March 21, 2003
No title
Yesterday and today have been difficult for so many. In my own small, sheltered, privileged, and distanced way, they have been difficult for me as well. I have, somewhat unexpectedly, had a quite visceral reaction to world events: my frustrations and laments created a pain in my stomach that has hardened into a small stone I carry with me. Never before has my body reacted in such a way.
I realize now that twelve years ago I was too young to fully understand the consequences of that war; I am further concerned that eventual hindsight afforded me will reveal more unsettling offenses than those I recognize as I watch, listen to, and read various news sources.
I listen to Arvo Part's Litany, a symphony that consists of twenty-four choral prayers (one for each hour of the day), as slight consolation and make my own secular prayers with every passing moment.
I hope that in the coming days those who are suffering now will rediscover that there is beauty in this world and that life is a precious, precious gift.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 16, 2003
Matthew Barney and springtime in New York
Yesterday morning found me standing in line with dozens, if not hundreds, of tourists and art aficionados at the Church of Barney. When I first moved to New York, in August 2001, I learned that one could make appointments with Barbara Gladstone Gallery to view the individual Cremaster films. Over the course of three weekends, I saw the four that were then complete; when the fifth, Cremaster 3, was completed last year, I saw it at Film Forum.
It's difficult to explain my reaction to the exhibition. There's so much going on that one could make a 528 page book about it. Oh wait, someone already did.
My biggest concern before entering the exhibition was that I feared an inability to separate the sculptures—Barney has always insisted he is a sculptor—from my first encounter with them as props and set-pieces in the films. This concern was thankfully unnecessary: the most engrossing aspect of the entire exhibition is Barney's enchantment with materials and how they can be creatively employed to create sculptural form. The leather from Ford Mustang front seat that Barney inhabited while playing Gary Gilmore is here pulled off of its support and stretched like skin around the corner of Barney's prosthetic addition, snapped down with white plastic buttons. Every element used for the Masonic ritual scenes in Cremaster 3 is ornately patterned with decorative flourishes. Every ribbon seen in the exhibition—with the exception of those hanging from the five-screen Jumbotron in the center of the rotunda—is not a ribbon at all, but rather cast rubber or resin. Never before have I felt such a visceral desire to touch everything on view.
The 'Jumbotron' itself is a five-screen behemoth that hangs from the center of the rotunda skylight and continuously plays a twenty-minute selection of scenes Cremaster 3. Each screen is devoted largely to one of the five challenges in The Order, the competitive game Barney must defeat to kill The Architect as played by Richard Serra. The Order required Barney to scale the inner walls of the Guggenheim's rotunda with rock-climbing equipment and face a challenge at each level: in a move toward visual cohesion in the exhibition, relics from those scenes provide are placed exactly where they appear in the film. Visitors who do not know why the letters 'NY X HC' are taped to the floor and flanked on either side by rock-salt 'tables' can look up and watch the third challenge, wherein Barney must retrieve a hammer from the floor in the middle of a mosh pit circulating between two New York Hardcore bands. This is Barney's surest move, inviting everyone to literally inhabit the space of the film—props and all—and hopefully gain access to the very hermetic set of meanings encoded in that space. However, it simultaneously fractures this cohesion through its means of presentation: as one walks from bay to bay up the ramp, the ambient noise of five different audio channels and the dizziness created by continually looking up pollute the clarity of the visual experience.
I'm sure Barney meant for that to be the case, as everything aspect of this exhibition has been meticulously planned. He has changed the Guggenheim's lighting, adding bright white lights that makes you notice just how yellow the sun is once you've left the building. He has controlled the pacing, leaving some bays empty (notably the ones closest to the bathrooms and elevators, and good for him) and others with only one or two works of art hung off-center. He has paid attention to the smallest of details: be sure to note the white pentagon embedded in the rich blue astroturf at the center of the five vitrines displaying the films' disks or the perfection of the stretched black vinyl in the sumptuous top room dedicated to Cremaster 5 at the end of the exhibition.
In the end, I don't think that my take on the show is as rapturous as that of Michael Kimmelman or Jerry Saltz (who I saw at the show and had a nice long talk with), but I do feel The Cremaster Cycle is a major accomplishment. It should rightly enter its place in the canon of recent American art, and I will certainly be visiting the exhibition several more times during its remaining three months. I will also go to Film Forum on May 4th to watch the entire five-film cycle in one marathon viewing.
