motos were a group of bedazzled, bejewelled, be-tatted, and sometimes bearded gents, presumably the owners of the bikes, though they could have been a bunch of models from the anti-Hell's-Angels department.

Celebrities abounded, including Tyson Beckford (left), quick to arrive and to depart. It all seemed strangely of another era--80's fabulous-- but sadly without the substance inside. I like the idea of Shephard Fairey much more than the reality: someone whose hard-working street art style has blossomed into a full-fledged commercial career, thanks to a certain Obama poster, and of course buoyed by Deitch's happy collaboration. Fairey was likable in "Exit through the Gift Shop", which I highly recommend as a parable about art-world hype. In that movie, an unlikely protagonist [thrift-shop owner-turned artiste] becomes a semi-celebrity due to a massive marketing campaign, yet his work rips off every other street artist and pop artist, including Fairey himself.

Fairey also recycles many a Pop and propaganda idiom, and happily admits to it, but inside a gallery his work suffers. So-called street art serves a purpose and attains a power that circumvent the Deitches of this world. The international nature of the art itself is even more fascinating, and its demographic is far wider than that of most "fine" artists. Mr.Deitch has had a long history of working with graffiti-based artists, and among these, Fairey's work is the tamest. And as for Mr.Fairey, who would turn down an opportunity at having Tyson Beckford, motorcycles, and fancy dogs at his opening, not to mention lines of eager beavers trying to get in?

Left: installation view of Shephard Fairey, "May Day" exhibition.

The Last Days of Chez Deitch, Part 1

2010-05-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

Left: Rosson Crow at Deitch Projects, 3/4/2010.

Jeffrey Deitch's departure from our fair city for LA has been much-chronicled, and although I've charted a 50/50 hit rate with his artists (still much higher than most galleries), the element I'll miss most is the medieval-pageantry aura of his openings. While I only caught Jules de Balincourt on a quiet Tuesday, I found the openings of Rosson Crow, held during the first day of Armory Week, and of Shephard Fairey, held last week on the heels of a currently-playing movie featuring Fairey [Exit at the Gift Shop], to be extravaganzas of glamor.

Right: Graffiti-top, brick wall pants, man about town.

Left: Keith Haring tunnel with contemporary urban texting dweller.

But to be accurate, the glamor was of a certain very democratically-accessible sort: celebrities, collectoristas [one part fusty collector one part fashionista], and young kids with neon colors and ripped t-shirts all co-mingled and pretended to ignore each other. With all the hubbub of a movie premiere but without the velvet ropes (although the long lines at the Fairey show necessitated a special VIP-only line complete with bouncers), each opening reminded one of a Fellini-esque fete--yes, not quite circus-like, but certainly I'll miss my little pinch of Deitch's Dolce Vita.

Left: photographer waiting to snap as Rosson Crow greets fans.

Right: Rosson Crow's ball gown, all poufs and trains.

Rosson Crow's paintings were in themselves a tribute to art-worlds past: titled "The Bowery Boys", each painting was an homage to Bruce Nauman, Keith Haring, and other 80s stars, as well as subway trains, and now-gone places such as CBGBs. The meta-celebration of "Better Days Gone By" was everywhere--but in the person of a confident young artist who seduces with vibrant splashes of paint (detail at right) and loud bangs of ambition, one felt a kinship, and a re-imagining, rather than a sad eulogy or empty envy of the glitz and grit of the 80s art scene. Deitch's desire to cycle through (some say devour and spit out) younger artists was at least for this one evening an example of a benevolent dictator throwing a bread and circus for his subjects; and what a wonderful circus it was. Among the crowd were the equally young prodigy designer Zac Posen, Rosson Crow and several other ladies wearing the bright warm hues found in many of her paintings, onlookers in baseball caps or high heels, all in a gleaming white space that one has to ascend into, as if into a privileged inner cloister.

Left: matching lady-in-waiting.

The Armory Fair: "Hang In There, Baby"

2010-03-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

"Hang in there, Baby." (Left) Fans of Sean Landers’s onanistic career of would be proud of his latest endeavors—a booth full of work at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and a perfect 2010 art market recap. Landers expressed not just what he, and by extension all self-involved artists (that is to say, all artists) are thinking, but what the entire art world is self-reflexively musing. "Ne me quitte pas", the kitten pleads: don't leave me, dear collectors!

Right: Jack Shainman's booth on Saturday.

But fear not, this year’s Armory Show was brimming with art, although crammed with smaller and medium–sized works rather than the giant warhorses of years past. The show was overrun by all manner of species: on opening day, the VIPs, VVIPs, and countless press and looky-lous roamed the stalls in their Wednesday best. By Saturday, at Pier 94 (the more contemporary of the two), security tried to manage the queue for the stairs to prevent trampling, clueless parents brought their strollers and carriages, and there was not even a spare bit of floor to rest a weary derriere. One artist complained of spilling her $16 glass of Champagne due to the madding crowds, and many were heard to mutter not-to-silent screams of "MOVE!!".

Left: Artist Nick Cave, at Jack Shainman, with El Anatsui wall hanging behind him.

Right: Detail, Nick Cave sculptures.

Jack Shainman had a mobbed booth, but the art, all colorful vim and vigor, more than held its own. Nick Cave's soundsuits, a perennial art fair favorite, were pared down to a single element or color, becoming ever more mysterious, undermined by the smiling face of the artist himself.

Left: Rina Banerjee at Nathalie Obadia.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia had a museum-worthy dramatically lit staging of Rina Banerjee's works. By Saturday her sculptures' delicate protrusions had forced the gallery to tape the entire booth off, as the gallerists sat a table nearby, pleine d'ennui. Banerjee's cultural mishmash of references was submerged in the impact of the objects themselves, confusing yet evocative, and happy to display a reliance on old-fashioned visual "wow".

Right: Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, carpet.

Left: Nicole Klagsbrun's booth, with yellow swastika on right.

Nicole Klagsbrun's booth was a show-stopper as well, its all-over neon yellow-green so bright that gawkers didn't notice the swastika painting on the wall. The entire installation was by artist Adam McEwen, but the connection between all the works and the arresting color wasn't nearly as clear as the shrewdness of having a wide-open booth at an intersection that stopped viewers in their tracks.

Left and Right: Tony Feher at Pace.

The opposite effect occurred at Pace, where viewers plunged into an all-black room of Tony Feher table-top installations. His mundane object and recycled aesthetic worked best up close. Plastic water bottles, caps, bunched up aluminum foil, an old globe with a bow out of string, were not as gingerly arranged as Sarah Sze works, or explosively strewn as a Jason Rhoades installation, but rather the work of a bricoleur of midling ambition, which I mean as a compliment.

Left and Right: Isa Genzken at Hauser & Wirth.

The Armory was full of glitter, embroidery, festive color, and celebration, even if it came in photos of slums in Third World countries (i.e. Zwelethu Mthethwa at Shainman). Isa Genzken's "Disco 'Soon' (Ground Zero)" had a perplexing title, but its beads , ribbons, and red paint perhaps suggested that we can smooth over our tragedies by getting back to partying mode.

Right: Houseago head looking at another head.

