Brian D.'s Profile

2/27/2012

I went to see the Tom Friedman show at Luhring Augustine and it had lots of fun trompe l'oeil conceptual art, which means familiar-looking things were made out of the wrong materials--like a pile of apples with bites taken out of them were all wood, and a TV camera was also made of wood. One guy tried to look through it but of course he couldn't see anything through the wood!

Tom Friedman is a real popular artist. There were a lot of people in the gallery and they were having a good time. When I walked past the gallery's office and the front desk the people who worked there were talking and laughing. That was nice to see because usually people who work at galleries look so somber that you feel bad for them. Maybe it was Tom Friedman's art that put them in a good mood!

4/18/2012

I had a fairly complicated experience with this gallery that will take a while to explain so please bear with me.

When I went to Elizabeth Dee at the end of February there was a sign on the door warning people not to come in if they didn't want to have their photograph taken and put online. Ryan McNamara, the artist exhibiting there, was making all his viewers dress up in costumes and pose with props for pictures, so they weren't just his viewers but collaborators in his work who would eventually become viewers of themselves in the work. I thought it was a cool idea. I walked inside and got dressed up. I ended up wearing a denim jumpsuit by Armani and holding the end of a vacuum cleaner that was blowing out air to fan the long hair of this other guy who I didn't know. The photo came out really well! It was thoughtful of the artist and the gallery to put all the images online where people could see them and download them. I posted mine on Facebook and it got 27 likes, which is a lot for me! So I was very satisfied with my initial experience at Elizabeth Dee, except for one small thing: Seeing as how people were getting in and out of costume in the gallery I thought there should have been a changing area. I had taken off the jumpsuit and was in my underwear when Elizabeth Dee herself walked out of her office with a client and they saw me standing in the gallery half-naked. It was a little embarrassing--at least for me, maybe she was already used to it. Anyway, this could easily have been avoided if Ryan McNamara had strung up a curtain in the corner or something like that.

A few weeks later all the photographs were cut up and incorporated in collage designs on various objects. I went back to Elizabeth Dee to check it out. There was an archway, jugs and vases, masks, canvasses, etc., all decorated with the results of the on-site photo shoots. It was all very nicely done and I had a fun time recognizing people I knew. Of course I was most interested in finding the picture of me and seeing what Ryan McNamara had done with it. When I finally found it... well, I was disappointed, to put it mildly. The photo was on a jug and my face spread over a curve. Apparently to get it on there they had to wipe out all my features, perhaps with glue.. it was hard to tell with the way the jug curved. So instead of me it was just the Armani jumpsuit with a warped blank spot for a head. I was sad because I looked really good in that photo, and also I felt slightly disturbed by the thought of that jug going to some art collector's house with my wiped-out face. Ryan McNamara's project was about photographing his audience so he shouldn't have let something like that happen to anyone who posed for him.

I really liked the overall energy at Elizabeth Dee while Ryan McNamara's show was up but because of the problem with my face (and also the lack of the changing area) I unfortunately cannot give this gallery more than two stars.

6/18/2012

KW is Berlin's top space for exhibiting contemporary art. Since 1998 it has hosted the Berlin Biennial. This summer's edition is different from the past ones. In the downstairs gallery there is an encampment of the sort that Occupy movements have set up in cities. There are tents, brochures, graffiti, posters, and occasional assemblies. The galleries upstairs feature work that seems closer to agitprop than it does to art--a deliberate choice on the part of the curator, Artur Zmijewski, who writes in his introduction to the catalog that contemporary art doesn't interest him any more. A Powerpoint presentation by Antanas Mockus, formerly the mayor of Bogota, Colombia, discusses his campaigns against the drug business and traffic deaths that involved elements of performance art (respectively: when he got death threats from drug lords he started wearing a bulletproof vest with a heart-shaped hole cut over his heart, and he had mimes line up along sidewalks). In the presentation he says this is "sub-art = art without the pretenses of art."

Everything at the Berlin Biennial could probably be described as sub-art. For example, one room has a lopsided circle of screens, each of which displays documentation of a protest that took place somewhere in the world in the last year. It looks like a complex video-art installation, but when I was inside it I felt like I was at a protest meeting, an assembly of assemblies where I couldn't possibly see and focus on the whole thing at once but I still got an impression of a worldwide movement that I could potentially belong to. Likewise, the Occupy encampment on the ground floor looks the sprawling, cluttered installations you see at a lot of biennials, combining a variety of images, texts, and objects. But the sharp cuts between old radical documents (a printout of the 1996 "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace") and current, useful information (a flyer with instructions on how to get from Berlin to Occupy Frankfurt next week) make it feel like something else. Maybe, because of its position right at the entrance, it's supposed to be a proposition about how works of sub-art engage each other in dialogue.

