Brian D.'s Profile

7/3/2014

As I begin to write this I'm thinking about all the things I've seen and heard at Issue Project Room, both in their old location at the old can factory in Gowanus and their new digs in a stately bank building in downtown Brooklyn.. and the sheer diversity of the offerings here boggles the mind. I can remember a quartet of electric guitars playing incredibly loud experimental contrapuntal pieces, installations of drone-making devices, extremely rude and dirty performance art, a marathon performance of a Milton Friedman string quartet.. if it's live and edgy and and electronic and weird, Issue Project Room is a good home for it.

I went there last night for the first time in a while (I heard they had problems securing the vaulted roof of the bank, and were closed for renovations) for an evening of "internet as poetry." I wasn't in the best disposition for it.. there was a torrential downpour outside, and my feet were totally drenched, what's more because I'm about to leave the country for two weeks I stopped buying groceries a week ago and I've been trying more restaurants in my neighborhood, last night I tried a Chinese place, New Peking, that looks totally run of the mill but had great reviews on Yelp--I'm not sure what these people were thinking, my sesame chicken was totally normal, which means heavy with sweetness and stickiness and fat, not in a great way, so I felt bloated and dazed when I arrived at Issue Project Room all wet. I tried to mitigate the effect with a large can of grapefruit radler ($6) but I think that just made it worse. The first act was Bunny Rogers, who was not only reading from her poems but singing and dancing and displaying a sculpture, two pastel wicker chairs that were woven kitty-corner to each other. There were dramatic costume changes--from Disney princess get-ups to a lounge lizard white leisure suit. Plus, a live piano player on a baby grand! Certainly not your average poetry reading. The poems were good too, though I wonder if all the drama of the performance distracted from the reading part, rather than enriching it. After a brief intermission, during which I guzzled water but still felt like garbage, was Kevin Bewersdorf, who is notorious, apparently, for not using the internet for five years. But now he's back on it, and read some poems--a slammed a few, freestyle--contrasting the ideas of the web (soft) and the net (hard). "babies are perfect. babies are on the web" I noted on my phone, transcribing his words, and I still don't know what they mean, but it sounded cool. He didn't really seem to know how to read into a microphone well and a lot of his words got lost, in fact I think my favorite part was the very beginning when, un-amplified, he made a Santa Claus "ho ho ho" that boomed in the old bank's vault. Christmas in July!

Speaking of which.. the space doesn't have any ventilation or AC that I could discern which makes for some sweaty summer nights.. so i might wait til yuletide to return.

p.s. I love the multicolored stretched fabric parallelograms hung around the room.. it's just for acoustic purposes, but it looks like a cool show of monochrome paintings!

6/18/2012

My parents are not big art lovers but they have a poster on their mantle that reproduces a painting of a fisherman on a beach, and the poster has a weird finish on it that imitates the surface texture of brushstrokes. They become visible when the light catches them, and their direction and length have nothing to do with the image underneath it. It is supposed to make the poster look fancier or more expensive but if you're paying attention it's just weird and fake.

You will not find anything like this poster at Metro Pictures but nevertheless I couldn't help thinking about when I saw Cindy Sherman's exhibition here. The backgrounds in the photos are dramatic landscapes, with forests, mountains, and volcanoes, and they have been treated to have a feathered, brushy look that reminded me of my parents' poster. Cindy Sherman stands in the foreground of each image wearing fancy dresses that have elaborate textures of their own, but they are photographed normally (I mean, the quality of the photography is obviously very high but the dresses don't look like they have been altered). The way the dresses look against the backgrounds is out of control! I loved it!

In the Cindy Sherman retrospective that was at MoMA this spring you could see how she has used digital retouching to put herself in the frame of a single photograph multiple times. But the settings are normal--expensive houses, parties, and so on. The relationship between the figures and the background makes sense in those pictures. In the new ones it doesn't make sense and that is why it's so exciting. I was really happy about this new direction in the artist's work.

The inside of Metro Pictures is shaped like a horseshoe and visiting the gallery can feel like going to a haunted house or other amusement-park ride: go in one end, follow the path, look at the stuff, go out the other end. When a show is so-so this can make it seem even more trivial than it actually is. But Cindy Sherman's new work was so good that I didn't even think about on that particular visit. I may have felt a little dizzy--but it wasn't from walking in circles!

