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!
09 July 2010
Hartford/New Britain
Ran down to CT in the heat yesterday.
Visited Trinity on Main in New Britain. Gonna be putting up a show this coming spring hopefully. Might be sooner. Going to help with a show at the Mayor's gallery in New Britain this summer too.
Went to NBMAA after that. Great space. They are doing it right. Elana Herzog's works made of paper and fabric stapled to the wall were nice, but many of their paintings were what really got me excited. Tom Yost's Painter Hill Road is an excellent little landscape. Christopher Gallego's Interior with Three Rooms is another excellent realistic painting. It's exactly what it sounds like, a painting of a house's interior. Walton Ford's Fallen Mias (see above) is another stunner.
Headed up to the Wads-Ath to at least see the Matrix 159 show of Justin Lowe.
Can't say enough about this installation. He really used his chance in a museum to its full potential. The image above is from my cell phone, so it's hard to see, but this is the acid room, the 60's acid room if you ask me. The floor is a carpet of pulp horror novels, the walls are reflective, the windows are colored green and pinkish, the tv shows overlain with other acid movies, the paintings are composed from the novels in the floor. It's intense.
Next to that is a hallway that has a slide projector. This room did nothing for me, but that's ok, as it leads to the post acid, punk rock cocaine and beer CBGB's bathroom. It's a dark place and dangerous. Maybe the hallway was the aftermath of the free love era where one moves to northern Cali to grow your own food or Aspen to be free. Either way, the bathroom is what everyone seems to be talking about. It was too clean and smelled too good to be the real CBGB, but that's fine by me.
Next door to that is the 90's rave chill out room. The music Brooklyn hipsterish-- a mellow non-genre slog of noisy chillout. With the symmetrical video projector showing another set of videos mashed together, this felt overpoweringly content. Too content. Melting into the carpet content.
Hiding behind all this drug reference is a great site specificity. He reflected the museum by being era conscious and making period rooms, he brought a Jackson Pollock into CBGB's bathroom for example. He made lots of puns about what he included in each room that reflect on the Atheneum's holdings. Very smart show.
Glad I went. Any museum that has a strong contemporary tradition and a Rembrandt, Zurbaran, and a pair of Glotzious's (or is it Glotziouseses?) paintings is alright by me.
29 June 2010
How one might read modern art.
Everyone who might be slightly interested in Museums and/or art exhibitions has to watch the first 5ish minutes of this talk. Lowry is laying out a seriously important changes that are going on at the MoMA. Ann Temkin spoke at Harvard last month, and echoed these sentiments from her perspective as chief curator.
I've been reading the early history of the MoMA written for the 10th anniversary. I'm going to start writing about these years, but Lowry and Temkin both certainly know their history from what I've read already.
If you make it to 24 minutes in to Lowry's video you hear him talk about a subject I watched butchered at teh Fast Co. Wicked Pissah Bahston crap this morning. A portion of the conversation went as such: How does a Museum reach younger adults?
A: Their kids.
And kids coming off their school buses are the M-F daytime shift of art goers was what else I found out today! Man, I thought it was shifting your programing and understanding what non-AARP visitors need/want. So, if you know anyone at the MFA, let them hear that the MoMA dropped their average age from 55 to 40 years old by working with a younger audience that PS1 understood, not by forcing 30 somethings to bring their kids.
And speaking of twisting mom's arms, I guess I had more info about this than the speakers this morning, as I read this. Moms and kids are a complicated creature to court.
P.S. I just reread my Dürer review. I needed one more edit. I apologize.
I've been reading the early history of the MoMA written for the 10th anniversary. I'm going to start writing about these years, but Lowry and Temkin both certainly know their history from what I've read already.
If you make it to 24 minutes in to Lowry's video you hear him talk about a subject I watched butchered at teh Fast Co. Wicked Pissah Bahston crap this morning. A portion of the conversation went as such: How does a Museum reach younger adults?
A: Their kids.
And kids coming off their school buses are the M-F daytime shift of art goers was what else I found out today! Man, I thought it was shifting your programing and understanding what non-AARP visitors need/want. So, if you know anyone at the MFA, let them hear that the MoMA dropped their average age from 55 to 40 years old by working with a younger audience that PS1 understood, not by forcing 30 somethings to bring their kids.
And speaking of twisting mom's arms, I guess I had more info about this than the speakers this morning, as I read this. Moms and kids are a complicated creature to court.
P.S. I just reread my Dürer review. I needed one more edit. I apologize.
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