To be honest, I have never liked "political art." When art has a direct message it becomes one-sided and shallow. But I didn't want to judge the Berlin Biennial by the criteria of art because it defines itself as non-art, as sub-art that is occupying a kunsthalle. Of course, there are individual works here with legible agendas. But it's like an Occupy meeting, where there are people handing out leaflets or starting discussions to promote their own pet causes, but they're still working under the umbrella slogan of "no demands," a rejection of the present system that refuses to participate in its politics. This Berlin Biennial presents an aesthetics of "no demands." Instead of issuing the sort of bland political statement that biennials usually give when they try to get political, it rejects familiar exhibition formats and the expectations people have for contemporary art. It's a biennial and an anti-biennial--a position that has the ambiguity and richness that makes for good art but also feels different and new. That's the impression I got, and it was exciting for me.

A lot of people I talked to about the Berlin Biennial hated it. They thought it was political art and it didn't have teeth, that in spite of its good intentions it was disconnected from life, that it cheapened the Occupy movement by turning it into an installation. By doing this project at KW with funds from the German government, these critics say, Zmijewski et al are capitulating to the system that the Occupy movement rejects. To me this sounded a bit like the people who call Occupy protesters hypocrites because they use laptops made by successful corporations. But that's ridiculous. You don't start a co-op that makes its own computers from scratch to organize a protest. You don't build an Institute for Sub-Art to have a biennial. You just use the means that are available to you and in using them you remake them.

I also heard rumors about corruption, mismanagement of funds, complaints that artists were not paid fairly. These are probably true. But in the end I can only evaluate an exhibition space based on my personal experience there, and my experience at KW was very positive.

If you are set in your ideas about what a biennial or other big group show should look like then maybe KW (especially with this Biennial!) is not for you. But if you are open to new ideas and like to be intellectually challenged I would highly recommend it!

TIP: You don't have to walk through the ticket office to get to the galleries and the attendants don't check tickets so it's really easy to see the show without paying. I did it twice.

12/8/2012

Richard Phillips had a show here with paintings of Lindsay Lohan and Sasha Grey. They were very realistically done and sexy, no pretenses to the quality. Gagosian Gallery caters to guys with tons of money and I'm sure many of them would like to own huge paintings of starlets in bikinis. Why not? But I'm just a browser myself and my tastes lie elsewhere. There were also videos of the actresses that were too long to be music videos and not enough narrative to be short films. Just the girls moving around on beaches or mountains or nice houses. At the end of the video the titles said "Lindsay Lohan [or Sasha Grey, in the Sasha Grey video]," then "Gagosian Gallery," then "Richard Phillips." Maybe I got the order wrong but it was those three, fading from one to the next. So it was like a commercial but you couldn't tell what the commercial was for. That's what made it art, if not very good art.

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.

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.

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!

10/16/2013

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.

10/22/2013

"Museum" is not really the right word for this place, as it has no permanent collection. It shows works by living artists and sells them. So it's a gallery that is subsidized by the city, as a way of supporting the local arts community. That's fine. Just not what I was expecting when I first entered this "museum." Most of the works deal with some Rhode Island-y themes: lots of beaches, views of Narragansett Bay, landscapes, etc. with various "modern" twists to them, as well as some crafts (i.e. jewelry). That's fine, too--but for me, ordinarily what catches my attention is edgier/more conceptual stuff. I did get bewitched, though, by a quilted piece by Michele Leavitt, a bay scene created from ragged, irregular scraps of fabric, with the bits of thread that hold them together hanging from the surface and adding to the already wild texture. So many different, vibrant hues of blue! I didn't pay much attention to the boat-shaped sculptures, assembled from big, found pieces of wood and metal, the maker of which--I learned from the museum's binder--taught engineering at the University of Rhode Island and started making art a couple of years ago, after his retirement. I was with my father--an engineer like the artist, and someone who doesn't usually look at art--and though I didn't pay much attention to the boats my dad said he really appreciated the craftsmanship that went into them. He actually lives in Warwick, so the museum is there for him, and that's a good thing.

12/5/2013

The hard thing about making art is coming up with an image that will impact people in a meaningful way. It's easy to think of an image that means something to you--but how do you communicate that feeling to hundreds or thousands of strangers? Pop art made things a lot easier: use an image that already means something to a lot of people, and change it to make it your own . I think pop art works best when a popular, mass-culture image is changed in a way that communicates a very individual, personal relationship to it--and it's a personal relationship that a lot of other people can relate to.

Bad pop art is almost too easy. Take a popular image and change it in an obvious way--make it something it wasn't, make it the opposite of itself (i.e., the cute and familiar becomes strange and scary). Make it really big, in an expensive and monumental material. This is what was happening at the KAWS show at Mary Boone was about. A few huge wooden statues, of a Mickey Mouse-type figure, with a head that had been modified to look uncanny: no eyes, split ears, standing in poses of shame and disappointment. I didn't like it at all. But it's certainly popular. I visited on a Saturday and the gallery was swarming with people, all of them admiring this giant junk. I felt like I was in a scene from that Banksy movie, "Exit Through the Gift Shop." What do they like about it so much, I wondered? Maybe for some people it's just cool to see an easy way to make an art. they know it encourages their fantasy that they too could be an artist, if they just put in some effort and money. Maybe what they admire is the will the artist has to make art work for himself.