Brian D.'s Profile

4/23/2012

Family Business is a new gallery. I wish I could say it looked promising. When I went in mid-April there were at least a hundred works on display in a tiny space, crammed so tightly that it was hard to look at anything. When I did manage to focus my attention on a single piece it was weak, undergrad-level work.

There are dozens of places in Chelsea to see decent art in favorable installation conditions. Don't waste your time here.

2/6/2012

Last month I went to Foxy Production to see a show by Michael Wang. I had read some of the articles he wrote for Artforum and other art magazines and he seemed like a smart and cool guy so I was curious to see his art. The show was called "Carbon Copies" and it was a series of sculptures. Each sculpture was made out of carbon and its dimensions were determined by the amount of CO2 that was emitted to create a certain artwork, the appearance of which was reflected by details in the sculpture. So, one of the big ones was based on Richard Serra Torqued Ellipse and it was a cube with a torqued ellipse cut out of the middle. I thought it was a great show. It combined two kinds of work that are super boring--art about art, art about environmental issues--and made a really interesting, good-looking show. Quite an achievement! When I looked at the checklist I saw the prices of the sculptures were in the low three figures, with a couple under $100. This was really exciting for me because I always go to Chelsea without expecting to see any art I can actually afford. I wanted to buy one of Michael Wang's sculptures! I asked if any were still available. The dealer said no--the whole series had been sold together as an installation, and the objects were never meant to be sold separately anyway. They were priced that way conceptually--each price is fixed at 1 dollar per 1.1 negative tons of carbon offset. Not sure exactly what that means, but in any case, the experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth. If that's the way the prices work, maybe they could be written with pen and ink on some nice paper and hung on the wall, so people would get that it's part of the installation. That way the gallery wouldn't confuse or let anyone down. Just a suggestion.

I was going to give Foxy Production three and a half stars but I guess there's no way to award a half star. So only three.

10/15/2012

Very classy. With wooden floors, gray walls, and low lighting, it's set up more like a small private museum than the average photography gallery.

The exhibition up when I visited juxtaposed paintings and pastels by Charles Burchfield and photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard from the 60s and 70s. I really enjoyed the pairing--they were two idiosyncratic takes on the pastoral genre, and Burchfield's washy brushstrokes and folk-art compositions were tempered by the eerie effects of splintering and shattering in Meatyard's prints.

In the back there is a showroom, which on my visit had a selection of works by Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Fraenkel shares a floor of an office building with several other photography galleries but clearly stands far above the crowd.

3/22/2013

This museum is sooo random! I was there today and I heard a docent telling her tour group that "there was no acquisitions policy written down" until 1951 and I was like, no shit lady. The Fricks were just buying whatever struck their fancy and now New York has this weird museum celebrating them and their whims. I guess it's useful for figuring out your taste in painting, because there is such a weird mix--without any kind of chronological or historical narrative to rely on--that it's really up to you to decide what's worth looking at and how you should look at it. Though there is a free audio guide.. but audio guides are for dweebs.

And there is a lot to like here. For instance, I LIVE for Holbein the Younger and the portrait of Thomas Cromwell is absolutely radiant. I also am obsessed with the two Turner paintings of the northern European port cities, with orange waters and yellow skies. The Cologne one has a puppy drinking from the Rhine. It's nice that they have big couches under each Turner to rest on and look around. Each would be ideal for resting in while looking at the Turner on the opposite wall... BUT in the middle of the gallery there's a table with some decorative statuettes on it, so if you try to look at the opposite Turner there is a centaur abducting a woman and blocking your view (so instead you have to look a little to your left, at Margareta Snyder, an old Dutch lady who had to wear a huge collar so she wouldn't bite her stitches). The centaur is additionally annoying because, like most of the Frick's decorative arts, it's just a tacky expensive tchotchke. Other "highlights" of the applied arts include nymphs on a clock and two porcelain geishas who look like they're high.

Let's get real--some of the paintings are pretty bad too. Like the Goya portrait of a military officer who has this smug-but-insecure hipster look on his face (which, I'll admit, is weird in a good way--but certainly not a significant work as far as Goyas go), or Manet's big pastel-colored scene of a mother and her two little girls, all of whom look like stupid dolls, and the only dark color is their spooky eyes, which are gawking at something off the canvas.. what the hell is it? I actually don't even care. Also don't care about the big boring French paintings with lots of dark trees, none of which are even Poussins.

The moral of this story is, if you have obscene amounts of cash you can buy whatever art and knickknacks you like and put them in your Fifth Avenue mansion, and that's fine. But it's overly pretentious to assume that other people need to see it just the way you left it.. it's better to donate it to the Met or the National Gallery and let the curators make sense of it. But I can see why Henry might have had some immortality issues with a name like Frick.