Figuration also was prominent, mostly in painting and sculpture. With a huge work at the Whitney Biennial, Thomas Houseago showed several large primitivist bronze busts at The Modern Institute.

Tony Matelli's life-size epoxy girl in underwear titled "Sleepwalker"( left) found her way into a tightly packed Leo Koenig booth. Her hyper-realist body surrounded by clothed oglers made me think of her as exploited, suggesting everyone's Freudian nightmare of being caught in public naked.

On the other hand, some work seemed able to survive only within the art fair context: Jonathon Monk's instruction "Do Not Pay More Than $40,000" in neon had an effect that lasted exactly 2 seconds, by the third, one had moved on mentally and visually.

Right: Jonathon Monk at Lisson gallery.

As jaded and begging for entertainment as one is at the Armory, it was still possible to solicit a reaction. The first thing I heard upon entering the Fair was a German couple clearly scandalized by some naughty photos in Horton & Co.'s booth. "Mein Got, mein Got", they gasped to each other--imagine how much it takes to shock our usually-less-sanctimonious European connoisseurs.

Among the VIPs were the usual celebs and art-celebs, though it was so crowded I only glimpsed one: a very jaded Tracey Emin glaring in boredom at her smartphone, but proud of finally being recognized she gamely posed for me (Left). Fashion-wise, fur coats and fur hats were positively wooly mammoth-like even though the climate was more like Bombay. One woman had a half coat, clearly too fashion-proud to take it off (hello, free coatcheck!)--(Right). Zebras were also in favor, in all black-and-white shoe, dress, and coat (i.e. Left).

And speaking of species, an explosion of ladybugs was unleashed mid-Saturday, to the disbelief and confusion of security guards-- "I guess we can vacuum??". Within an hour they were extinguished by lesser means: death by stiletto-squish. I thought it was a cruel gag, as if we needed more side-show distractions, especially at such a cute creature's expense. At least those were the only casualties, as the health of the art fair was pronounced "stable".

Damien Hirst is the Devil--Not

2010-02-01T16:58:00.000-08:00

On a frigid Saturday night, Gagosian's Madison Avenue gallery hosted a greatest hits version of the Brit marketing genius's oeuvre. Coatless hatless creatures stood in line to get autographs, while a few strays actually went downstairs to look at some of the celeb-free art (although John McEnroe dutifully strolled through before departing).

Right: detail of "Judgment Day", gold-plated case with 30,000 manufactured diamonds.

Left: Damien Hirst [with fabulous rings] signing autographs:" Who should I say it's for, Dahling?"

Spotted in the madding crowd were: the naughty photographer Terry Richardson, Mr.Pineapple Express James Franco, Johnny Mac, Mick Jagger, Takashi Murakami, Jeffrey Deitch, and GoGo himself. Power art-biz/show-biz huddles were everywhere, with Mick talking to Mac, Mac talking to GoGo and Deitch, and Mick happily posing for pix with Hirst.

Right: Mick Jagger hugging Damien Hirst.

Left: Gagosian artist Takashi Murakami.

It's too easy to have something snarky to say about aptly-named Damien Hirst. Although he hasn't yet been featured in The Simpsons, Hirst has nonetheless become ubiquitous in mass culture. And while his show had as grandiose a premise and title as ever-- "The End of an Era"-- the sad collection of old and new works showed a consistent path of diminishing returns.

Right: Damien Hirst's cow sticking its tongue out at the oblivious crowd.

In the center of the main room was a vitrine eponymously titled "The End of an Era", with a cow head recycled from an earlier sculpture entitled "The Golden Half". While claiming to acknowledging his own conceptual dead end, Hirst was still trying to market a career arc that started with a bang [Death, God, Big Ideas] and has since become an end game whose outcome is now only measured in dollars. And despite the brouhaha at the opening, and the range of works from 2006-2009, there was quite a large number of unsold works.

Left: Gem paintings in gold frames, behind glass, reflecting the packed room full of gem-wearers.

Aside from his trademark paintings of pills, butterflies, and spots, Hirst continued his obsessions with wealth with his Vegas-y arrays of diamonds and zirconias in gold cases. Paintings of famous diamonds on black backgrounds with gold frames were dead on arrival. But all eyes were on the golden glitz, as the Golden Calf was old hat. Of course my eyes were on the hoofs of the humans.

Right: Equestrian chique.

Below: "You Cannot be Serious!!" John McEnroe to Larry Gagosian, with Mick.

Below Right: Endless work for Mr.Hirst.

Below left: Detail of butterflies encased in paint.

"Damien Hirst: End of an Era" at Gagosian Gallery through March 6.

Tino Seghal-- meh?

2010-01-30T14:12:00.000-08:00

The Tino Seghal exhibit at the Guggenheim opened quietly, with no photographs allowed (at the press preview or anytime). This made sense, as there really was not a thing to photograph, except the "piece" in the center of the atrium, of a male/female couple slowly writhing in various poses of embrace and kissing, enacting famous artworks on that theme. Quite flimsy both visually and conceptually, the piece easily suggested an earnest college dance performance. More intriguing was the second of Seghal's "pieces". In quotes, because Seghal fancies himself as an anti-object artist, forcing his work to be sans documentation, explanation, or materiality. At the Gugg, I didn't read the (albeit vague) press release as I wanted to allow myself free reign to try and accept his conceit, for while there was nothing new about his posture, I also didn't want to be a predisposed meh-sayer.

Indeed, I showed up towards the end of the preview and saw, as I was promised, emptiness. Rather, some people sitting at the bottom of the museum, and mostly ignoring the performers. To see the Gugg for the first time entirely empty of art, especially as compared to earlier manifestations of cramming [Art of China? Brazil? Russia?], was like seeing a mansion emptied of its candelabras, carpets, and curtains: you glimpsed how un-majestic it all suddenly seemed, just a big white spiral hallway.

As I walked up the first ramp, to avoid stomping out, a group of adorable kids waited, and one gamin approached and asked me to define progress. Taken aback, I tried to think how to speak weightily to a 7-year-old. "Things getting better over time?" I blurted, anxiously hoping the kid would approve. He asked me to give him an example, and I thought of something personal that had been on my mind. Finally, the kid repeated what I had said verbatim to a 20-something "interpreter", who took over the interrogation based on my answer. Within seconds we were revealing things about ourselves, and debating if progress in my example really was a straight line. Suddenly a 30-something interrupted with a non-sequitor about current events, and off we went. And finally, an older professorial type explained about a theory of Hesiod's, and the conversation went on to Haiti, Nigeria, and the entrenchment of the world's problems.

I repeated the path up the ramp once more, and the interpreters followed a similar rhythm, yet in most cases the conversations were dense, engaging, and real. I did not feel like a pawn in some art brat's conceptual gambit, but a participant, a creator, and perhaps the driver of the work. Does Seghal presuppose curiosity and a willingness to engage in provocative tete-a-tetes? Or was it because I purposefully avoided a cynical interpretation? It would be easy to want to slap Seghal for owning one of the world's most celebrated museums for 6 weeks only to leave it at basically a cocktail conversation. But even while going up the ramp slowly I was quite aware of my physicality, and its metaphoric connection to our topic: how apt to go up a spiral, and then go down alone, mulling over the exercise, and ending up in the bottom, back to reality. Had anything changed in those 15 minutes? Perhaps not enough. In other cases maybe I would give Seghal a slap for leaving so much of the art-making to the interpreters and the audience, but that day, I wanted to give him a slap on the back, for making me want to repeat the exercise, rediscover the Gugg, and go on a journey that let me see something without seeing anything.