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New York is experiencing unseasonably warm weather, and yesterday afternoon I got on my bike for my first long ride since the weather took a turn for the worse in December. I love the familiar weight around my hips, the familiar ache in my calves. Seven hours went like this: Astoria, Long Island City, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, across the bridge, Lower East Side, Chinatown, NoLita, East Village, Union Square, East Village, NYU, West Village, East Village, up First Avenue, over the Queensboro Bridge, through Long Island City, over to and around Roosevelt Island, and back home. Along the way I ran into Johanna, Michael, Liz, Emily, Sarah, and Jonathan. Springtime in New York is a wonderful thing.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, Lauren.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 11, 2003
Armory Show roundup
This is a long post about contemporary art. Read on if such things interest you.
Thousands of people visited the Armory Show, and hundreds stopped by my gallery's booth to ask questions about Cornelia Parker's sculpture. I caught up with friends from other parts of the globe and even managed to make a few new ones. Williamsburg galleries extended their hours to midnight on Saturday; consequently, I attended about twenty-two openings in the six hours after my eight hour work day. Others guessed there were ten thousand works of art on view along the Armory's two westside piers. I don't wish to hazard my own guess, but I don't think everyone else is too far off. And this doesn't even account for the Scope Art Fair, which I managed to attend late yesterday afternoon. Given the plethora of visual stimuli, here's what made an impression:
First and foremost is Mamma Andersson, a Swedish painter whose work was first pointed out to me by my employers. There were five paintings at Galleri Magnus Karlsson and a sixth at Stephen Friedman, who presented a solo exhibition in October-November 2002. She's married to Jockum Nordstrum, and I can only hope that their personalities are as well-matched as their painting styles. His spring 2002 exhibition at David Zwirner typifies his folksy, faux-naive rendering of ambiguous narratives that seem culled from an international set of fairytales. Her work is slightly harsher in its edges, trading the approachability of his scenes for an approachability based on her magnificent handling of paint. Layers build up without really accumulating density, allowing ghost-like forms, often of children, to inhabit space on the picture plane without seeming to inhabit the world depicted therein. Check Touched by Gods (2002) to see what I mean. Andersson currently does not have New York representation, but I would not be surprised if a show of new paintings crops up in a prominent gallery's autumn 2003 or spring 2004 exhibition schedule.
As long as I'm talking about Stephen Friedman--who possesses one of the sharpest eyes in London for new talent--I should mention my rediscovery of Rivane Neuenschwander. I've known her sculptures and installations since seeing her paired with Iran do EspirÃto Santo, another young Brazilian 'organic minimalist,' in an exhibition at the Americas Society approximately two years ago. I had only seen her sculptures and experienced her installations, so the presentation on the gallery's booth of photographs, collages, and two videos was quite interesting. The four photographs, all part of a series titled 'Conversations,' managed to escape critique as juvenile snapshots by virtue of intimate beauty. The video I saw, Inventory of Small Deaths (Blow), created in collaboration with her husband, exudes a similar delicate grace that borders on the saccharine without quite crossing that line. The collage, titled Deadline Calendar (2002) is simple conceptually yet pregnant with the past lives of the collected sell-by dates. With solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center and the ArtPace residency program, as well as gallery representation by Camargo Vilaca in Sao Paulo and Stephen Friedman in London, it's surprising I have yet to see her work in a New York gallery. I nonetheless look forward to the day it arrives.
Neighbors and friends 303 Gallery exhibited a new painting and drawing by Sue Williams that renewed my appreciation. Her last solo show at the gallery left me wanting more: it was technically stupendous yet intellectually empty, and suffered in comparison to the Brice Marden exhibition then on view across the street at Matthew Marks' 22nd St. space. At the fair she reintroduced the (ambiguously) sexual and (barely) figurative elements that had slipped out of the paintings (but not the drawings) in the gallery show. The large canvas was painted bright orange on pink, making it a partner-in-crime with Sea Life, another recent canvas. Her ink on vellum drawings are still some of the smoothest objects being made by contemporary artists working today.
The Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama had an impressive showing, with a solo exhibition at the booth of Taka Ishii Gallery and a few more photographs at the booth of Frankfurt's L.A. Galerie. His photographs seem engrossed with the concept of rendering time visually: the 'Slow Glass' pictures at L.A. Galerie contrasting the frozen dynamism (no pun intended) of the 'Blast' pictiures. Add to this the saturated-color panoramas depicting remote lime works or buildings under construction in big cities and Hatakeyama seems an amped-up version of Ryuji Miyamoto. Miyamoto's depiction of contemporary ruins, best showcased in his book Architectural Apocalypse, are more formally composed and contemplative than Hatakeyama's work, and I feel will have more staying power, but I like the younger artist's take on the current vogue for photographing buildings.