9/15/2013

Sometimes I think that putting a group of paintings of the same size at the same height on a gallery's wall is a boring way to hang an exhibition. But shows like Charline von Heyl's are a good reminder that this is only the case when the art is boring! (and complicated installation techniques are often only compensating for the art.) She is my favorite living painter and this new work at Petzel Gallery is truly remarkable, with gaunt-yet-bold palettes--pink, gray, pale green in one, black, yellow and purple in another and so on--and the hints of figuration and patterning that always invite some kind of identification or familiarity but never satisfy it, because it stays on the hint level. What I really love about von Heyl's paintings is that when you stand back and observe them they look so complex and layered, with otherworldly depth and aura, but if you look close up you can see there's nothing particularly mystifying or ghostly about the way she paints. The brushstrokes are evident, there's nothing that hides her hand. You can see the roughness, dare I say clumsiness, of the painting's application, and the marks of the palette knife where she cuts the paint into shapes, where applicable. It's just something about the way she combines all the elements to produce an organic whole that is breathtakingly brilliant. The one thing technique-wise that remained a mystery to me was the scratchmarks on one painting; the checklist said there was charcoal among the meida so I asked the guy at the desk if the artist had scratched into the surface of the dried painting with a knife or something, or if that was just what the charcoal looked like when it was drawn on. He didn't know, so he went to ask the director, but the director was in a meeting. He said I could email him with the question and he'd get back to me, which was very nice of him, but I doubt I will. It's not that important anyway.. just curious!
I'm going to pretend I didn't see the Allan McCollum exhibition in the small gallery--Allan McCollum is always a snoozefest, this show even moreso than usual, which I didn't think was possible--and the Charline von Heyl show is so excellent, I don't want to bring this review down.

10/16/2013

Midtown never ceases to amaze me. I tend to avoid it but when I do go there I always come across some weird surprise. Granted, this time it wasn't such a surprise because it was what I was looking for--but surprising nonetheless. In a nondescript building on Madison Ave., on the fourth floor (up a very large stairwell that could only have been built before WWII, and had the wooden bannisters to match, but also some hideous burgundy carpeting from the 70s) is a small art gallery called Front Desk Apparatus, which has apparently been there since 2006, though I'd never heard of it until recently, when it had an exhibition of work by Carissa Rodriguez that I wanted to see.

The works were all small things or small gestures made in the space of the gallery, like a set of four slender fluorescent bulbs installed in a square around an empty light fixture. A rack of post cards featured (among other cards) photos of the works on display in other places. One shelf had a few unevenly shaped ceramic cylinders, the kind of thing you'd make in seventh-grade art class when you're supposed to produce a mug, but they were studded with rows of razor blades. So it's humble and threatening at once. One was upside down (or right-side up, if it's a cup), so you could see it was hollow. I gently tilted another one just to see if it was light as I expected, and it was, so it was surely hollow too. The way the shelf was set up made--the one glimpse into the unglazed belly of the ceramics, and the prickly garden of razors that were just barely planted into the glaze of the clay on the outside--really made me curious about the inside and the outside of the things, and left me with a sense that boundaries between the surface and interior aren't necessarily where I'd think they would be.

Art installed in a gallery office can be an awkward situation, and usually I just won't bother going up for a close look unless I know someone who is working there. Otherwise it's like you're intruding in their personal space and interrupting their work. But at Front Desk Apparatus I glimpsed a big print of a tongue on the office's back wall and decided to venture in for a look. I was glad I did. After passing the partition that blocked off the work area on my way toward the print I discovered that the guy working there was really hot (but not in an intimidating way) and he was happy to answer my questions and offer more information about the work. The print was a big photo of the artist's tongue, and she'd had her dermatologist write on it in a marker about the various health problems that aspects of the tongue indicated--the raw white and red spots that showed she'd been eating poorly, etc. What really blew my mind was the note that these scalloped ridges around the tongue's edge indicate problems with the spleen. This lump of flesh in the gateway to the inside of our bodies is relatively far away from the internal organs of the gut yet it is totally connected to them and the shape of it changes dependent on their condition. Bodies are wild.

7/31/2012

I had heard a lot about The Future Gallery before I came to Berlin and was excited to visit it. I'm sorry to say that I was disappointed. Both of the exhibitions I saw there were weak. Jennifer Chan's exhibition had a jumble of works that looked like they were based on trendy motifs I had seen elsewhere--plants, a pool of water, a printed list of unused URLs--but I couldn't figure out why these motifs had been brought in here. The most interesting part was the video, about two dudes Skyping and then ordering a pizza. It was hard to tell what they were saying but I guess the sound was fuzzy on purpose and I was OK with that. The "climax," so to speak, featured a guy in a pizza-print shirt jerking off and ejaculating on the shirt. You don't see a lot of penises in video art, especially not in such long explicit shots. Watching it was uncomfortable (and not just because it was a mediocre penis, lol) so if Jennifer Chan was trying to disrupt the male gaze or whatever I would have to say that she succeeded. More importantly, I liked the connections between that part of the video and the homosocial intimacy of the two guys Skyping and sharing pizza, and how it suggested ideas about contemporary masculinity, youth culture, and internet culture.

At least Jennifer Chan's exhibition was trying to communicate something and engage ideas. The second show I saw at Future Gallery was intellectually empty. There were some elaborately tie-dyed textiles and glass fixtures that looked like they came straight from Home Depot--gestures about materiality and transparency that (as was the case with Jennifer Chan's non-video works) seemed familiar from elsewhere but were not fully conceptualized or convincingly executed here. At the opening the gallery was serving a Turkish gum that was flavorless--you just chewed and chewed and it didn't release any taste. This seemed like a bad choice on Future Gallery's because it was too easy to take the refreshments as an unflattering commentary on the work.

Maybe I just hit a couple of duds. I think it's great that The Future Gallery is committed to working with artists who don't have much of an exhibition history and lets them try out new things. But I feel like there are so many young artists in Berlin and elsewhere that it could do better. Perhaps developing more group shows would be a good idea, because those can cover up weaknesses that solo shows expose.