Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze gardens on the grandest scale. In her latest exhibition – and first with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York – she grew continents from toothpicks and paper scraps, stars from light bulbs and mirrors. Her installations don’t just inhabit the places they fill, they transform them, like a like a Frederick Law Olmstead park or the landscapes of Lancelot “Capability” Brown.
Read more at frieze (subscription required).
Focus: Matthew Day Jackson
Matthew Day Jackson is a consummate fetishist. I don’t mean that he’s off in a honey-smothered studio somewhere, smelling shoes or tickling mayonnaise. No, the Brooklyn-based artist has a fetish for fetishes themselves, and not the sexual kind. His art obsesses over specific objects and moments made totemic by their part in a history (whether military, Utopian, counter-cultural, scientific, artistic or automotive) and translates those same objects and moments into exquisitely crafted sculptures and wall-based works that play their own role in a private and tangled narrative.
Read more at frieze (registration required).
Knight’s Move
The season of the summer group show is, at least in New York, a kind of swingers’ party for the art world, where casual relationships, vacationing collectors and lofty concepts lure young artists out of their galleries and into unfamiliar romps. ‘Knight’s Move’, SculptureCenter’s contribution to this year’s saturnalia, featured some fine lookers, but curator Fionn Meade couldn’t find the theoretical ambience to turn a room full of singles into the kind of oiled-up orgy that people remember for years to come.
Read more at frieze.
eBay’s Millionaire Artist
No Sotheby’s or Christie’s for artist Michel Keck: eBay is her auction house of choice. In early 2006, she became a Platinum Power Seller on the shopping website, with sales of her paintings, collages and their inkjet reproductions netting more than $40,000 in one 30-day period (she averages more than $25,000 every month). Keck developed such a following that she was able to leave the website and its aggressive fee structure to start her own online store. Now, after a three-year hiatus, eBay’s millionaire painter is back.
Read more at The Daily Beast
‘Greater New York’ by the Numbers
In order to really remember anything about an exhibition as big as ‘Greater New York’, you have to forget a lot of it. Though this third iteration of PS1′s quinquennial survey is smaller than ever before, it still features 68 up-and-coming New Yorkers spread over four floors. To write a review of all that, you have to forget even more. Attention spans can’t accommodate that many artists nor that much art, and neither can word counts or column inches or casual readers.
Read more at The Awl.
Thank You So Much for House Sitting!
It’s such a relief to have you looking after the place while I spa-cation and establish Valium suppliers throughout Southeast Asia. On a recent heroin safari in North Africa, I was waylaid by some customs agents, and when I returned home several of my cockatiels were dead. That colorful mound of feathers was so sad.
Read more at McSweeney’s.
The Picasso Sale: World’s Most Expensive Artwork and My Whiskey Chocolate Chili
Last night, Pablo Picasso’s Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur(1932) fetched more at auction than any artwork in history ($106.5 million!) for the same reason that my whiskey chocolate chili never wins the annual firehouse cook off: popularity, whether measured in US dollars or cayenne-smudged secret ballots, has everything to do with the lowest common denominator.
Read more at The Awl.
Anna Parkina At Gladstone
Anna Parkina’s ‘Nests’ is one of the more aptly-named exhibitions I’ve seen in some time. It’s a small, messy thing that looks just inviting enough to land inside, but barely, and you wouldn’t want to stay there for long.
That’s not to say it’s hosted in a tiny space built of twigs – the project room at Gladstone might perch on the second floor of the gallery, but it’s plenty big enough. No, that pronouncement has much more to do with this young Moscow-born, Paris-and-California-educated artist’s Rorschach-like collages assembled from rough-hewn layers, which pile on to one another forming a scrappy home for light, flighty ideas. And there are a few pictures of birds.
Read more at frieze (subscription required).
Focus: Sara VanDerBeek
Sara VanDerBeek is every historicist’s dream: an artist whose biography and practice seem so symmetrical that it’s tempting to skip all of the written arguments and simply diagram the details in a Cartesian coordinate plane. A daughter of the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek and a co-founder of the now-defunct downtown New York gallery Guild and Greyshkul, she photographs handmade assemblages adorned with images from art history, American culture, her father’s archive, and of her own making. With even the most cursory glance, certain influences (and their attendant anxieties) seem to jump from her life on to her photographs.
Read more at frieze (subscription required).
Black Notes
| THE STORY OF A FORMER BOXER FROM PENNSYLVANIA’S COAL COUNTRY WHO CAN KILL YOU—AND BRING YOU BACK TO LIFE—MERELY BY TOUCHING YOU IN THE RIGHT PLACE. |
| DISCUSSED: Wuxia Fiction, Bruce Lee, Pennsylvania’s Coal Region, Cracker Barrel, Bloodsport, Kung Fu Panda, Xena The Warrior Princess, The Vulcan Nerve Pinch, Nonviolence and the Repression of Emotion, Fort Knox, Martin Luther King, Bear Wrestling, Muhammad Ali, Chi, Howard Cosell, Andy Warhol, Black Belt Magazine, Kill Bill |
You can read a bit more at The Believer’s website or the whole story in the magazine’s March/April issue.
