Brian D.'s Profile

2/8/2013

I walked into this gallery and "Wonderwall" by Oasis was playing from two big speakers, followed by "Time to Pretend" by MGMT--two of my favorite dude jams! The gallery director told me that it was a Smashing Pumpkins station on Pandora, and it was all part of the exhibition by Tyler Dobson. Each of the speakers faced a tapestry stretched on a rectangular frame, each of which depicted loose piles of printed photos. The photo piles had been photographed and then sent to a weave-on-demand tapestry service, which made the images look pixelated in thread, scraps of a pre-digital '90s past preserved in a cheap textile. ("Put it on a mug, it will last longer" would be a good slogan for those various Zazzle services that turn your jpegs into things.) Tucked in the corner was a photo of a teen boy, shirtless, smoking a joint. Apparently there are sites where guys upload their shirtless weed selfies, just thousands of photos in the same pose. This is a recent phenomenon but because the photo is printed out and has a slightly yellowish tinge (maybe a filter?), and the kid has longish stoner hair, the image looks like it could be twenty, thirty years old (except for the iPhone he's holding). The Smashing Pumpkins Pandora station, with its kind-of-edgy-but-not-really songs from all over the 1990s and 2000s, is another reminder that all these soft forms of rebellion are suspended in time, part of the repeating cycle of teens. There were dead leaves strewn all over the floor, a gesture about the passage of time and youth that was so obvious I almost rolled my eyes, but the brown-gray color looked so good with the autumnal shades of the tapestries I gave the artist a pass.

47 Canal is a fairly young gallery, having opened in the spring of 2011. They had a really exciting first season. But this past fall the quality seemed to lag a little as they tried to bring in artists who they hadn't worked with before, and it made me a little worried. Tyler Dobson is an artist I hadn't seen showing there before, and I really liked his worked, so I left the gallery feeling optimistic. Can't wait to see what they do next!

1/2/2013

Found video footage shows up in a lot of art these days, but Trisha Baga adds another dimension to it--literally! One of the pieces in her show at Greene Naftali had Olympic athletes, and fireworks, stadium concerts, and stuff that looked camera-test footage from YouTube spliced together in an order determined by the artist's private network of associations. But because the images were extruded with 3D techniques it felt less introverted and subjective than a lot of the poetic video montage I've seen in the last few years. When the runner lunged toward me in his warm-up stretch and the soundtrack surged it was hard for me not to feel engaged, even though I wasn't really sure of what the image meant. There was also another 3D video, an animation with characters in conversation, and it required a different set of glasses. Signs on the walls noted that the glasses were "specially synced" to each video. There's not a time component to the way the glasses work so "synced" is not the right word, but I understood what they meant and was very impressed by the technical work that went into preparing the videos. More importantly, the different sets of glasses gave the videos a sense of being anchored in space: you really had to move into their zone and stay there for a while with the glasses on in order to appreciate a work. Maybe Baga's next step is virtual reality helmets! (Just kidding... although, who knows?) The whole gallery was darkened, and viewers had to navigate the various glowing sections between and around the two main projections. There were some sculptural video installations to walk through, with projections bouncing off plates or through pieces of broken glass, and weird little assemblages without any digital components just cluttering the floor. These pieces related the digital moving images to everyday objects in a way that suggested a bodily presence for the video without relying on the technological novelties deployed in the 3D works. I doubt they would look that great on their own, with the lights on, but they really added some depth and fullness to the show as a whole.

I'd say Trisha Baga's show was a four-star experience for me, but thinking back to some of the great exhibits I've seen at Greene Naftali in the last year I have to give the gallery five stars overall. This fall Gelitin put big weird sculptures on pedestals that were rigged so when people pushed levers or buttons on them (as they were invited to do) the sculptures fell off and crashed on the floor. I missed the opening so I didn't get to see the sculptures in their original, untarnished state, just the wreckage several weeks later. So often when messy art gets put in a Chelsea gallery, the installation sanitizes and sterilizes it, putting ugliness and failure on a pedestal for people to ooh and aah at. That always makes me feel a little queasy. Gelitin knocked ugliness and failure off the pedestal--literally!--and when I walked through the gallery I felt like these qualities were all around me, fresh and nasty and alive. Then there was Haegue Yang's show last spring, of her hanging sculptures assembled from Venetian blinds, cameras, and light bulbs. This had a totally different feel than Trisha Baga and Gelitin's lively and funny exhibitions-- it was beautiful, ethereal, serene. As I moved around the sculptures the light skipped down the blinds, and the angles of the camera lenses reminded me of the limits of my perspective. Greene Naftali is on the eighth floor a building, which makes it more of a hassle to get to than Chelsea's sidewalk-level galleries--you have to ride up in an antiquated elevator with an operator and there's usually a bit of a wait. There were times when I thought about going to see an exhibition there but skipped it because I knew it would take so long. But when I looked out the big windows at the city skyline and Hudson River nearing dusk and saw the soft light coming in and filtering through Haegue Yang's sculptures, the high location no longer seemed like a drawback. It can actually be a huge plus.

