Brian D.'s Profile

10/15/2012

This is a good space. I went during the Art Walk and they had a Quisqueya Henriquez show will collages and prints: op-art lenticular effects, shimmery pixelated screen shots, digital renders of architectural fragments, sticky Rorschach-test paintings laid on top of some of the prints. She is taking some interesting ideas that other artists have explored in greater depth and putting them together in her own way. This isn't incredibly exciting but, honestly, that's what most art is and at least Quisqueya Henriquez has a nose for what's relevant.

Tip: Don't even look at the press releases. The pretention is over-the-top. You will gag.

6/29/2013

One of new York's top galleries. I always like going here. I'd give them five stars but I really did not appreciate their latest show, of new sculptures by Jeff Koons.
It was very fancy birdbaths--all white plaster casts, each with a mirrored blue orb perched somewhere on it. The suite of sculptures mixed a range of visual references, from a copy of a famous old Hercules statue to a rather plain birdbath to the kind of inflatable snowman you'd see on a front lawn around Christmastime. Koons likes to even everything out--good taste or bad taste, it all ends up as lawn decorations.

It's the expense that matters. Money is what makes all these things (from various socioeconomic contexts) essentially the same, it's money that gave them the same color and texture. The more money there is, the less difference. The more money you have the less there is that's unavailable to you. Koons's work is about this, and about how it works for him as an artist--how there's no material that can resist his vision because he can do anything with his touch. Like the delicate crinkles along the seams of the inflatable snowman--these are miraculously still visible, but hardened, permanent, and dead when cast in plaster. And the orbs twist the reflection of the people who look into them, everyone becomes a warped bluish shadow. In the twenty-first century the distinction between high and low culture doesn't matter anymore--and why should it?--but Koons keeps shoving it in your face, he likes to remind you that it used to be there, until money made it go away. He likes to remind us of the meaninglessness or arbitrariness of taste. Taste is one of the five senses. Taste is a bodily response, and it's personal--it's each of us gives one or three or five stars in a review. But Koons hoards all the tastes for himself here, as the object of his vision, suffocating taste to death and shutting it away from the rest of us behind the immaculate, unimpeachable finish of his work.

Kitsch and desire and beauty and bad taste are all important subjects for art--but if you want to see an artist do them well you can just check out any of the three Paul McCarthy who has three shows up right now, in which he outdoes Jeff Koons in all of them. In his work there's life and it resists his vision, it resists the material, and that difference is where he finds art.

6/29/2013

A new space for Zwirner right next to the old one with a semi-domestic vibe--the entryway is narrow and carpeted, the door closes so tightly it makes a little sucking noise and you feel hermetically sealed inside, and there are warmly earthy wood and stone materials/colorings. There's a second floor and when I went up the stairs I felt like I might stumble across the master bedroom but no, just the office. I imagine that the buildings Zwirner's clients build for showing off their collections look a lot like this one. The shows i've seen here are all classic stuff--Judd, Flavin, Serra, Blinky Palermo--and it looks good here. Hard to complain!

6/25/2013

I had never heard of this gallery before but several people told me that the Albert York show there was a must-see and so I went to check it out. I hardly even ever go to galleries on the Upper East Side but maybe I should do it more because being situated in townhouses they tend to have a very relaxed, homie vibe, that the big boxes in Chelsea lack. This is especially true at Davis & Langdale where the floors are a dark and uneven old parquet, and when you go to the basement to see the second half of the exhibition there's a door open into the workshop, revealing a wall hung with frames--the heart of the operation, exposed! When I was there a little boy was drawing in his sketchbook, and the elderly people who run the gallery were walking around the space and talking about the show ("These paintings are hung low, aren't they?" "It's a little late for that") and even though they weren't related I felt as if I'd walked in on a family gathering. As for the exhibition the paintings were incredibly delicious. Albert York used very forceful physical brushstrokes to make simple, fresh, compositions and there's a satisfying tension to how it all comes together... you can see how the paint was applied and it looks like the painter added paint from the outside as the image itself emerged from within--from within the paint or the surface or the painter's imagination (which is organically fused with the surface), I don't know, but it's amazing. Amazing! For example, there's one landscape with a long brown snake slithering along the bottom. It's just a green space with some ordinary deciduous trees, not a jungle where you would expect to see a huge snake, and yet there the snake is, its sinewy curves looking right at home in their natural habitat of S-curve brushstrokes. In another painting a cartoonish, scribbled-in alligator grins out at you from under a patch of bushes. I can't remember the last time I felt really excited about a still life with flowers but in York's floral paintings each petal is every bit as surprising as an alligator or a snake. Unfortunately this show will be closing soon but I plan to follow up and see what this gallery is showing in the future.