Tino Seghal is up at the Guggenheim until March 10th.

Miami Fashion We Can Enjoy While Surviving the Blizzard of '09

2009-12-20T21:09:00.000-08:00

Left: "Paradise" by Jack Pierson, at MOCA, Miami.

The first night of Miami was the perfect way to slap a bit of Miami fashion into any warmth-deprived New Yorker. At MOCA, a reception sponsored by Vanity Fair had all the platform stilettos sinking into the earth of the Museum courtyard, but no one cared, as the women still towered over the men, and everyone lined up for the free booze. Weird combination Smurfette-ballerinas posed and pranced, and promoted the gin du jour.

Right: Smurf-arina.

Calvin Klein was sighted, and a well-coordinated couple posed amiably. Some "ladies" really know how to accessorize...(left).

Spiderella made an appearance (right), and of course requisite shoe fetishists could not be disappointed--the woman below left was ensconced in skintight shiny spandex leggings (are there any other kind?) and an equal length of platform shoe.

A bit more New York-Carrie Bradshaw was on display at one of the numerous parties held at the hotels on the ocean. Miraculously the pink graffitti Louis Vuittons below were not forced to endure any unpleasant sand, as they VIP'd their way into the bar area.

Matching couple at the Pulse fair below:

And, in a segment I have been dying to start, the "What Not To Wear" section: I photographed this anonymous couple browsing at Art Miami from the back, in order to hide the fanny packs. Hawaiian shirt--check. White socks, brown sandals--check. Matching couple--check. Perhaps this segment should be renamed: "How Not to Match".

Pulse/NADA/Photo/ArtMiami/Scope/Aqua/Verge...oh my!

2009-12-07T13:21:00.000-08:00

Right: Wanda Koop at Michael Gibson Gallery, Toronto, Scope.

The painting on the left is exactly how I felt as I finished walking through Scope and Aqua. Two art fairs that last year had been among my favorites, shrank and eliminated many good galleries. Aqua got rid of their lovely hotel location, and the current Wynwood location had so many garish works that by the time I had walked through I had forgotten the good ones. Among the better, were Toronto's Michael Gibson Gallery, featuring a quiet and haunting painting by Wanda Koop of the "Miracle on the Hudson"- an event that quickly became a Hallmark-card media spectacle, but in paint brought back the haunting lonely frisson of near-death it once was. Another standout was Megan Whitmarsh's oddball embroidery and painting mash-ups, at Michael Rosenthal.

Right: Megan Whitmarsh "Crystal Expanse" at Michael Rosenthal, Scope.

Left: Guerra de la Paz at Carol Jazzar, Scope.

Scope was also barren of good booths, with even the best galleries playing it safe and bringing rather ho-hum works. Recession specials were not in everyone's favor. Carol Jazzar and ADA stood out, with 3-d work by Guerra de la Paz and Jen Stark, and Chris Verene's idiosyncratic photography and a crazy collection of cats by Scott Hewicker respectively.

Right: Scott Hewicker at ADA, Scope.

Left: Okay Mountain Corner Store, Pulse.

Pulse won out for Most Improved Fair, gaining a better space (no more sand floors!), more solid galleries, and a terrific music program taking full advantage of their courtyard space at NADA's former location. With 104 galleries, Pulse managed somehow to still feel organized and leisurely. A highlight of the Impulse section (for solo exhibitions) was the hand-made bodega at Austin's Okay Mountain collaborative gallery. With products for sale, all created by hand, it hit the sweet spot of art-world humor (Dzamacolors "for art school kids to use when they're making those rip-off Marcel Dzama paintings") and silly fun (Old Stanky kitty litter).

Left: Devin Strother, "Drunken Bitches Fighting in the Bathroom" detail, Richard Heller, Pulse.

Devin Strother, a young artist at Richard Heller, showed cut-out figures in manic scenes, slyly playing with devilish racial stereotypes. Cut paper was used to quite different effect in Natasha Bowdoin's elegant layered paintings at CTRL Gallery in Houston. DCKT, Kopeikin, Fred, and Mark Moore Gallery all had strong carefully thought-out curated booths; i.e. London's Fred Gallery presented works by artists from the African diaspora--though one wouldn't necessarily guess it from the variety of works.

Steve Viezens had paintings and quirky drawings in a star-shaped layout at the booth of Galerie Kleindienst from Liepzig, another strong booth (no surprise given the famous art school there).

Right: Steve Viezens at Galerie Kleindienst, Pulse.

Left: happy reveler, post-Exene Cervenka performance at Pulse.

At Photo Miami, the booths shrank by two thirds, leaving a spartan arrangement of 26 galleries. However, for the most part it was for the best-- fewer flower studies and giant female nudes, more thoughtful or historic work. Large constructed photographs of a fictional African town called Udongo, dealt with post-colonial history and Western concepts of Africa by Jasper de Beijer at TZR Galerie Kai Bruckner. Nearby, classically composed photographs from 1970s beaches gave us the opposite--a taste of the visually familiar, but with a Mexican twist, courtesy of Carlos Perez Siquier at Galeria Sandunga (right). A vibrant booth from China--MR Gallery-- with classical documentary black and white images by a handful of artists, provided welcome relief from Art Asia's Vegas-y commercial fare.

Left: Comfortable man being comforted by comfortable art at ArtMiami.

At nearby Art Miami, bright halogen lights and gleaming concrete floors created a soothing environment, and the art similarly didn't want to cause any discomfort. While I saw some great art, including Zhang Huan photos at Barry Friedman, and iceberg photos by Olaf Otto Becker at Amador Gallery, the overall effect was of a gentle sea breeze.

And finally, my visit to NADA provided a welcome pause to the madness. NADA chose an anachronistic resort a few miles north of Art Basel, replete with chandeliers, ballrooms named after famous French leaders (Napoleon, Richelieu), and a pool aching for hipsters to swim in their skinny bikinis (right). Also, a baristas from Intelligentsia Coffee plied their wares midway through the ballrooms, and who could resist such steam-punk cuties (left)?

Art-wise, NADA had dealers beaming with delight, as booths were both full of visitors and high-quality, especially the Lower East Side galleries. Collette Blanchard showed an installation by Derrick Adams including a performance, as well as glittery paintings based on the musical the Wiz. Lisa Cooley featured a bureau stabbed multiple times in the back, and a knit sculpture by Josh Faught.

Left: Derrick Adams at Collette Blanchard, NADA.

Right: Josh Faught at Lisa Cooley, NADA.

British galleries were quite good, as London's Man and Eve showed tiny cut paper delicacies by Sarah Bridgland, perhaps a tad too cute, but riding the overall trend for cut-paper sculptures and collage. Josh Lilley Gallery also had a strong show of Christof Mascher and Vicky Wright, whose oddly light washes on unprimed backs of panels created an ominous cloud when seen from afar.

Right: Sarah Bridgland, at Man and Eve, NADA.

