Brian D.'s Profile

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.

3/5/2014

The Queens Museum recently opened an expanded space and it looks fantastic. The old galleries had an awkward shape. The panorama totally dominated everything, being so much bigger and taller than everything else, and the main galleries were just filling it out in a square. The exaggerated height and curved walls tapering into narrow corners were just completing the building, not serving the interests of displaying artwork.

But the new galleries, in a former ice rink, are spacious and rectangular and very amenable to displaying all kinds of art. The NYC watershed map and tiffany glass collection (which always seemed like somewhat odd companions for the contemporary art that the museum usually shows) are still around but separated from the other exhibits in a more coherent fashion. Now there's a permanent display of memorabilia from the World's Fair, which maybe had been in the museum before, but I had never noticed it in the old configuration. The old, oddly shaped galleries are still in use, but the way movement flows into them from the central court feels elegant and now the variety of spaces that they contribute to spices up the experience of the museum visit. On my last visit a rounded wedge-shaped gallery featured works by Cuban artists, highlighting the diversity of artistic communities on display at QMA that you don't always find at the big NYC museums. Upstairs in the education area there was a small collection of unlabeled works--a project that encourages people to look at art without consideration of names, a gesture I appreciated. There was a denim jacket with punk stuff painted all over the back that held my interest for a while, and a painting that I'm pretty sure was made by Philip Guston (not that it matters).

One of the exhibitions in the main space was the Queens International, a biennial exhibition featuring artists who live or work in Queens. There was a lot of good stuff here, and great variety. I won't go into detail about it but I remember one video piece with a hip hop soundtrack and a women shimmying around a kitchen in their underwear with hands duct-taped behind their backs that made my friend say "Art is the best!"

The real highlight for me though was the exhibition "Peter Schumann: The Shatterer," which is about the activity of the Bread and Puppet theater, which has been doing performances and participating in activist demonstrations since the 1960s. There are larger-than-life paper-mache puppets, masks, books... It's so richly textured and full material - i felt like I would walk around, take a look from another perspective, and see a whole other layer of drawings and objects that I hadn't noticed before. From nonsense words and stories to grotesque body shapes, pointed renderings of expressive gestures and wistfully dashed-off ephemeral fragments, the two big galleries are packed floor to ceiling with details that are all worth stopping and pondering. It's up through March 30, 2014, and I would urge any art lover to check it out.

All in all, the Queens Museum is great and keeps getting better. I feel proud to live in its borough.

6/13/2014

It wasn't so long ago when the Lower East Side galleries were the place to see delicate and minor works--drawings, photo collage, or little assemblages of whatever with garbage dangling off. But those days are quickly receding into the past as LES galleries move into bigger digs and put on more ambitious shows to hold onto the yougn artists they've been working with who want to make granger gestures. "More weight" by Sam Moyer at Rachel Uffner is exemplary of this trend. This is a heavy show indeed. I felt like I was at Paula Cooper!! Maybe it was even too heavy for me--Sam moyer's studies of stony textures is so cold, but tactile touches warmed it up. The main gallery is impressively vast and cave-like in its current dimly lit state, a great rock slab taking up most of the floor and a warm off-white luminescence from a stately marbled lightbox of commensurate size on the ceiling. It should be said that the architecture of the gallery itself, which is beautiful, lends a lot to the effects of the art, with white wooden beams, dark floors, a rich lived-in old feel to all the walls and materials. But what I liked best were the smaller works on the upper level, the unevenly cut small rock slabs jointed with textiles stretched on uneven frames. The ancient grooves of geological movement improvised with the quicker, newer lodes of dye in fabric, and what I liked best was how this play of texture and surface continued through the slanting skylight above, which showed the rise of the building next door and the winding paths of vines and cracks as if an extension of the works on view. Made me feel small, and light, in a good way.

8/16/2013

I did not expect to see ancient Egyptian artifacts in an artist-run gallery in Greenpoint but with Real Fine Arts, you never know. The first time through the gallery I didn't even know what they were, maybe just some outsider-y metallic sculptures inspired by the vitrines of poorly preserved and rusty everyday objects at the Met (seems like a lot of artists are interested in fake museum artifacts these days). Whenever I go to a gallery I always just look at the show first, then go back and consult the checklist later. So when I saw that they really were from Egypt I was amazed! Apparently you can buy these things on eBay. Even before I had learned that bit of information I thought it was a really good, very richly textured show, with various grades of reflectiveness and protruberance on each of the surfaces--paintings, collages, objects, etc. It was all enclosed by a gallery within a gallery, a tight and quiet temporary structure, and walking around it to get to the back in order to view a film on display involved passing through a narrow and dimly lit corridor. This contributed to the sense of these objects being located somewhere outside of time.