Stephen T. Asma’s ‘On Monsters’
For those wondering what to call an enormous furry quadruped with a bladder built to shoot caustic excrement at enemies, Stephen T. Asma, a professor of philosophy at Columbia College in Chicago, has a new book to help out: On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. It’s packed with beasts like the power-pissing Bolinthas, tales of penis-stealing witches, and spine-tingling stories of human depravity that make Danny Boyle’s slapstick undead and Stephanie Meyer’s chaste bloodsuckers seem suitable company for a Sunday social. A contemporary bestiary unwilling to simply rest on the scaly shoulders of those that came before it, On Monsters also surveys the grotesque history that it meticulously recounts and offers a series of cultural and conceptual lenses with which to consider what goes bump in the night.
More at frieze.com (subscription required).
Andrea Bowers at Andrew Kreps
Andrea Bowers likes to put her politics in plain sight. Whether it’s AIDS, abortion, immigration or war, when she takes on an issue with her art work, it’s as obvious as night. Unsurprisingly, then, from the far side of 22nd Street, it was clear that her latest exhibition, ‘Mercy Mercy…
More at frieze.com (subscription required).
Max Toth Encourages Bad Behavior
I interviewed the painter Max Toth over gchat a few weeks ago. We visited some places on the internet and talked about his work.
You can read more at Art in America.
Furious Cousins’ World Famous Holiday Punch
Furious Cousins’ World Famous Holiday Punch contains absolutely no toenail clippings, as well as sugar, rum, grain alcohol, chunked pineapple, maple syrup, light beer, salt, and chicory.
Read more at McSweeney’s.
Performa 09
RoseLee Goldberg – the critic, art historian and writer who founded Performa in 2005 – tapped at her BlackBerry through most of Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners. It was annoying, but I’ll forgive her indiscretion. The evening’s compositions, after all, were scored almost a century ago for a newly silence-less world clattering with engines and aeroplanes. So why shouldn’t a centennial restaging be accompanied by the faint clack of mobile messaging?
More at frieze.
Another Type of Time
In the Winter Issue of Art Lies, I talk to some long-time DIA caretakers:
Between the three of them—Bill, Patti and Robert—they’ve spent sixty-eight years with Walter De Maria’s art, which would be impressive under most circumstances, but given the crucial role that time plays in these creations, it’s really quite exceptional.
More at Art Lies.
Troy Brauntuch at Friedrich Petzel
It never occurred to me that Troy Brauntuch was one of the funny siblings of the Pictures Generation, but after visiting his latest show at Friedrich Petzel, a sprawling exhibition of drawings, paintings, letters, photographs and source material pulled from his more than 30-year career, I’ve come to see that…
More at frieze, but only if you’ve got a subscription.
Arcangel, Pinard, Routson at TEAM
Team Gallery’s mid-summer offering, ‘Arcangel, Pinard, Routson’, was as siloed a presentation as the show’s title: Cory Arcangel, Guillaume Pinard and Jon Routson – three new media artists from the gallery’s roster – on display together, separated by punctuation, without a conjunction to offer a through-line.
More at frieze.
Pennsylvania Station, Again
Religious rhetoric often seems to find its way into discussions of Moynihan Station, which makes a good deal of sense if one subscribes to the notion that, in the historical schema of civic architecture, grand cathedrals were replaced by train terminals and post offices. Moynihan Station involves both: Its most current iteration calls for the construction of a railroad station inside of the eastern half of Farley Post Office, which would then be known as Moynihan Station.
More at the Gotham Gazette.
Tunnel Vision
The largest transit public works project in the country held its groundbreakingceremony on the western shore of the Hudson River just two months ago. The Mass Transit Tunnel, the venture’s third name in 15 years, is a fully-funded $8.7 billion trans-Hudson rail link connecting the west side of Manhattan to northern New Jersey.
More at the Gotham Gazette.
Jay Walder Comes Home
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority needs to find at least $15 billion to fund its next capital plan, debt service on previously issued bonds continues to climb exponentially, and pension costs are skyrocketing. More than 8 million people depend on MTA services each day, and state legislators seem to prefer charging the authority with mismanagement and malfeasance to really grappling with its serious fiscal problems. It couldn’t have said all of that in the job posting that Jay Walder recently answered, but a man of his experience no doubt knew what he was getting into.
Read more in the Gotham Gazette.
