19 July 2010
Steffen Schleiermacher
Also, feel free to use the comments section at Big Red and Shiny to tell me that my review was (insert angry internet criticism here). Or that you think Steffen is a crap pianist. Isn't that what the internet is for?
Another 10 hours of my life on Rt. 84
New York. Lots of art spaces to root around in. Visited again this week.
New museum's Brion Gysin show was excellent and I ran into a friend from undergrad that I haven't seen in years. This show was a disappointment for me in some ways, and completely what I wanted in others. The good news first, much of his important work from his career is shown here. The bad news, it is way too crowded for the amount of work and is a pared down show compared to the retrospective shown in the town he spent his childhood, Edmonton Canada, in 1998. If you want to learn a ton about his life and career, buy the book from Edmonton, and go to this show to see the works in person if you can get to NY at all. It's well worth it.
The reason I have to complain about the way the work was put up is that a lot of his work is very loud and chaotic. If it overlaps, you can not escape the other stuff happening in the other room. His work was mostly composed in solitude, and is very hard to find in private or public collections. This is truly an important show to see if you are interested in the artists who had no interest in Greenberg, minimalism, conceptualism, etc. He was an outsider of sorts. His work presaged a whole other way of working that was related to anything in the mainstream of art history in the 50/60/70's.
The surprise in store for me at the New Museum was Rivane Neuenschwander. She may not be an household name, but I think her work deserves this mid-career retrospective. Her work is massively influential in her native country, Brazil, and is better known in Europe. I appreciate the ephemeral nature of her work and how smart the work shown is. She creates new and accessible objects, or installations, but their immediacy, their lack of large historic critical myths is what makes me love them. It is refreshing after seeing so much conceptually driven work in Boston.
After the Storm (scroll down most the way) is one of the new works on display. The newer works do not show the influence of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, her metaphorical Brazilian artistic parents. Instead of being an experience, a video of an experimental moment, or an installation, it is a collection of 12 maps of NY's counties that have been left out in the rain to decompose. Then they are drawn and painted on. It's an object, but still requires you to pay attention to the ephemeral and non-restraint involved in the making of the work. The maps have all but been eliminated by the artist losing authority (author-ness) in the beginning stages of the creation process.
I moved on to Chelsea. Saw a pile of galleries with just one piece in it worth talking about, so I'll skip them.
The Graffiti NYC: Artists of the Third Rail was stuck in one generation of graffiti. They were nice enough to let me charge my phone and the DJ was excellent, but it wasn't the historical show about the growth of writing in NY that I hoped it was. It is always worth seeing that era. I hope it doesn't get forgotten in this mass-market driven hip hop light world we live in now. These guys lived it. Well worth seeing the paintings and the photographs of early hip hop pioneers.
Kaleidoscopic Adventures at Blank Space was cool. I was too tired by the time I got to see Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham to appreciate the work, but I'll see his show at Portland Museum next year.
The Hans Op de Beeck show at Marianne Boesky was interesting. I'm not sure what to think about these large watercolors. They might be greeting cards done large, or they might be just fantastic oversized explorations of single themes like absence and presence or the often explored memory. But I like them and they stayed with me for days now.
The real reason I went down was to see the IPCNY summer show. My friend Deborah Chaney (printer at Gowanus) was a juror and wrote the essay for the show. The gallery was a milllllion degrees and louder than anything should be without amplifiers. But, the show is excellent. Heat is such a nebulous idea to jury, but hey, I didn't have to make those calls!
New museum's Brion Gysin show was excellent and I ran into a friend from undergrad that I haven't seen in years. This show was a disappointment for me in some ways, and completely what I wanted in others. The good news first, much of his important work from his career is shown here. The bad news, it is way too crowded for the amount of work and is a pared down show compared to the retrospective shown in the town he spent his childhood, Edmonton Canada, in 1998. If you want to learn a ton about his life and career, buy the book from Edmonton, and go to this show to see the works in person if you can get to NY at all. It's well worth it.
The reason I have to complain about the way the work was put up is that a lot of his work is very loud and chaotic. If it overlaps, you can not escape the other stuff happening in the other room. His work was mostly composed in solitude, and is very hard to find in private or public collections. This is truly an important show to see if you are interested in the artists who had no interest in Greenberg, minimalism, conceptualism, etc. He was an outsider of sorts. His work presaged a whole other way of working that was related to anything in the mainstream of art history in the 50/60/70's.
The surprise in store for me at the New Museum was Rivane Neuenschwander. She may not be an household name, but I think her work deserves this mid-career retrospective. Her work is massively influential in her native country, Brazil, and is better known in Europe. I appreciate the ephemeral nature of her work and how smart the work shown is. She creates new and accessible objects, or installations, but their immediacy, their lack of large historic critical myths is what makes me love them. It is refreshing after seeing so much conceptually driven work in Boston.
After the Storm (scroll down most the way) is one of the new works on display. The newer works do not show the influence of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, her metaphorical Brazilian artistic parents. Instead of being an experience, a video of an experimental moment, or an installation, it is a collection of 12 maps of NY's counties that have been left out in the rain to decompose. Then they are drawn and painted on. It's an object, but still requires you to pay attention to the ephemeral and non-restraint involved in the making of the work. The maps have all but been eliminated by the artist losing authority (author-ness) in the beginning stages of the creation process.
I moved on to Chelsea. Saw a pile of galleries with just one piece in it worth talking about, so I'll skip them.
The Graffiti NYC: Artists of the Third Rail was stuck in one generation of graffiti. They were nice enough to let me charge my phone and the DJ was excellent, but it wasn't the historical show about the growth of writing in NY that I hoped it was. It is always worth seeing that era. I hope it doesn't get forgotten in this mass-market driven hip hop light world we live in now. These guys lived it. Well worth seeing the paintings and the photographs of early hip hop pioneers.
Kaleidoscopic Adventures at Blank Space was cool. I was too tired by the time I got to see Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham to appreciate the work, but I'll see his show at Portland Museum next year.
The Hans Op de Beeck show at Marianne Boesky was interesting. I'm not sure what to think about these large watercolors. They might be greeting cards done large, or they might be just fantastic oversized explorations of single themes like absence and presence or the often explored memory. But I like them and they stayed with me for days now.
The real reason I went down was to see the IPCNY summer show. My friend Deborah Chaney (printer at Gowanus) was a juror and wrote the essay for the show. The gallery was a milllllion degrees and louder than anything should be without amplifiers. But, the show is excellent. Heat is such a nebulous idea to jury, but hey, I didn't have to make those calls!
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