Brian D.'s Profile

8/4/2013

Definitely worth a peek if you've got some time to kill between your transfer from the G to L or vice versa, or at either end of your journey! It sells artists' books, zines, and other paper matter by independent publishers (some DVDs and CDs too). They are organized by publisher rather than thematically so you just have to release your inner browser, dive into a box and see what catches your eye. I picked up an old book of essays on video art and television from 1985, for $12, and a book of "Cell Phone Poems" which was a stack of thick manila sheets cut the size and shape of an iPad mini, or one of those big Samsung tablet phones, and printed with some washed out images and brief poems, held together with a big brass fastener (and a half dozen staples holding its legs down for good measure). The poetry didn't seem amazing but I liked it as an object and at $5 it was hard to pass up. A lot of the other handmade-looking things were in the high end of the single-digits so this thing seemed like a steal by comparison! The people who stop in here look like zine experts (when I went in there was a guy having a long conversation with the clerks, wearing marijuana-leaf printed socks and a snapback) but I think anyone can find something here to their taste if they give a try.

10/16/2013

I actually lol'ed when I entered this gallery. Raw concrete floors, exposed pipes and other utilities--I'd just entered from a corridor in a very nice Upper East Side office building but suddenly I could have been in Bushwick. Apparently that's the feeling that this gallery is going for, trying to import some grunge style to Madison Ave for cool points.

Unfortunately I can't even remember what the art here was, except that it involved the kind of big messy painting that you would expect to see in such a space. It was like the art was made for the brand of the place and beyond that it's unremarkable. Two stars is "meh" and that was how I felt about this gallery. First lol, then meh

12/5/2013

This might be my favorite restaurant in the world? As other reviewers have noted, the ambience is nothing special, and like them, I am not the kind of guy who cares about that. I like robust flavors, low prices, generous portions, and--because 90% of the time I'm eating out alone--fast service. And Lali Guras has all those things in ample quantity. And they always come out when you're 3/4 done and give you a second helping!! I tend to get the veg thali--thali because it's a curry so you get a well rounded meal on one big plate, and veg because the meat ones are good but the meat chunks tend to be a little bony, so veg is just easier to wolf down, which I appreciate. But all the appetizers and soups are great too.

12/5/2013

Great gallery. I recently learned that on Saturdays, members of the gallery's staff (and even Andrea Rosen herself) stand in the gallery and talk to visitors about the work. It's very generous--I got a full tour of a fascinating show, "Counter Forms," with works by Tetsumi Kudo, Alina Szapocznikow, Paul Thek and Hannah Wilke, all of whom worked in different parts of them world, died youngish and were forgotten in the 90s but making a comeback now. And they deserve it: weird materials and biomorphic forms, industrail waste and synthetic pigments, intriguing use of slightly sickening colors and textures--a fertile mix of mad-science lab and contemplative poetry that seems to speak to the ways in which artists are dealing with the relationship between bodies and technologies now.

Usually Andrea Rosen has a few shows up at once - a big one in the front, medium in the middle, and a selection of works by different artists in the showroom in the far rear, which means you're guaranteed to find SOMEthing to like on any given visit. For 'Counter Forms," however, the whole gallery was devoted to this single group exhibition. But it's definitely worth it! so much to see.
 
There is also a small appendix across the street. I feel like the narrowness of this space makes it slightly awkward. It's smaller than any of the spaces across the street, even the little showroom in the back. I haven't felt really impressed or moved by a show here yet but, it's new so maybe they'll get the hang of it (no pun intended!).

2/15/2014

I went to the Raqib Shaw show.

Um.

This is... some of THE tackiest shit I have ever seen in Chelsea.

Where to begin?

How about the butts. There is a fake cherry-blossom crawling with nude guys, well not exactly nude--their packages are tastefully (not) covered by these little brown thongs that frame their butts. And they all have animal faces, with maws open in squawks or yowlings.

The weird thing about this is that it is obviously going to sell for a lot of money and it took a lot of work by a whole studio of people, and some fabricators, and yet it's not even that good. It's not polished and doesn't wow me with craftsmanship. It reminds me of a diorama of cavemen I saw at a museum of natural history in Azerbaijan (not lying), with a bunch of blotchy pink half-naked guys chasing after some mammals. At Pace, as in Azerbaijan, the figures' skin is a crayola-peach hue, their butts have a grim dull glow. Is this supposed to be sexy?

In another room a mural covers a whole wall. Same garbage as in the other room but now it's flat and bedazzled--another sex-battle of bird head men. Again, this totemic animal imagery is probably supposed to come off as referential to myth and a cosmos of ancient archetypes. And yet, it just ends up being gross. The city walls that make the backdrop for the inaction sparkle with rhinestone and a palette straight out of a Thomas Kinkade store, or maybe a Hot Topic. Either way it belongs in a mall. Boo

2/15/2014

I like this bar but I could never give it five stars as it's too damn narrow. I like some elbow room and at Beverly's once the crowd at the bar is one man deep it's hard to walk from one end of the bar to the other without being like "scuse me" "pardon me" and shoving your way past everybody. So it's a nice place to meet up with friends on a week night but I would steer clear on weekends, unless I manage to park myself at one of the lounging areas in the front or back (probably the back, since that's where the bathroom is and I will have to go there at some point anyway). But otherwise I like the design of the place. It's newly built but it's not slick or pretentious, yet at the same time it's not divey either--the furniture is in pretty good shape and it's clean. It strikes a nice balance, like an art gallery with concrete floors and some utilities showing but still neat enough for showing art. I make this analogy on purpose because Beverly's does display some art works. Up front there's a relief panel in styrofoam, backlit with blue and rose LCD bulbs. I'd seen the piece elsewhere and thought it had this effect of otherworldly alien menace yet in the bar context it evoked a timeless downtown neon coolness, with a strange twist--and I liked it more than I had before. The rear lounge area in the back has a giant backwards 2, hewn from wood, under a little canopy of icicle lights. The je ne sais quoi of art pieces like these makes Beverly's feel like a place where you should always be poised for an interesting, open-ended conversation.