Left: Another fabulous shoe/dress combination.

Below: a restful view courtesy of NADA's Deauville Beach Resort.

Art Basel 2009- "The Second Act"

2009-12-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

Left: Jack Pierson "The Second Act" at Regen Projects.

Below right: Doug Aitken's "Free".

This year's Art Basel Miami was full of proclamations: large textual sculptures which, strung together, could easily portend statements about the art market this year. A gigantic “DESIRE” filled one booth, a “PORN” revamped Robert Indiana’s famous “Love”, and “FREE” by Doug Aitken had a photo of wreckage within. Peres Projects featured Don Attoe’s neon figures along with phrases, most potently “We’re all here because we’re too afraid to deal with problems in our real lives” atop men’s heads watching a stripper at her pole.
Additionally, we had “The Second Act” by Jack Pierson, certainly a comment on how quickly the art market has rebounded from the doldrums of last year. The neon “After” aglow behind Philippe Parreno’s "Marquee" lights, showed that afterlife was just across the way, seen through the entryway of celebrity/film idol-worship. Perhaps last year’s purgatory has led not to Hell but to a slightly adjusted Heaven of smaller fairs, but still healthy appetites. One overheard snippet: "...but I have 30-foot ceilings!" from a happy purchaser.

Left: Marc Bijl "Porn" at Breeder.

Above right: Philippe Pareno "Marquee" at Esther Schipper.

Below right: Jonathon Monk "Gold Bubbles" at Yvon Lambert.

Indeed celebrity reared its ugly head quite often in Miami. Richard Prince had a row of pencil sketches of Zac Efron and similar teen idols. The Obamas were featured in Annie Leibowitz photos, and in large paintings by Kurt Kauper at Deitch. But most prominently, Michael Jackson was the real star of Art Basel. His beatific likeness found its way into a triptych by David LaChappelle at Tony Shafrazi, including one of “Archangel Michael”, and a giant Kehinde Wiley equestrian painting of MJ as King Philip, commissioned before the artists’ death and completed afterwards, much to the happiness of Deitch’s cash registers. A faceless MJ could be seen in both a 3-inch cardboard painting by Gideon Rubin, and painting of MJ with his chimp by Jonathan Monk. But my favorite MJ painting was by Jeff Sonhouse of the singer as seen from the back, with odd colored lights, and one rhinestoned glove held out in his signature pose, showing us the paradox of celebrity worship: we think we know all based on a celebrity’s ubiquity, and yet he is forever unknowable.

Left: Jeff Sonhouse "The Loved Gloved One" at Tilton Gallery, LA.

Right: Agathe Snow sculptures at James Fuentes, LLC, New York.

This year Art Basel changed its configuration, confusing and frustrating many artgoers (including me), but on the plus side, it moved newer galleries from the containers on the beach to the convention center into a section called Art Nova. For the most part, these galleries capitalized on their new location, and certain galleries stood out; James Fuentes with his all-over wallpaper and crazy sculptures by Agathe Snow, Canada with a quiet threesome of paintings by Joe Bradley, Andrew Edlin had an old-timey booth with Brent Green, and Miguel Abreu with thick paintings by Pieter Schoolwerth. Gavlak, a Florida gallery, featured surreal collages of people with neon colored plants instead of heads, and sculptures of sinking houses by Philip Estlund, proving that not everything is shiny and happy in that sunny state.

Left: Lorraine O'Grady at Alexander Gray, NY.

Right: Mickalene Thomas, "Photomontage8" detail, at Rhona Hoffman, Chicago.

Alexandre Gray's booth featuring work by Lorraine O'Grady had a great feeling to it. Bridging work from an older era showed how O'Grady's work conceptually and stylistically preceded that of Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and even the more photographic work of Mickalene Thomas, the latter two artists featured at Basel as well. O'Grady had a series of photographs of Harlem, where participants held frames in various poses, and the work felt as fresh and organic now as it must have in the 1980's. Thomas, more familiar as a painter, had stacks of 80's-era frames and black and white photos within, making an interesting sculptural link to her work.

Right: Robin Rhode "Pan's Opticon Studies".

Robin Rhode had work featured in at least three galleries, including a black and white series of photos at Neils Borch Jensen Galerie. This artist is continuing his seeminlgy endless investigation of movement, performance, sculpture, and painting, creating his own hybrid by inventing new ways to document mark-making via the body, i.e. hitting a ball with paint and then photographing the results in a series.

Right: artist Hans Peter Hoffman in front of his work at Galerie Jamileh Weber.

Sartorially, the men at Art Basel fared better than the women, as one artist matched his family crest flags, [Hans Peter Hoffman] while another cooly strolled past a yet-more graphic painting (left). Proving that art fairs make for fascinating outfit/art combinations, a woman enlivened Shephard Fairey's communist propaganda portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi with her dress. While Fairey as usual lacked any irony, one could see nearby a series of Warhols based on the hammer and sickle, where the wall labels alone created a rich stew of communism and capitalism, art world and politics, cool irony and real danger.

Right: Shephard Fairey at Deitch.

Left: Andy Warhol wall labels at L & M Arts.

Below: Gerhard Richter and Louise Bourgeois at Kukje Gallery.

Another pleasure found at crowded art fairs was that of finding delicious juxtapositions of art by familiar artists. A lovely pairing of a hanging Bourgeois "Lair" sculpture, dark, minimal, yet sensual, prompted me to see a nearby abstract, primary colored, lush Richter in a new light.

Shoes seemed to boringly inhabit the black platform stilettos range, which I consequently abstained from photographing. Some colorful Miami variants popped through, notably the following.

In my final few minutes at Art Basel I noticed a realistic life-size sculpture of a waitress by Duane Hansen wedged into a corner. How apt, for all the discussion of the health of the art market, that I saw this sad creature, left behind by the whirlwind of moneyed exotica roaming the halls of the convention center searching for their next investment.

Left: Duane Hansen "Rita the Waitress" 1975, at Van de Weghe.

Jerry Saltz: "Go Yankees!"

2009-11-05T14:11:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, X Initiative hosted New York art critic Jerry Saltz signing his new volume of reviews, "Seeing Out Louder". A long line of well-wishers queued patiently, while some disappointed fans scoured empty boxes on the floor for stray copies. So popular was Jerry, that those without a copy left their credit card information haphazardly, with instructions for Jerry to inscribe his undying interest in them, and watched as said invoices went straight into a pet-carrier. Ah, the mysteries of publishing!

Right: Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith.

Coming off the heels of being crowned Best Art Critic at Rob Pruitt's dubiously ironic Art Awards, Jerry heartily expressed his glee at his own "opening", and ended his brief speech (thankfully, no teary thanking of God, agent, make-up artist, etc...) with a very Jerry-esque "Go Yankees!" Such brevity and enthusiasm typifies his writing; Jerry loves art, loves to democratize and enlighten, and bring our little art world the same rah-rah as a World Series.

Go Jerry!

Left: Jerry Saltz wine.