1/2/2013

Webster's dictionary defines art as "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced." But these days a lot of art isn't about the production of objects, or even the conscious use of skill. It's more about creating an experience for the viewer. (That's what makes it fun to Yelp about!) New York's best museum, the Museum of Modern Art, is built around a history of objects, but fortunately they have the resources to support an outpost in Queens at PS1 where they can showcase performance and sound and other various kinds of experience-oriented art. It's a place for happenings that keep people coming back again and again throughout the year. While PS1 is well known for the summer WarmUp series (and I mostly agree with other reviewers that this used to be a fun party but is now overcrowded--the organizers need to rethink it a bit), there are plenty of other events, including readings and book launches, and they aren't just limited to things of interest to the art world. It seems to me that PS1 is trying to be a hub for contemporary culture, inclusive of music and literature as well as art, and I think they're doing a good job of it. The ambience of the old school building gives it all a sense of humility. There can be some esoteric stuff here, but it's all in the spirit of learning and discovery.

There tends to be a broad variety of art up at any given time--plenty of objects to anchor the events. Some recent stand-outs for me were Darren Bader's series of rooms with living animals and vegetables, with a pair of burritos basking in the sun at the end, and Janet Cardiff's motet playing from forty speakers. The latter piece was gorgeous and moving and it always had a big audience of people sitting on the benches and walking slowly in circles, listening carefully. It stayed up for so long that I thought PS1 might make it a permanent installation, like James Turrell's skylight. Alas, it had to come down, but other good things will come in its place.

A final note about the café: The reviews talking about how bad it is are obsolete. In 2012 the M.Wells diner took it over and now the food is amazing. It's not cheap, but it's a decent value, unlike the standard museum café (such as PS1's old one) that charge ridiculous prices for mediocre-to-poor-quality fare.

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.

12/8/2012

This place is very confusing! It's in a ritzy office building and the main entrance is on one of the upper floors. I can never remember which one, and it's not marked in the elevator, and I don't want to ask the security guard in the lobby because when I go into a fancy building on the UES I just want to breeze by like I know what I'm doing, know what I mean? I'll concede that this last point is my problem and not the gallery's. But still. When you get off on the upper floors there are narrow, dark corridors and multiple doors to the gallery, some marked and some not. I always feel like I'm sneaking in an exit, or about to open a door to an employee lounge. At one entrance you're immediately confronted by a narrow staircase, leading to a gallery on the top floor. Considering this is one of Manhattan's top galleries it's a bit disconcerting that it's laid out like a rabbit warren.

Because of its size this location of Gagosian always has several shows up at once. On my last visit one of the big draws was Cy Twombly, an artist who I personally have never liked. When I first started to learn about painting I thought this was my fault--I suspected that there was something special about the relation of the pigment to the brushstroke to the canvas, or about the form of his scribbles to the classical texts referenced in the titles, that I just couldn't understand. As time passed I became  more confident that this was not the case. He's a reasonably proficient painter with a few novel ideas and a lot of pretentious talk around them to magnify their importance. (Come to think of it, this description can be applied to most successful artists.) I can see how some people can be moved by his work but overall I think he's way overrated. Cy Twombly died recently and Gagosian Gallery was showing his last paintings. They were big whorls in bright red/chatreuse, green, and yellow--like his old chalk-on-chalkboard drawings but done in synthetic pigments in fast-food-chain colors on wood, for durability. When I looked at them I found myself imagining a 3rd-rate painter ca. 1972 saying to himself: "Now that I've combined Abstract Expressionism with Pop I'll be proclaimed a GENIUS!!" This imaginary painter didn't coincide with the image I'd had of Cy Twombly--and that's partly why the exhibition felt strange to me. On another floor there was a gallery of Twombly's photographs, taken in the Italian countryside where he lived. Lots of shrubs, trees, and country roads with nothing particularly distinctive about them, all overexposed, blurred, and excessively bright with no sense of composition--it was like a bad and pretentious Instagram account (and I should know, haha! Follow me on Instagram). If I had any doubts about my assessment of Twombly's artistry, those photographs killed them. RIP Cy Twombly. RIP doubts.

