Brian D.'s Profile

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.

7/3/2014

This hotel is fine. My parents stayed there when they visited New York in 2005, I think, and they didn't have any problems with it. More recently I was there for a presentation of.. art? products? I don't know, by Cory Arcangel. Renting out a conference room on the second floor, the event was billed as a presentation of "surfwear," clothes to wear when surfing, not the waves but the internet--pretty standard T-shirts. But there were other things there as well, sheet music related to conceptual performance projects, some electrici tiki décor, like plastic glowing palm trees and icicle lights, a DVD tower full of shitty 90s comedies (Happy Gilmore etc.), a stack of books about contemporary art and how it's shown.. not to mention the DJ table, and the free donuts and coffee from Dunkin Donuts on a folding table and a mini-fridge, branded Coke, but stocked with Nice brand water from Duane Reade. Everything about it was aggressively average, low/middle brow--and I suppose the hope was that amassing all that in one palce (which is itself totally bland--a Holiday Inn conference room!) would eventually transcend it, concentrate it, make it special, but that's not what happened. It was just boring, textureless. Maybe the artist wanted to bore everyone.. certainly the grossly too-full-yet-undernourished feeling one gets after eating two Dunkin Donuts donuts was a bodily feeling that matched the aesthetic impression... I Can't figure out if that's an artistic achievement or what. After a while I moseyed over to the bar, conveniently located just outside the conference room in the second floor lobby, because the event was dry and I needed a martini. The drink was good but the bartender was slow and kept disappearing for long breaks, so I was glad I was the first attendee of Cory's event who decided (around 3:30 pm) that it was time to drink. I was originally planning to give this three stars but now that I've written it out I realize that nothing says it better than "meh" so, two stars.