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!

6/13/2014

Franklin Evans' show here is called paintingassupermodel which could mean painting gets photographed, looked at, admired, airburshed, photoshopped, has its pores removed and so on. But painting here is still a mess: thick, complex, riddled with rough textures, covered with masking tape and confused with print. When it's photographed it's distorted, stretched into wallpaper, blown up too big so the pixels show, or the editing tools otherwise show in ways that aren't pretty. But maybe I'll never understand what Franklin Evans was thinking when he chose this title for this epic installation and that's ok, the title doesn't really matter anyway. What I liked about it was how it shook up perceptions of two-dimensional space,  creating a variety of ways of looking at and relating to images on a wall, by mixing prints and collage and painting, inverting one through the other and mashing them all up. It's a fun journey through the artist's process of looking at paintings and making them, with some references to data and web pages and excel spreadsheets in the form of wallpaper that reminds you of computers and offices and networks and markets, the numerical atmosphere that art is made in and exhibitions are organized in, but not in a way that's boringly archival or demands calculating examination on the viewer's part. As I approached the desk to check out the press release a man behind it, barrel-chested in a pink oxford shirt, said "hey how's it going" in a gruff but amicable way that made me feel welcomed.

6/13/2014

I came to Andrew Kreps with great expectations as a fan of Darren Bader's work but this show--or three shows, he says it is--left me sighing with a tinge of melancholy. Bader is a sculptor, I would say, and what I've liked about his work in the past was the feeling of an organic synthesis  forging a deeply resonant and closeknit connections among disparate objects, while employing unexpected materials such as animals, living plants, dead vegetables among images and products and the other usual elements of sculpture today. It's a really thrilling sculpture that electrified the space around it, making all the environment alive and me excited to be in it. Or it was.. now, in this show at Andrew Kreps, the materials are atomized, disconnected, and the space of the gallery is just ordinary gallery white space that's there to separate objects and set them apart from my life and life outside. The walls, floor, and air were there between things to isolate them from each other, and isolate me from them.

It was a show of photographs and objects--photos on the wall, objects on the floor. (Already a significant separation, a categorization keeping everything apart in its own conceptual cubbyhole.) For the most part the photographs don't have a lot going on in them, or at least not anything that really caught my interest. They look like fashion shots or ads or stills from movies I wouldn't want to watch in full. And they are framed in black on white walls, very isolatory. The objects, as I said, are all on the floor, some of them are plain like a can of beans whereas a limited number are big and crazy--a panel printed with a weird text about celebrities along with collaged images, which appeared to be a full-fledged work of art in its own right, and a big plexiglass box with black rubber gloves reaching inward, perhaps a kinky torture chamber of some sort? These were interesting to look at but looking at them only reminded me of the plainness of all the rest of the objects, how little there was to link any of them together, just this analytical picking and choosing that just repeats what any gallery in Chelsea does instead of transforming it and making it a worthwhile space to be in.

7/3/2014

I've never been to Egypt but I can imagine how the mystery of seeing the Sphinx rising from the desert is somewhat mitigated by all the trappings of the tourism industry around it--tour guides, the lines, souvenir stands, finding bottle water, etc. Postcards and pictures make it look like an Ozymandias experience of encountering ancient history amid the sands but I'm sure the real experience is more tightly managed. That's how it is with the mammy sphinx at the Domino Sugar Factory, "A Subtlety" by Kara Walker, where you wait in a long line (fast-moving, but took me about 45 minutes to go three blocks on a Friday afternoon) and then sign release forms absolving the organizers of any guilt should you inhale an asbestos and then go inside, where there are guides observing you and you're surrounded by tourists, people posing and snapping the object, which is so huge and mysterious albeit somewhat detracted by all the hullaballoo I've just described. I've read a lot of articles about how, although this work deals with the legacy of slavery and racism, most of the people who go to it are white and they take goofy pictures pointing at the sphinx's ass and so on, but when I was there were a lot of people of color and though everyone was taking photos of the sculpture they seemed to me to be posing solemnly, not silly--I remember one man who dropped to a half squat and pointed a sober, thoughtful gaze at his friend's phone, holding it for two or three minutes while his friend staged the perfect shot. So, maybe reports were sensationalized, or maybe I just lucked out to be there on a day when the atmosphere was chill, and people were taking pictures not to make light of it but because that's all people know how to do when confronted with a monumental sublime moment, the enormity of an important piece of art that will later dissolve, the importance of it swells their longing to capture it in an image and tag themselves to that moment to think of it again later. I couldn't resist getting a photo either but it all seemed too big to fit on my iphone so I just got some details of the dirty sugar at the sphinx's feet, the lodes of impurities lodged in her sugary flesh like dirt in shoveled snow.

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