But that's not all!! There was ANOTHER exhibition at the gallery, of another artist--Richard Prince. It was some black and white text pieces, the hood of a car, tarry textured paintings. I wasn't into it. I love Prince's early work, the photographs of magazines and joke paintings. Magazine ads create an image of a social setting that everyone recognizes but can't actually take part of because it doesn't exist, a simulatneous sense of familiarity and alienation, whereas jokes are what people say to each other when they want to sustain a conversation but are afraid of talking about things that are honest and personal, or just have nothing to say. And Prince's old works are about these feelings. A lot of people seem to think of those works are wry cerebral games but they've always struck me as very melancholy and pointed reflections on being a lonely outsider. What happens to lonely outsiders when they become hugely successful? Some of them turn into surly jerks. That's what happened to Richard Prince. Most of his work of the last ten years is all about being a surly jerk and I'm over him.

I think there was at least one other show at this gallery. It's huge! I can't remember what it was though.

12/8/2012

On my last visit to this location of Gagosian Gallery in October the best thing was the cables. They were draped across the floor in long, slender coils that got smaller and accumulated in little piles near the display equipment. Very nice. The videos they were powering, not so much. They were by Douglas Gordon and were shot in the Scottish highlands: views of a lone grand piano in the hills, set on fire and burning. A wannabe-lyrical platitudinous parable about nature and culture.

10/15/2012

Modernbook shares a floor of a building downtown with several other galleries. I was walking down the corridor when I passed it and decided to poke my head in. I didn't stay long--but it was long enough to tell that this gallery was not worth a longer visit. For starters, it was very cluttered. Works by several artists were on display simultaneously, and it looked more like a showroom than a group show, with several works by each artist clustered closely. Apparently because they ran out of wall space, there was one series of four works laid out in a square grid on the floor. The lower parts of the walls were used as a lean-to storage space: wrapped up prints of all sizes were propped up and facing the wall. I'm no construction expert, but I don't think it would be so hard to put up some drywall and make a storage area SEPARATE from the display area. To top it all off, the gallery was playing bad muzak--the sort of saccharine house you hear in Europe's cheesiest cafes. If you're passing through the building and you're in the mood, you might as well pop your head in and see if anything catches your eye. But don't expect much.

10/15/2012

This is a special museum. The first time I came here, which was in 2006, I was really excited about a collection that combined contemporary art, folk art and applied art from different parts of the world, and painting from the first half of American history. It almost exoticizes painting and "the fine arts" by featuring paintings from when the medium was still developing in America while making the work from the southern hemispheres and Native American societies that is usually exoticized feel like the mainstream tradition of the world's art.

On a recent visit, in September, I didn't enjoy myself as much. Maybe it was because the composition of the collection was less of a surprise or a novelty, or maybe it was because some of my favorite pieces had been rotated out of the permanent display. One thing that really bothered me was a temporary exhibition of the Paley collection--a private collection assembled in the mid-twentieth century that belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA is a good place for it: it includes works by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Cezanne, Derain... all the big names who figure in the standard history of modern painting and sculpture. Seeing it at the DeYoung felt weird, because this is a history that the museum's permanent collection ignores. The fact that these works were assembled by a private collector, the large-format photographs of the paintings hanging in the Paleys' home, and the exhibition's title, "A Taste for Modernism," made it seem like an exhibition about interior design--an appropriate theme for the De Young, given its focus on applied art, but it seems like the wrong way to handle these masterworks. In general, I don't like exhibitions of private collections because it becomes about the collectors--not the work of the painters but the money that bought all of it. Sometimes when I'm at major museums I find myself thinking about the structure of the art market and its influence on museum displays, and I like the De Young because it engages a wider variety of art's social contexts and economies. The exhibition of a private collection of modernist masterpieces makes me concerned about the direction the museum is taking, and this is a fairly young museum so it's vulnerable to missteps.

It was hard for me to choose between three and four stars for me personally, but I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from coming for at least one visit, so I'll give it four.

10/15/2012

I saw a show by Devin Leonardi here. The paintings (gallery statement called them "exquisite"--maybe a tad presumptuous?) depicted quiet scenes--minor landscapes, views from porches and windows. I liked the way that Leonardi turned leaves and branches into monochromatic negative space, without shading, to give these intimate paintings the flatness of impersonal graphic design. There was a relatively small number of paintings spread out in a fairly large gallery, giving each work a lot of breathing rom. I would call the overall effect precious (in the best possible sense) but probably not exquisite.

10/15/2012

Very classy. With wooden floors, gray walls, and low lighting, it's set up more like a small private museum than the average photography gallery.

The exhibition up when I visited juxtaposed paintings and pastels by Charles Burchfield and photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard from the 60s and 70s. I really enjoyed the pairing--they were two idiosyncratic takes on the pastoral genre, and Burchfield's washy brushstrokes and folk-art compositions were tempered by the eerie effects of splintering and shattering in Meatyard's prints.

In the back there is a showroom, which on my visit had a selection of works by Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Fraenkel shares a floor of an office building with several other photography galleries but clearly stands far above the crowd.