The Counter-Intuitive Traffic Curative
After Mayor Bloomberg launched a pilot program to see if Times Square could kick its car habit, the nice people at UrbanOmnibus asked me what I thought about the City’s plan:
While it’s exciting that Broadway’s redesign is busy shouting to New York City what was whispered to Kevin Costner’s character in Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come,” what’s more thrilling from a transportation perspective is that the redesign might also be convincing people of the inverse: If you take it away, they will go.
More at UrbanOmnibus.
A Letter from the Editor of Exotic Beast Dealer Monthly
Dearest Beast Dealers:
Today I write to you with sadness in my heart and hunger in my belly. Times are tough, money is tight, and people are no longer buying vicious, hybrid animals.
Those of you who have been in this trade as long as I have no doubt remember the last great downturn: When Miami’s “Cocaine Cowboy” days came to an end, and dozens of Komodo Tiger dealers shut their doors, leaving the residents of southern Florida without a place to purchase gigantic, bloodthirsty lizard-tiger crossbreeds.
More at Mc Sweeney’s.
Car Chases: Not Like What You See in the Movies
I was out walking the dog and came upon a horrible multi-car crash. A few questions later, I was reporting on an alleged NYPD cover-up of a deadly high-speed chase.
You can read the series at StreetsBlog.
Bike-Share in NYC
Tens of thousand of bikes could be headed to city streets, making New York City New Amsterdam all over again. That’s the message some advocates see in “Bike-Share: Opportunities in New York City,” a study released yesterday by the Department of City Planning.
More at the Gotham Gazette.
For Sale: Harbor View, Needs Work
THE West Bank Lighthouse stands about three miles east of New Dorp Beach on Staten Island. From there, in the view to the north, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge seems delicately placed on the horizon.
A foghorn wails at passing ships, and two lights beam from the top of the 70-foot-high lighthouse, whose tower resembles nothing so much as a giant spark plug.
More at the New York Times.
Guy de Cointet
Guy de Cointet’s I Smoke all the Time (1983) is a drawing in red ink and an admission in delicate pencil. It is also a ciphered rendering of that titular sentence – the eponymous words buried in the interlocking mountains, valleys, snowlines, church steeples and windows that seem the work’s subject matter. Of course, I Smoke all the Time might also be a fire (where there is smoke, after all); the lines are so stacked, so red, and so pyrrhic. It’s most certainly a confession, too. But whose? Is it made in jest? Out of frustration? With a wink or a nod?
And so we’re left to wring our hands and wonder – as Polonius must have when young Hamlet went on and on about the oddly insightful clouds above – how all the meanings are there in the symbols, floating in a disjointed conversation between shapes, circumstances and cohabitating narratives.
More at frieze.
Recessional Aesthetics
It is somewhat fitting that art historians Hal Foster and David Joselit would discuss ‘recessional aesthetics’ at X, a new, not-for-profit space provisionally housed in a four-storey Chelsea warehouse that was once home to Dia Center for the Arts.
The building − vacant since soon after Dia moved its permanent collection to Beacon, New York in 2003 − was sold a year and a half ago, but the current economic climate has prevented the new owners from finding a long-term tenant. As a result, gallerist Elizabeth Dee and some like-minded cohorts were granted the space to host X until next spring, after which its fate is uncertain. Thus, the recession created the possibility for X. This is exactly the kind of market-spurred possibility that was at the core of last Thursday’s discussion, titled ‘Recessional Aesthetics: New Publics or Business as Usual’.
More at frieze.
Notes from the Underlings
I have asked around and it’s safe to say that my young friends and I are sick of reading about the downturn’s upside; tired of hearing middle-aged critics and established artists offer a spoonful of it’s-good-for-art sugar to help the medicine go down. For those of us most susceptible to the market’s illness, that tincture tastes terrible, and anyone who says otherwise is in the midst of an inoculated haze.
More at frieze.
‘Obama, Pave Atlantic Avenue’
THE old New Deal helped shape today’s New York. Its dollars financed the construction of such enduring building blocks of the city as La Guardia Airport, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the Lincoln Tunnel, along with countless schools, hospitals, courthouses, post offices, police stations and firehouses throughout the five boroughs.
What lies ahead for the city and the nation has been called a new New Deal, and with good reason. The economic stimulus package proposed by Barack Obama, whose inauguration is on Tuesday, calls for the creation of at least three million jobs by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the nation’s aging infrastructure.
People from around the country have been offering suggestions on what they hope to see from this and other aspects of an Obama presidency, and New Yorkers too are weighing in.
Will today’s New York see the same kind of transforming changes from this new New Deal as it did from Roosevelt’s? Only time will tell. But to get a sense of what items are on local wish lists, The City asked a sampling of New Yorkers about what they think the city needs most from President-elect Obama’s stimulus plan.