3/3/2013

While Red Lobster is a familiar entity to diners in the United States, a global superpower and an aggressive exponent of neoliberal ideology, I had never dined there until a recent Sunday afternoon. My companion, who had only visited Red Lobster facilities in central Pennsylvania, immediately remarked on the "upscale" self-presentation of this urban Red Lobster relative to the more casual atmospheres of the Pennsylvanian habitus. The dark wooden paneling and navy banquettes articulated one of interior design's discourses of authority in order to enact the effect of a "special experience," so apt for this particular outlet of the Red Lobster chain, located as it is in the belly of an outer-borough temple of consumption.

Visitors to Red Lobster often comment on the delight produced by the complimentary cheese biscuits. A basic and omnipresent food--bread--is presented in an alternative form--the biscuit--elaborated further by Red Lobster with the addition of cheese, a dairy product popular for its combination of creaminess and saltiness. Served warm, the cheese biscuits exude a coziness that illusorily eradicates the sensation of alienation of consumer to food endemic to the mass-market restaurant experience. While the cheese biscuits are free, the cost of their production is in fact hidden in the prices of the menu's paid items. A gift without a gift economy (Reb Lobster's manager would be surprised indeed should a customer offer something in reciprocation), their distribution is in actuality an augmentation of the capitalist practice of concealing rent and labor in the commodity form.

We shared two appetizers and one entrée, playfully subverting the standards of individualized gluttony through the implementation of a communal dining praxis. The Coconut Shrimp comprised plump prawns fried in a batter so fruity and sweet it may have passed for a dessert at a more avant-garde eatery rather than a starter at Red Lobster, especially when dipped in the accompanying pina-colada sauce. (The flavor was nearly indistinguishable from that of my beverage--a Malibu Hurricane--highlighting the transversal of gustatory stimulators across solid and liquid forms of nourishment.) The dish interrogated first-course conventions even while following them, a contradiction intensifying the appetizer experience: a frivolously crunchy fried finger-food whetting the appetite for more substantial fare as well as a cloying flavor experience that induces an immediate craving for a subsequent savory dish. We also ordered the Lobster Pizza, where chunks of shellfish swim in a creamy pool atop a crisp crust. The fusion of two cuisines--seafood and Italian-American--so popular in the New England dining milieu in which Red Lobster's branding strategy finds its genealogy was a clever move on Red Lobster's part, yet without vegetables or notable seasonings the blend was bland. The internal flaw undermining the fusion was revealed as the Lobster Pizza deconstructed itself on my tongue.

Our Signature Combination was comprised by barbecued shrimp, grilled scallops, and a bisected lobster tail. The trio of now-defunct crustaceans reconstituted life on the sea floor in a colorful array, jauntily organized in a loose triangle upon a broad oval platter. The lobster, a metonym of the institution itself, was suitably succulent, the bites of meat clinging to the edges of the shell much like the bodies of patrons lodged in the restaurant's booths. It showed us, with horrible vividness, how we consume lobster and how lobster consumes us. The garden salad, the cost of which was included in that of the Signature Combination, was utilized by me as palate cleanser, the tasteless iceberg lettuce offering a tepid respite from bites of butter-drenched fish flesh, but otherwise it was unworthy of comment.

All of these dishes were not only served but pictured on the menu, photographed with such glossy flair that, when the menu is placed beside a plate and opened to the page on which the dish is pictured, a passer-by could be forgiven for failing to distinguish the two with a quick glance. When the menu is on the table, the diner's gaze is bifurcated as it meets its objects of desire: the physical food and its photographic reproduction, an auratic potential meal that is just as--if not more--appealing than the real nourishment that sits before the diner. Thus Red Lobster maintains its customers in the gears of the engine of desire, inciting an appetite that can only be extinguished by death; the customer--always between yearning and satisfaction, hunger and satiety--wants to eternally return to ShrimpFests, CrabFests, and LobsterFests. Saddeningly, many Yelpers have succumbed to this spectacle, failing to adapt a truly critical optical in their reviews; they fixate on the centrality of the lobster itself rather than confronting it as a repertoire of practices and effects that increasingly lodges Red Lobster within the body.