Frieze 2009: Small Paintings and Smaller Egos

2009-10-22T13:45:00.000-07:00

Left: Tony Cragg's "Bolt", stainless steel, at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

What I loved this year about Frieze was the hordes of youngsters, toting cameras and notebooks, looking intently and arguing about the works at the fair. Had the collectors all come and conquered already? No, for here was a tall blonde vaguely Eastern European stunner with her trophy-holder, eyeing works picked for her by a famous art consultant. And there was a nattily-dressed lady, begrudgingly letting me take her photo. All is not lost, long live the art fair!

In contrast to last year's Frieze, several trends could be observed: a fascination with the pedestal, small geometric paintings with a labored hand, less video and shock value, and more conceptual sculpture. Booths were all tightly packed, with even the blue chip galleries cramming in 2-D and 3-D works, on the floor, on the dealer's desk, and in front of other works.

David Zwirner showed a prominent Neo Rauch, a gigantic Luc Tuymans (at right), and a naughtily-pierced Annie Sprinkle portrait by Alice Neel (at left).
White Cube had a crowd-pleasing marble portrait of the "pregnant man" by Marc Quinn, but also a series of twelve small ceramic sculptures by Rachel Kneebone (at right) titled "The Stations", whose intricate and layered meaning counteracted the obviousness of the Quinn work. Carter's black and white paintings were sold at several galleries, as were the dark yet faint Gothic-y paintings of Michael Bauer, the chopped photos of John Stezaker, and small paintings by Phillip Allen (at left) combining delicate geometric areas with borders of gloppy thick paint.

Right: Gareth Moore "Neither Here Nor There" at LuttgenMeijer, Berlin.

A big hit this year was the "Frame" section of Frieze, showing smaller galleries that presented a single artist's work. Gareth Moore's sculpture installation looked great, with no booth walls to interfere with its sea of dismantled chairs. Lisa Cooley presented black and white photographs of knives hand-made by the artist, Erin Shireff (at right), that first looked as old-fashioned as Irving Penn, but still held their own as a documentation of odd objects. Daniel Silver at IBID Projects showed abstracted marble busts on idiosyncratic pedestals, using auto-biographical materials. Even at Frame, there were echoes of art history and a longing for tradition, but re-imagined by younger voices.

Above left: Daniel Silver, at IBID Projects, London.

Right: Peacock lady preening.

Left: Towering heels on an abstracted concoction.

Frieze 2009: The Year of the Broom

2009-10-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, the first public day of Frieze Art Fair, a fey rather bored gallerist admired his shoes, and as I was about to turn away from the tedium in his booth, I heard him brag that all the works had been sold within the first hour of Wednesday's private view, so the gallery owner simply didn't know what to do with himself. Bring out the violins indeed!

Right: Hurvin Anderson @ Thomas Dane Gallery, featuring a bucket made of records.

Left: Stella Hamburg bronze at Galerie Eigen & Art.

While Frieze definitely had less brash oversized works, less adventurous installations or booth-deconstructions, and certainly no Icelandic disco (Club Nutz was a bust when I poked my head in), by all reports the art market has survived, and for that we should be grateful. With less bombastic one-offs, but sadly less fun booths, this year's Frieze provided an underhanded sense of humor about the recession, as exemplified by one booth with empty store shelves of white pegboard. At a Polish gallery, a banner screamed "Long Live Capitalism", and the recession-chique theme continued with not one but three (!) sculptures of life-like brooms and mops. One artist even went on about all the analogies in cleaning up/making art, and the exceptionally humble prop was a great wink at art fair glitz. Will Miami Basel bring us Q-tips and sponges?

Left: Richard Hughes, at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Two mops in resin, with rainbow of peeled paper on the wall.

Zoo 2009-- More Warehouse, Less Wares

2009-10-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

This year's Zoo Art Fair moved from the very Royal Academy in London's West End to more decrepit digs in a series of East End industrial warehouses, some from the Victorian era. Although the actual space increased from last year, Zoo was filled with a series of curated exhibitions, and a print selection, to make up for the fact that the number of galleries went from 58 to 22. Aside from the shrunken numbers, Zoo was hampered by its layout--while the spookily unrefurbished spaces lent an air of discovery to the exhibitions, the galleries themselves were squeezed into odd configurations, and the overall effect was of an overhung group show, rather than discrete galleries. I hope that next year they can utilize the space with more expertise, and exploit the adventurous side of London's East End without sacrificing art-viewing.

Mildew on the walls of Zoo.....

The free-flowing champagne at the opening did little to camouflage the relative paucity of decent art. There were some standouts, all British, including Brown Gallery of London, (at left) which covered its space in paintings, and MOOT, an artist-run space in Nottingham.

Bristol's Works/Projects gallery (at right) had an eye-catching booth covered with wallpaper on the floor and walls, and featured photo-based works by Richard Wilson which seemed very sci-fi apocalyptic and yet were made with old-fashioned cut-and-paste and paint.

London's Riflemaker gallery had several old-timey technological works by American artist Juan Fontanive, one using Super 8 film to create an Op-art drawing, and another a hand-drawn flipbook of a hummingbird, both pieces clickety-clacking the artist's clear preference for machines made by hand, as if from 100 years ago.

Left: Richard Wilson, "Earthquake Pavilion."

The message fit right in with the environment: London's East End has gentrified quickly, and yet its underpinnings are as apparent and deliciously unrefined as Zoo's space. There is room for a contemporary art fair that does not require the smooth apparatus of Frieze to function. More art fairs should take risks and find not-ready-for-prime-time spaces. Luckily, London has plenty of them.

Right: Juan Fontanive, "Movement #3".

Mary Boone Always Booming

2009-09-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

Right: Trio of Richard Tuttles.

Left: Mary Heilman in front of Malcolm Morley painting "Goalie".

On Saturday Sept. 12, downtown Mary Boone featured a group show, titled in honor of one of her gallerists Ron Warren . The show was a celebration of her venerable 80's artists--Peter Halley, Julian Schnabel, etc--, as well as her more recent stable of artists--Luis Gispert, Hillary Harkness, Chie Fueki. The opening was sprinkled with appearances by Hillary Harkness, Barbara Kruger, and Francesco Clemente.
Mary Heilman, wearing a backpack that looked just like one of her paintings, requested to pose "in front of my friend Malcolm [Morley]", and MB artist Chie Fueki showed off her black and white and read all over ensemble.

Right: Mary Boone artist Chie Fueki.

Left: Baby posing thoughtfully in front of Barbara Kruger's "Untitled" (All Seeing/All Knowing).

Below: Pink-coiffed dog.

First Thursday!

2009-09-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

The first Thursday after Labor Day always brings giddy excitement, and this year was no different, despite fears of a mass gallery exodus. Chelsea's streets were packed with all kinds of art-gawkers, and several stretch limos reassured the sweaty brows of many a dealer. Marquee names like Maya Lin didn't hurt either. Filling the main space of Pace, her mound of wood chunks was unfortunately far too reminiscent of Tara Donovan, Phoebe Washburn, and too many others to stand out, however her squished-in topographical mountains in the backroom at least brought some scale confusion, as she conspicuously wedged among them, looming like the architectural goddess that she is.
Right: Maya Lin speaking with ArtForum's Knight Landesmann.

At Zach Feuer, Dasha Shishkin's rich paintings filled the space with golden tones, and a more relaxed version of her anatomically twisted and detailed figurative work. As an added bonus, she placed on the list of Feuer artists who unabashedly show the gory nature of childbirth, i.e. Dana Schutz and Danica Phelps.

