Brian D.'s Profile

9/29/2013 Updated review

I was walking down 23rd street thinking about how it's too bad Paula Cooper closed her little space near the corner of 23rd and 10th Ave, because so many galleries are expanding these days, it's a shame Paula Cooper scaled back because it really is the best gallery in Chelsea--and then just an hour later, I was walking up 10th Ave and noticed a new gallery I hadn't seen before, and it's Paula Cooper space that just opened two weeks ago! I didn't even know when I walked in--I just saw on the window that they were showing Alan Shields, whose work I had just read about that morning, without knowing there was a show of it in Chelsea. Serendipity upon serendipity! The show is really amazing--it is some kind of totemic, shamanistic free-spirited assemblages, the best "hippie art" I've ever seen. (Coming to it straight from the Anne Truitt show at Matthew Marks makes poor Anne look so pathetically boring.) One piece I really loved was a huge tapestry, with a fabric that looked like it had been tie-dyed in a rusty blood red, and the color richly saturated the textile and made illusionary folds and fissures all over it--it looked like skin from the inside. Beads and strings were strung across it, in bright and pastel colors and some pieces with a metallic sheen that seemed like a weird combo with this rich crimson cloth but that just makes the throbbing of the surface more magical.

I read on the web site that this space will be open through January 2014--so catch it while you can!

10/22/2013

Color me paradoxical but the art museum feels like the least snooty place on the Princeton campus--not that that's saying much. The entrance is very relaxed, because you don't have to pay to get in, and you don't even have to pay for a locker to store your bag--just ask for a key in the store. The front gallery is like a cozy parlor of artworks, crowded with post-war masterpieces arranged in a circle--I was really impressed by a painting with big scraps of fabric applied to the canvas. It was Conrad di Marca Relli, who I'd never heard of before but was glad to learn about.

American and European art is in the "upper galleries" whereas African, Asian and Native American art is in the "lower galleries," which sounds racist at first, but actually the low-ceiling, darker galleries of the basement level are better for the cool curio-cabinet set up they have down there, with all of these glass cases packed with specimens. I was particularly intrigued by a Mayan display that included figurines of men who were bound, hanged, and tortured displayed alongside instruments of cock/ball torture. Usually when you see the usual old ritual masks or Greek and Roman pottery and busts (all of which are here in abundance, by the way) you feel like you know what they were for and why they were made, but with these things bursted with an enigmatic energy of long-dead sadists.

Upstairs, some of the galleries have low comfy black leather couches in them, inviting you to sit down and spend a while looking closely at a painting. I'm a sucker for couches in museums. If you want me to look at a painting for a long time.. hang it in front of a couch!! I ended up gazing at a Willem de Kooning, a Toulouse-Latrec, and a John Singer Sargent--all artists who I'm not crazy about but, since they had couches, I went for it. I can't say I felt any revelations while doing so but had a good time nonetheless.

I really enjoyed a temporary exhibition titled "New Jersey as Non-Site" that looked at art made over the last few decades in New Jersey, which you wouldn't ordinarily think of as an art-making place but lots of amazing stuff has come out of it--mostly by artists who were living in New York and were just going there for some fresh air, or quarries and abandoned houses, but still. Did you know that two members of Fluxus used to have weekly meetings at a Howard Johnson in New Brunswick? And they organized a YAM festival in Jersey? I also liked learning about the artistic community that Amiri Baraka cultivated in Newark. There was all sorts of interesting art stuff happening in New Jersey--and you could say that there still is now, at the Princeton University Art Museum.