One wants a new Federal Writers’ Project; another, better schools and hospitals in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Brooklyn. Several people defined infrastructure in the broadest possible way — to include, for example, Wi-Fi zones.
These are the needs of New York, as New Yorkers see them.
More at the New York Times.
Paying for Transit: Fares or Fees, Tolls or Taxes?
With the Metropolitan Transportation Authority less than one month away from having to pass a balanced operating budget for fiscal year 2009 and more than $1.2 billion short of the mark, plans to fill the gap and provide sustainable sources of revenue are almost as plentiful as the doom-and-gloom adjectives newspapers use to describe the authority’s finances.
More at the Gotham Gazette.
Smokey and the Truckers
ACROSS the scalloped counter, over the backs of red vinyl booths, between bites of charbroiled hamburgers and spoonfuls of minestrone, the talk, in almost every imaginable accent of American English as well as in Spanish, Greek and Polish, is often of trucking.
Such has been the case since the Clinton Diner opened in 1935 atop a small triangle of land in Maspeth, Queens, formed by the intersection of Rust Street, Maspeth Avenue and 57th Place.
More at the New York Times.
Meredyth Sparks: We were strangers for too long
Ian Curtis. Ian Curtis. Ian Curtis. I could type his name 100 more times and still not come close to approximating the obsession that fills so many galleries with images of Joy Division’s front-man turned tragic suicide story turned counterculture legend turned biopic star. As Dan Fox put it in these pages last year, when describing the nascent stages of exhibitions about music: ‘With each show announced, you can hear the chatter and clatter of curator and Rolodex: “I want that Christian Marclay video with the guitar tied to the truck and anything you can find with a picture of Ian Curtis on it, pronto!”’ It has reached the point where I have started thinking of Curtis as a kind of Alma Mahler-esque muse for the first decade of this century, in which case there were 11 images of Alma − sorry, Ian − on display at Elizabeth Dee for Meredyth Sparks’ first New York solo show, ‘We Were Strangers for Too Long’.
More at frieze.
In the Likely Event of my Posthumous Fame
My birth, death, and high-school graduation should be celebrated with a feast, a day of mourning, and a Sadie Hawkins dance, respectively.
The feast should have a “me” theme. My favorite foods—turkey sandwiches, half-sour pickles, popcorn, and strawberry-rhubarb pie—ought to be available in abundance. Please avoid serving cold soups. I find the thought of them hideous. Also, there should be a kids’ table where little brothers sit.
More at McSweeney’s.
Painting the Town
WHEN the artist Byron Kim saw workers repainting a small bridge near his studio in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, he was concerned. “I watched them painting it Deep Cool Red,” he said, “and I kept thinking, did we pick the right color?”
Along with having an artist’s eye for particulars, Mr. Kim is one of 11 members of the city’s Public Design Commission (formerly the Art Commission). He and his colleagues review permanent works of art, architecture and landscaping proposed for city property. Picking the color of a city-owned bridge fits squarely in their vast domain.
More at the New York Times.
Wall Text From My Home
Shoes, 2008
LEATHER, RUBBER, LACES.
ON LOAN FROM THE CLOSET COLLECTION.
Shoes have been an integral part of Beck’s work since the 1980s. Although some of the earliest pairs have been preserved in bronze, most of the famous examples, including the Doc Martens he wore to a Meat Puppets show, have been thrown out in accordance with the wishes of his girlfriend.
Shoes, 2008 is a rare example of the “dress shoe” series. These pieces are characterized by high-gloss leather, stiff backs that chafe the ankle, and thin, blister-inducing soles. They tend to get used once every six months, when another one of his girlfriend’s 10,000 cousins gets married.
More at McSweeney’s.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Assistant
Behind every great artist there is an assistant. Or more accurately, behind the artists most often called “great” there are two, or twenty, or enough for a full-time accountant. Many of my friends are artist’s assistants. I worked as one. My girlfriend is an assistant; my sister is too. When I first became involved in this peculiar profession, I was struck by the variety of tasks collected under that one umbrella, but the art world is big, studio habits are varied, and methods of fabrication so specialized that the required labor is as diverse as its results. Depending on who you ask, being an artist’s assistant is a lot like being a friend, or a secretary, or a 19th-century factory worker. Wages range from paltry to lawyerly; work spaces from stately to slovenly to simply unsafe. Some spend their days in business-casual and others in coveralls, but what they all share is unfettered access to the personalities and studio workings that others only glean from CVs or biographical blurbs. There are stories of ungainly tantrums, eye-popping extravagance, clichéd eccentricity or profound compassion; these accounts are traded by artist’s assistants like baseball cards or bragged about like battle scars. It would be a gross understatement to say that it’s engaging to talk with assistants about their workdays; it’s often like hearing from a star-struck therapist freed from the binds of doctor-patient confidentiality.
More at The Brooklyn Rail.