Right: Dasha Shishkin at her opening.

At Galerie Lelong, a wild woman of indeterminate provenance pranced through the show of all-white work by Jaume Plensa. We commend her attention to detail, pattern, and color, as an all-black outfit of short skirt, stacked platform heels, and slinky top seemed all the rage, perhaps due to the overlapping of Fashion Week.
Left: at Galerie Lelong.

Speaking of Fashion week, Thursday ended with an outpouring of long legs and fabulous get-ups at the Juergen Teller opening at James Cohan. While in his photos the actress Charlotte Rampling languidly posed nude at the Louvre, I much prefer the clothed models in Teller's commercial work for Marc Jacobs.
Still, his opening did not disappoint, chock full of celebs and fashionistas, and even one Jeanne-Moreau-channeling ingenue photographing said celebs/fashionistas.

Right: John Currin and Rachel Feinstein peering at Juergen Teller photo.

Left: Louis Vuitton at James Cohan.

Back to School in Art-land

2009-09-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

Still recovering from Burning Man, I dusted off, got my hair did, and managed only a few shows on Wednesday, the traditional back-to-school day. On the Lower East Side, Franklin Evans opened the fall season at Sue Scott Gallery.

With pieces of tape forming a transparent room within the gallery, bubble-wrapped mounds squishing underneath one's feet, and pattern blossoming everywhere, Evans's show would have been the perfect summer feat: color, fun, and playfulness.
Thank god we grown-ups can still appreciate these elements come fall.

Left: The artist behind his colored pieces of tape.

This Object Is/Is Not Art

2009-09-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

Just came back from Burning Man, and being a newbie I didn't have high expectations for anything other than people's fashions. Still, as a friend asked at 1 a.m. at the playa, "But is it art?" Specifically, we were looking at a miraculously wavering dotted line of blue lights, creating a gigantic wavering cursive across the night sky. Up close, it turned out a series of balloons had a teenie LED attached, and anyone could grab any of the line, and pull or gather it, making their own gigantic drawing that could best be appreciated from half a mile away. My sarcastic answer was that the balloon-lights would have to be about Death, or any other Topic, to be Art. But why all the capitals? Really, could the utter simplicity and mystery of the blue dotted line, and its status as an unambiguously participatory event, not be enough? If I had glimpsed it one night from afar, walking through Central Park, or perhaps if it was situated in front of the Biennial and well-coiffed UESiders had the chance to pull the balloons down Fifth Avenue, would it switch from a lower-case to an upper-case A?
Back at the playa, that great chunk of desert in which Burning Man happily played, the line of balloons brought six of us together, made us cross the darkness while guessing at how big the blue lights actually were, and what pulled them--the wind? Human hands? A machine? Those moments of wonder, along with the actual moment of discovery, capped by one of us giddily running into the darkness while pulling a chunk of the "drawing", created its own particular Art, and I am happy to report that as opposed to most of the summer shows in Chelsea, it stuck in my mind far longer.

Eros vs. Thanatos

2009-07-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

This summer, MoMA's atrium was filled by "Waste Not", an installation by Song Dong-- the perfect antidote to Pipilotti Rist's "Pour Your Body Out" from fall 2008. Song filled the atrium with an orderly arrangement of all the contents of his mother's house in China, where she had spent a lifetime collecting every scrap imaginable, including pieces of used soap, bottles caps, and plastic packaging. Although originally a practical impulse, spurred by the hardship she endured, it became, at least as presented visually, a Collier-Brothers-level mania. The feeling of death, sadness, the utter uselessness of material objects, and the pathos of such a life of parsimony and thrift, coupled with the delicate compositions formed by Song, all created a paradox of lack, as exemplified visually by excess.

Rist on the other hand enveloped us in the perfect environment of comfort, pleasure, and idleness. Visitors lay on and within a gigantic donut cushion, listened to the lull of a dream-enducing soundtrack, and lapped up the visual feast filling all three walls with psychedelic colors, naked bodies animalistically cavorting in an Edenic landscape. I visited the installation three times, and I confess I wanted to spend a night, bring a book, maybe a meal [I did participate in a renegade yoga class that played with inhabiting Rist's world]. Oddly, in Song's installation, if I were allowed, I think I would want to handle each and every empty toothpaste container, each dirty glove, each bottle cap, to understand how one could possibly possess these trifling objects for such a long time. Song's emptied house, presented alongside its contents, was a Thanatos to Rist's multi-sensory Eros.
MoMa should be proud of finding two such site-specific works that challenge the gigantic emptiness of its five-floor high space.

The Isaac Show

2009-07-21T18:02:00.001-07:00

Isaac Mizrahi curated one of this summer's eponymous shows, "Summer Pictures" at Julie Saul Gallery. The show was a veritable picnic of pleasant painting and photography--Wayne Thiebaud, Lisa Sanditz, and more appetizing plates. Isaac obliged us with not only headshots, but even foot-shots. Alas, unlike the contestants on "The Fashion Show" where he provides zippy but always cheery commentary, he did not impress with his outfit of trackpants and hoodie. You're adorable Isaac, but even your line for Target has more class and sass! Although, his pedicure did leave us wishing more men would man-scape this neglected part.
Here's to everyone showing off their summertime gams!

Nathalie Djurberg talk at the Venice Biennale

2009-06-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

For one of the Conversazione during the Venice Biennale preview, Nathalie Djurberg and her musical collaborator Hans Berg (right) talked with Massimiliano Gioni (left), co-curator of the Berlin Biennial and a curator at the New Museum. All three were young, relaxed, and enthusiastic, though what was most surprising about Nathalie was her quiet, understated, almost nervous self-effacement. Several times, Djurberg giggled and interrupted herself, as if she realized she were revealing too much. Which was actually the biggest surprise of all: in an hour-long talk, Djurberg went into surprising detail about her video work, stop-motion claymation, and her 130 huge flowers on display at the "Making Worlds" exhibit. Many artists remain stingy when talking about their work, but Djurberg showed confidence in the power and unique vision of her art, by unblinkingly "giving away" her methods, her moods, and her process.
Djurberg revealed a tenacious work method that explains her prodigious output: a self-described workaholic, she starts with the puppets, then works chronologically in constructing the story, background, and props. When the film is finished, everything but a few boxes of props is destroyed. Hans Berg starts composing the music electronically, in an abstract dialogue that accompanies the evolution of the storyline. Their relationship, both personal and professional, is endearingly complementary: she works too much, whereas he calls himself lazy and in need of outside pressure. In a very contemporary manner he has no problem following her lead, both in conversation and in activity. And yet the end result feels unmistakably like a collaboration: the odd unplaceable sounds and rhythms of the music underscore the twisted-fairytale nature of Djurberg's scenarios. You never know if the over-the-top gore, sadism, and sexual perversity is Jungian and within all of us or a byproduct of her own imagination.

Djurberg described how initially she studied sculpture in art school, and when she tried to paint was told the result was awful, so in revenge she made a sunset in Super-8 film, and discovered the joy of not having to choose one image or painting. I'm glad she stuck with it, as the resulting videos are all of the above--vivid color, twisted forms, and along with the soundtracks highly watchable stories that unfold in unpredictable ways.