6/13/2014

I didn't spend long at Jayson Musson's show here before leaving in disgust. This collection of truly terrible art is presented with a knowing sneer, making it an unfunny joke of a show that makes fun of everyone but the artist, when it's really he who should be the butt.

The walls feature some stupid abstract painintg: discrete pastel blobs  sitting flat on the surface, absolutely no movement or volume or life at all in them. These are just static ugly decoration. Scattered around the floor there are some cartoonish sculptures, which for all their real volume are so toy-like and boring they might as well be flat. It's all just a caricature of what some rich guy with childish tastes might put in his house. There are some screens in the front window and along the stair leading down from the front desk to the gallery with messages in a Comic-sans-looking font, saying things like "Art Museum Next Door!" "Exhibition of Modern Art!" and so on, which implicitly compares Salon 94 itself to those tables outside the Metropolitan Museum or MoMA selling souvenir prints and overpriced postcards--I took it as a rib at Salon 94 for (arguably, somewhat tackily) moving into a space right next door to the New Museum to heighten its own profile. I wonder, what was the conversation between artist and dealer like when this piece was proposed?!

A friend told me that I should check out the press release and learn about the critique that the artist was intentionally hiding in the work, but screw that. That would just be capitulating to the requirements of bad modern/conceptual art that the artist seems to hold in such low regard even as he is exploiting them to his own personal benefit in order to shit on viewers, collectors, dealers, other artists. There is nothing visually or physically interesting about this art world joke that would make it redeeming or sympathetic and I wish that, since the artist obviously hates art so much, he would just give up, go away, stop it, leave me alone.

5/8/2014

What a wonderful small museum! The name of their show of new acquisitions made me laugh--"Initial Public Offering," a nod to San Jose's status as the capital of Silicon Valley and a tech industry center, but there was nothing funny about the show itself--a remarkable group of works, each one an exciting use of materials and allowed room in the spacious first-floor galleries to have its charms felt from all sides. Two of the most memorable pieces for me were a totemic  figure by Tim Hawkinson, woven from cardboard with enormous mitts and no head, its crinkly stuffed body both forbidding and inviting to touch, and a large photograph by John Chiara, who as I learned drives around in a van that he converts into a camera and does long exposures, so some of the traces of the developing process appear as blurs and imperfections on the surface, which he cuts in irregular shapes. it was a shot of the ocean, dappled and sparkling with sunlight, huge and awkward and gorgeous. I had never heard of Hawkinson or Chiara before (or many of the artists in the collection) but I will keep an eye out for their work in the future! Appreciated the chance the San Jose museum gave me to learn about them.

The upper floor galleries had an exhibit about food an art--there were some nice pieces here too, and the school group touring there made me realize that the topic was a great one for public engagement and educational opportunities. On that note, a lot of signage encourages people to post to social media about their experiences, and use the San Jose musem's branded hashtags. When I searched for them I didn't find that much activity--so it's like they were trying to hard, and social media discussions are something that happen on their own and feel weird when forced from the top, so my one suggestion would be to tone that down a bit. Otherwise, fantastic museum that any American city would be fortunate to have!

3/2/2013

I'm looking at the other reviews for Sculpture Center and thinking, "Wow! What a great bunch of thoughtful, well-written reviews!" It just goes to show that Sculpture Center is a real magnet for intellectual types. It does exciting things that the bigger institutions in the city can't risk and as such it performs an important function in the New York art world. I don't have much to add to what's already been said here, but I wanted to give Sculpture Center some stars!

6/12/2014 Updated review

Another Kay Rosen show here, and I must say my impression this time was much improved. This time the texture of the wordplay drawings was more unified, and all of the letters in them were starker and more architectural which gave the exhibition an overall feel that relieved the sense of monotony I has previously experienced. Great to see a more continuous relationship between work and space though it's still not my favorite art

10/15/2012

I went to Spinello Projects on opening night of Manny Prieres's exhibition: graphite drawings on black paper of covers of banned books, from the Bible to Salman Rushdie and Daddy's New Roommate. These were small, not-too-expensive works that look good in any minimal apartment and have an air of bookish importance that turns them into easy conversation-starters. The show was obviously calculated to sell by looking slick while capitalizing on cultural conflicts--in very poor taste, if you ask me. It got worse on the second floor, where in addition to the book covers there were slogans drawn in the same technique, including "Work will set you free," from the gates at Auschwitz. Gross. It's a cool space though.