Jack Hanley Gallery brought more graffiti- and street culture-inspired work by his gallery artists. Chris Johanson stole the show--it was his for the taking, with his work filling eighty percent of the booth--with his large, colorful pinwheel painting on paper. Berkeley's Paulson Press brought a similar sugarlift aquatint to their room at the Scope fair, this one coming across as a psychedelic rock and bearing the best title of the weekend: Two dimensional print of casual post-post-modern sculpture (2002). Other artists of note in the booth were Shaun O'Dell, whose medium-sized mixed media drawing of birds caught up in a bevy of decorative ink patterning floated comfortably against a large white background, and Simon Evans, whose humorously conceptual works on paper included a Traveler's Map of Heaven (2003).
Euan Macdonald is also represented by Jack Hanley, but I came across his work at Cohan, Leslie, and Browne's booth. CLB is another gallery with a seemingly unerring eye; Macdonald's works on paper were complemented by delicate drawings with ink and acrylic paint by the collaborative team of Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg. Their current group sculpture-and-video exhibition, Little Triggers, is also well worth seeing.
David Korty's watercolors captured my eye at China Art Objects; had it not already sold, I would have immediately put more money than I could afford toward a small rendering of rainbow-colored fireworks splattered against a purple evening sky. I have heard his name in the past, but never seen his work: I was surprised to learn that he is represented in London by heavy-hitter Sadie Coles HQ and in New York by Greene Naftali, another local favorite. Here is a good selection of his work.
Richard Telles Fine Art, a Los Angeles-based gallery that seemed to be prominent in the late 1980s and early 1990s--I see the gallery name deep in the exhibition history of many artists whose work I like--yet under the current radar, brought a beautiful photo collage by Jenny Bishton. The words 'photo collage' give an inaccurate mental picture of her art. Her photographic sources are atomized into tiny pieces, circular and smaller than a hole-punch, then arrayed across medium-sized pieces of paper according to color in abstract waves. It took me a second to remember where I had seen the work: a 'gallery swap'-type exhibition where Telles' artists presented works at Marianne Boesky gallery early last year. He said "You probably haven't seen much of her work around, as it's very time-consuming." That was the one thing he probably didn't need to tell me.
As long as I'm broadly outlining my tastes by naming favorite New York galleries, I'll mention that Murray Guy brought along a beautiful new painting by Munro Galloway depicting a bunch of white roses wrapped in paper. His pale purple and white palette suits the subject matter wonderfully, and the painting is a good counterpoint (since I gave a Sue Williams counterpoint earlier) to Cherry Blossoms and Plum Rain (2002).
I'm tiring of typing more than I tired of looking at art, so I will only mention briefly a few more artists whose work will stick with me: Victoria Miro brought three lovely gouaches of exotic birds by Chris Ofili; New York-based Jenny Perlin, whose work I haven't seen since the 2001 Animations exhibition I worked on at PS1, impressed with a small black-and-white looped 16mm film of an unidentified hand washing a window that looked out onto the Brooklyn Bridge (curiously at Annet Gelinks, Amsterdam); Willie Doherty's extracts from a file was as beautiful in its partial presentation at Kerlin Gallery's booth as I'd ever seen; last but not least, Ewan Gibbs' delicately cross-hatched window view onto a townscape dominated by a church was very impressive at Maureen Paley Interim Art. Those of you in London can go see his work this spring as he is their next exhibition.
I hope that the links provided lead some of you to discover new artists to like and support, even if it is not one of the ones mentioned above. I have another two or three pages of notes that I have not transcribed.. perhaps another day?
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
March 3, 2003
Coltrane, J.
Transformative music listening experience for March 3, 2003: "My Favorite Things" from John Coltrane's performance at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival. If you listen closely, you can hear the audience talking among themselves and clapping at all the wrong moments deep down in the mix; I can imagine they were five times as stunned by the beauty of what they were witnessing as I was by what I heard this evening. The nine to eleven minute mark features some of the best saxophone playing I've ever heard in my life. I am not critically equipped to tell you what kind of playing it is, nor do I think I want to. I'm still reveling.
Transformative music listening experience for March 2, 2003: Seeing Stephan Mathieu perform live in a one-off date at Experimental Intermedia, Phil Niblock's loft in Chinatown. He performed what sounded like an extended, forty-five minute remix of the sixteen minute piece from the Mutek 2002 festival. This rendition maintained the slightly shifting high-end tones throughout (three notes alternately shifting into and out of harmony with each other) but was marked by a greater number of glitches, clicks, pops, and general digital detritus filtering in and out of the multi-channel sound setup. The music was accompanied by a video projection that started off solid purple, and, with equal parts delicacy and patience, subtly flickered its way across the spectrum to pink, red, orange, yellow, and blue. Amazing.
I also had some great art experiences this weekend. More on those later.