Gioni (top), Djurberg and Berg goofing around after the talk.

Best "In This Economy" Outfit

2009-06-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

Judy Glantzman, at the opening of her exhibition at Betty Cunningham Gallery, June 18, 2009.

Perhaps as a follow-up to its recent article on what galleries are doing to cope with the new economy, the New York Times should list what innovative strategies artists are using to market themselves. Gold spangly dollar signs? I like it.
http://tinyurl.com/lcjlmr

Venice Biennale: National Pavilions

2009-06-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

For a first-time visitor, the 53rd Venice Biennale is a thrill of traipsing through the city in search of art in churches and palazzos among the tourist throngs. This year there were 77 national pavilions, with some new inclusions from Asia and Africa, but because of the cost, there was still a glaring under-representation of anything in the Southern Hemisphere. During the Biennale’s press conference, Italian artist Pino Boresta interrupted with a blood-curdling scream of “what do I have to do to get into the Biennale?” before being escorted out by security. But what soon became apparent was the arbitrariness of national commissions. A Brit impersonated a German (Liam Gillick), an American of Greek origin held court at the Greek pavilion (Lucas Samaras), and the Danish and Nordic pavilions were united by a group of 20 artists staged elaborately by the duo of Elmgreen and Dragset.

The hit of the Giardini, in terms of number of people waiting patiently to enter, was "The Collectors", the two houses staged by Elmgreen and Dragset. The first house was actually a collection of rooms of artwork and installations by other artists, with a fake real estate office providing tours, a timely jibe. The second pavilion was a tightly curated high modernist house of a gay collector, whose dead body floated in the pool outside. Skinny fey boys lounged like perfect objets d’art, as if they had just come from the nearby Hernan Bas painting. “The Collectors” also sold a bag of goodies, including a calendar of “handwritten” select events such as art fairs and auctions. Overall there was much fun to be had exploring both houses’ attention to detail.

The USA pavilion, one of three around the city with work by Bruce Nauman, had a perennial long line, as even in the rain people stood with trash bags on their heads. But after the long wait, and guards telling me not to take photos, I was curiously left feeling blank. Either because it had a “greatest hits” feel, or perhaps because Nauman’s work for me works chiefly as a slap to the face, and upon further encounters, simply a room of Nauman signifiers: neon, casts of heads, animal parts, hands, mechanized, assaulting, aggressive. The most powerful was the simplest: neon words, one on top of each other, alternating good and bad, such as "Temperance/Gluttony" flashed on the cornices of the pavilion. That’s America: we strive to be the purest, the ideal, but end up being blamed for being the worst.

On a more pleasurable note, the sounds of language, human and otherwise were everywhere at the biennale, from Uruguay’s video of a man mimicking birdsongs to a live version of four men bird-calling in unison, creating an amazing symphony at the Turkish pavilion. The sounds were amplified by the pavilion’s acoustics and were intoxicating, adding yet another sort of performativity to the biennial. In a strong Serbian pavilion played a video of a British man trying to lose his accent with the help of a coach. Sound also transformed the French pavilion by Claude Leveque. Viewers walked through a symmetrical room covered in silver glitter, lit by vanity lightbulbs, and jail cell architecture confused the viewer of their position as jailer or prisoner. At the end of each of four hallways was a room painted black, with black grates, and the sound of a black flag flapping in the wind. Fascism, anti-Americanism, the paradox of freedom as lack of liberty, and other visual abstractions echoed its title, “Le Grand Soir”. A French expression for a moment of revolution and societal change, it could be seen as a highly topical interpretation of numerous current events, perhaps a prescient note on the Iranian election?

The Russians presented a strong pavilion, full of visually and conceptually rich material, including a room of whimsical watercolors by Pavel Pepperstein (right) titled “Landscapes of the Future”. His particular world showed the inventiveness of his imagination and a pointed sense of humor, the latter usually lacking in many portentous and often pretentious pavilions (ahem - Romania!). It was refreshing to see conceptual work, weaving in Constructivist art with utopian vistas, with an enthusiasm for lightness of touch.

Another potentially charismatic conceptual pavilion was marred by a maddening cat. Liam Gillick filled the four rooms of the imposing German pavilion with perfunctory unstained pine kitchen cabinets, and an entryway of multicolored flaps as used in British shops. Like many artists, he was working with the architectural ideology of individual pavilions. But the end result, while equally imposing, was laughably lifeless: an animatronic cat sat atop one of the cabinets reciting a nonsense text that had no impact, despite the artist’s intent of disrupting modernism and social utopias.

The Austrian pavilion featured a feminist takeover of quirky paint galloping over the walls and windows. Elke Krystufek (left) showed paintings of a feminine male nude, and covered the walls with an often funny exploration of the Biennale’s historically masculine emphasis. Canada and Australia had video work back-to-back: Mark Lewis’s filmic explorations and Shaun Maxwell’s uber-masculine Mad Max-related series.

I was strongly rewarded by exploration of the off-site pavilions. Estonia featured a fascinating exploration of the political power of symbols by Kristina Norman, who showed footage of riots and installed her own cast of a Soviet monument, whose replanting was the cause of the riots. Singapore’s Ming Wong reinterpreted cinematic tropes with his 50's-era “Life of Imitation”.

Several pavilions around the city took fabulous advantage of the surplus of baroque Venetian churches. New Zealand's Judy Millar (right) stacked giant billboard-printed canvases among the Doric columns and orange and white checked tiles.

Lithuania's Zilvinas Kempinas made a tunnel entirely of magnetic tape, whose material delicacy conversely conveyed a claustrophobic space within, and billowed threateningly from the nearby canal's winds.

(see below left, and right).

The Central Asia pavilion was also worth the boat ride, with strong work in video and photography. Jamshed Kholikov (below) presented a photo series of bus stops in three “stans”—Tajik, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek. As a combination of Muslim symbolism, Soviet chunkiness, and local quirkiness, it was a great visual essay on how culture and history merges, is transported, translated, and transformed as local specificity defies our Bush-42 era need for simple categories. The graphic for the Pavilion could also be a sly dig at American lack of interest in geography: with no country borders, it had only the capitals of certain central Asian countries, defying the visitor to acknowledge that a vast area of the world was mostly a mystery.

Also far afield, the Iceland pavilion predictably provided a great opening-night party. Alas there was a superficiality and immaturity to its exhibition, titled "The End". The artist--Ragnar Kjartansson-- was painting the same model for the duration of the biennial, every day, transforming an empty ground-floor palazzo into a disheveled studio. I returned a few days later to find beer bottles left from the opening, stacks of records, ashtrays, and all the usual symbols of artistic decadence. After a break where the bath-robed model smoked, the artist resumed his work. It was all very smirk-ridden, and as the paintings were so dully second-rate, like a mediocre art-school student, nothing about the whole enterprise surprised or even excited. An adjoining room showed a more evocative suite of video performances of the artist and his buddy performing one musical number, on a variety of instruments, in wintry arctic landscapes. Even then, my aha moment was spoiled by seeing within the frame several cars go by on a nearby road, indicating that instead of being in “the middle” of nature, the artists merely parked their car and walked a few hundred feet. Another disappointment was that the videos were filmed in the Canadian Rockies: enchantment with the wilds of Iceland can hardly be matched by any second-world country. Nonetheless, the idea of two bearded fur-hat-bedecked blokes playing a folk-country dirge in the snow, eagerly listened to by French and Japanese art fans in an emptied palazzo on the canals of Venice, epitomized the appeal of the Venice Biennale.