10/15/2012

This is a special museum. The first time I came here, which was in 2006, I was really excited about a collection that combined contemporary art, folk art and applied art from different parts of the world, and painting from the first half of American history. It almost exoticizes painting and "the fine arts" by featuring paintings from when the medium was still developing in America while making the work from the southern hemispheres and Native American societies that is usually exoticized feel like the mainstream tradition of the world's art.

On a recent visit, in September, I didn't enjoy myself as much. Maybe it was because the composition of the collection was less of a surprise or a novelty, or maybe it was because some of my favorite pieces had been rotated out of the permanent display. One thing that really bothered me was a temporary exhibition of the Paley collection--a private collection assembled in the mid-twentieth century that belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA is a good place for it: it includes works by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Cezanne, Derain... all the big names who figure in the standard history of modern painting and sculpture. Seeing it at the DeYoung felt weird, because this is a history that the museum's permanent collection ignores. The fact that these works were assembled by a private collector, the large-format photographs of the paintings hanging in the Paleys' home, and the exhibition's title, "A Taste for Modernism," made it seem like an exhibition about interior design--an appropriate theme for the De Young, given its focus on applied art, but it seems like the wrong way to handle these masterworks. In general, I don't like exhibitions of private collections because it becomes about the collectors--not the work of the painters but the money that bought all of it. Sometimes when I'm at major museums I find myself thinking about the structure of the art market and its influence on museum displays, and I like the De Young because it engages a wider variety of art's social contexts and economies. The exhibition of a private collection of modernist masterpieces makes me concerned about the direction the museum is taking, and this is a fairly young museum so it's vulnerable to missteps.

It was hard for me to choose between three and four stars for me personally, but I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from coming for at least one visit, so I'll give it four.

7/31/2012

I saw a summer group show here and it was basically the ideal summer group show: very smartly put together with works in all sorts of mediums. One or maybe two works were "outsider-ish" (i.e. hard to sell), and all of them could be related to a single keyword (in this case, PLANTS) that has a loose relationship to a broader issue (ecology) and also a buzzy philosophical trend (object-oriented ontology). Shows like this are great if you are looking for stuff to buy but otherwise they don't bring a lot of insight into the work. Overall I had an average gallery experience here, not very exciting but not bad either.

2/8/2013

This gallery features all Korean artists. When I visited they had a group show: "Permeated Perspective: Young Korean Painters." It was organized to look like a museum exhibition, with a nice brochure on heavy stock and everything. I personally was not impressed. For one thing, I couldn't figure out what about the perspective was "permeated." It all looked like regular old perspective to me. Even when the painters were mixing traditions of Asian ink painting with Western styles it looked way less flattened and squashed than the Korean stuff I've seen at the Met. One of the artists made ink portraits of Bond villains and other movie characters in a semi-traditional style. Another did contemporary interiors where the brush strokes were softened for some depth and domestic warmth. She was my favorite in the show, but even she couldn't move beyond gimmickry in her approach to painting and her subject matter. I wonder why when Chelsea has so many galleries showing artists from all over the world, Doosan needs to pigeonhole itself and its artists as specifically Korean, even to the point of limiting its show concepts to national origin.