Venice Biennale: "Making Worlds"

2009-06-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

The Venice Biennale has two main areas: the Arsenale and the Giardini, each with large group exhibition spaces around the theme of “Making Worlds”, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, the Biennale’s youngest curator. This year, there are 90 artists represented. The former Italian Pavilion has been converted to the Palazzo delle Esposizione, whose facade John Baldessari covered with a blown-up view of perfect blue ocean, clear sky, and palm trees. One of the winners of the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award (the other being Yoko Ono), Baldessari first wanted to include a postcard saying such as “Greetings”, but wasn’t allowed, so the backdrop transformed into a flat joke. “Dive into La Biennale” it beckoned, an exhortation for people to walk into the ocean of the Palazzo. With the horizon so high above the visitors sitting on a bench, the art world looked like it was engulfing the mere mortals.

If Baldessari wanted to wink at La Biennale, the art inside disputed any such reflexive irony. The Palazzo’s largest room by Thomas Saraceno was a world made entirely of black elastic, a combination of cobweb, constellation, or atomic forms, trapping viewers and multiplying high above their heads like fractals. Mostly the Palazzo presented singular artistic visions, with more of an interest in the varying ways artists work today. Birnbaum spoke of an intergenerational biennial, with such stalwarts as Lygia Pape, Bruce Nauman, and the Japanese collective Gutai included; and he emphasized that some of the strongest works were by women, i.e. Nathalie Djurberg, who received the Silver Lion award. Djurberg’s dark room was filled with gory oversized flowers, all looking like they could out-do the Venus flytrap. Showing on the screen were her delirious stop-animation films, a Brothers Grimm meets Freud world of nightmarish ids gone wild.

Hans-Peter Feldmann created another kind of cast of characters, straight out of a surreal circus, using rotating dolls, kitchen utensils, plastic bottles, kitschy objects like the Statue of Liberty, and creating an entire wall of shadowy overlapping silhouettes.

Tobias Rehberger, another Biennale award winner, constructed the cafeteria as social space, manic and maximalist. Its mix of bold black and white stripes punctuated with neon colors was as trendy as anything in Top Shop. The space displaced and confused with an odd two- dimensional flatness. The baristas dressed in matching orange, were reflected in mirrors set in multiple planes behind them, so that the illusion extended through human form.

At the Arsenale, the first work of art I saw was Hector Zamora’s gigantic zeppelin, literally stuck between the narrow walls of a long passageway. Part of a larger project of art as social intervention, it was humorous and oppressive, but also could be a metaphor for how art aims high and yet sometimes falls flat and gets stuck on its own outsized ambitions. Much less impressive were his small cardboard models of dirigibles inside the exhibition, and with no plaque to describe it nearby the Biennale staff were clueless.

Another intervention of a smaller scale was Miranda July’s awkwardly rendered sculptures with humorous sayings, discovered in the gardens behind the Arsenale. At her reading, she explained that she hoped the work would live on by visitors taking photos of themselves with her sculptures and blogging or sharing them online—art with an extended and murky temporality.

Inside, the first room of the Arsenale was by Lygia Pape, titled “Tteiu”. Ethereally lit copper and gold wires filled a room like abstracted beams, beautiful, simple, and solid, creating space with the most basic of elements. Strong work by Marjetica Potrc also perfectly echoed the theme, using childlike drawings about cities and their power of transformation (i.e. post-Katrina). Pascale Marthine Tayou, from Cameroon, described how his work was not really specifically about Africa, but the interaction of life. His piece could have used some editing but was a great example of the theme: sounds, tree-house-like structures, aggregates of “people” huddling by old-fashioned lamps, piles of straw, videos of village activity, all took over the space.

Cildo Meireles had a series of monochromatic rooms in rainbow sequence, with a video of the color in one corner, showing what Birnbaum called a “painterly gesture”, as a defensive explanation of the lack of actual painting in the show. The dearth of painting didn’t exclude a richness of color and mark, whether in video, photography or sculpture. In general there was a clear attempt to be inclusive, and portray the very real profusion of media in today’s cosmopolitan art world. As I walked through the rooms, I was almost always drawn by the idea of each work first, rather than question the formal qualities of each chosen medium.

The two-channel video by Sara Ramo, a Spanish artist working in Brazil, showed two views of the brick alleyway behind her childhood home, where playful occurrences such as feathers falling, or a ball of paper gently rolled into the frame. A personal world of imaginary childhood events unfurled. Its haunting simplicity was a counterpart to the nearby Paul Chan piece “Sade for Sade’s sake”. Squares of color became black boxes being lifted and restacked for no purpose, with naked men in various jittery states of sexual activity. The artist said he was surprised to hear people laughing. “When you see the Arsenale there is a longing to ambush the space, and you have to NOT do that.” An abstract and oblique metaphor, it was perfectly scaled to the Arsenale’s physical and curatorial space.
By day three I had scored a ticket to the Steve McQueen film, the Great Britain entry, and arrived towards the end of the day for my screening. The stark and existential film resembled a nature documentary at times with its slow close-ups of bugs and raindrops, but its most powerful sensory experience was the sound of the weather. Depicting the Giardini in the winter, devoid of any human presence except the occasional scenes of men looking for a nighttime encounter, “Giardini” was a post-apocalyptic world of nature taking over culture, of the dated grand architecture of the pavilions overshadowed by piles of trash, insects, and packs of stray dogs. The herds of art-devourers, silenced, divided, and squeezed into the small theater, watched their own phased obliteration.

Lisa Ross and Nan Goldin conversation at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

2009-05-31T16:29:00.000-07:00

It was the optimal low-key setting to hear a photography legend and her protege chat. Nan Goldin, she who started out documenting unglamorous lives in a glamorous way, who identified with those on the outskirts but who now is a highly influential force, an "esque" no less, provided a public persona that seemed the perfect antidote to everything we might have dreaded from an artist with such a high-profile career. No bullshit, funny, self-effacing, and insistent on refocusing the conversation on Lisa Ross, whose evocative work was up at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery. Ross spoke in detail about the Uighur tribe of western China, and her 7-year project documenting their burial sites, which are a better art installation than much of what I've seen in Chelsea. The minute the conversation stopped Goldin got up and stuck a cigarette in her mouth, waiting to light it as she chatted with Mahmood.

Welcome!

2009-05-31T16:04:00.001-07:00

Whether I go to the MET, go to an art opening in Chelsea, or check out an art fair in London, I am taking everything in. Typically I go through a complex experience of looking, judging, observing, trying not to judge, reading, thinking, trying not to read, and looking again. Then I walk away, and see if whatever I saw can still exist in a few hours, a day, or longer. Capturing that experience is what "Asya Says" aims to do. Judge for yourself, do some more research, and above all enjoy it!