10/15/2012

This is a good space. I went during the Art Walk and they had a Quisqueya Henriquez show will collages and prints: op-art lenticular effects, shimmery pixelated screen shots, digital renders of architectural fragments, sticky Rorschach-test paintings laid on top of some of the prints. She is taking some interesting ideas that other artists have explored in greater depth and putting them together in her own way. This isn't incredibly exciting but, honestly, that's what most art is and at least Quisqueya Henriquez has a nose for what's relevant.

Tip: Don't even look at the press releases. The pretention is over-the-top. You will gag.

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

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.

6/29/2013

Shifting Chelsea's center of gravitas southward, this new gallery features a dramatic entrance--a broad, not-too-steep staircase which when you get to the top ends in a big reveal as you turn left. There it is--the cavernous gallery with vaulted wood beams, lots of natural light, and some really good art! I saw the Paul McCarthy show there. It's big wooden sculptures and drawings based on the artist's twisted vision of Snow White. Everything is warped--you can see Prince Charming on his white stallion, but the figure of him on his horse is split and repeated several times, fused with trees and dwarves, turned back on itself and sliced up into separate pieces, each with a smooth grain of wood that suggested no cut was ever made--that these weird fantasias just emerged into form. Decapitated heads of Snow White herself litter the floor, with blank, pupil-less eyes and a whorish hole of a mouth--actually not a hole but a divot with a rounded bottom, the right size to hold an apple, whole and unchewed. Here too the polish factor on the wood is very high, but the shallow oral cavity suggests a digging into the surface by a wood carver, without the possibility of penetration or a real inside. The imagination is twisted and broken up into pieces but each fragment emerges into being as if whole.  

All around, this is a great gallery to visit. I didn't interact with the staff directly but overheard them talking and they seemed nice--one of the desk girls was so nice she even expained scallion cream cheese to her coworker. She told her about how an onion-like bulb has green shoots that get cut up and mixed with cheese. First week in new York honey?

9/29/2013

For the most part the Pablo Helguera exhibition at Kent Fine Art doesn't look like a regular gallery exhibit--but what it does look like is hard to say. Does it look like a bookstore or a personal library or what? The first thing I noticed upon entering was the plain, industrial-looking metal shelves (bookstore) with colorful hand-lettered signs indicating the genre/category of the books on them (cute bookstore) but as I moved through I noticed these nice mid-century modernist chairs, the low (in terms of both height and intensity) lighting of vintage table lamps, and faded black-and-white photos on the wall--all domestic touches pointing to "personal library." Is this supposed to represent a public space or a private one, I wondered, and can I even say it's "representing" either or is it just _being_ them? after all, it seemed like the books were there for reading, maybe for buying (but they were all in Spanish, so not really for me). As I got to the end of the gallery, still thinking about whether this was one thing or the other or both, I was caught totally off-guard by a third element--the way one wall of bookshelves ended and opened onto a gallery that looked more like a standard art show--framed prints hanging on a white wall, lots of empty space illuminated by natural light coming in a window. Here we have Pablo Helguera's lecture on "The Art of the Future"--printed on sturdy cards, arranged on three shelves, interspersed with cards printed with plates from a 1969 book, "Art of the Future," to which the title of Helguera's lecture/work referred. And though it was purportedly about the future, the lecture really talked about the past--Helguera's own childhood and youth, when he encountered the book in translation, "El Arte del Futuro," in his home city in Mexico and learned about contemporary trends in American art--conceptual art, land art, and computer art, and became very excited about it. Eventually the lecture arrives at a rather grim conclusion that we live in a time of no future, when the future doesn't matter, when all artists are concerned with their own work in the present. So, like with the installation of books, here too there was this tension between public and private, an attempt to make a statement about general trends in the public sphere of art that ends up circling back into a reflection on personal experiences, but then is presenting as a lecture (or installation)--a transmission of a private life into public space, via the gallery. (On the opposite wall hung framed prints in a grid, black-and-white photographs of what looked like an archaeological site in Mexico--I think. I tried to read and comprehend the prints a few times but for some reason I quickly felt tired out trying to understand it and kept giving up and still am not sure what was going on there.)

On the way out I stopped at the front desk to talk to the very friendly receptionist a bit about the show and I noticed there were flyers that could be taken and exchanged for a free book! I headed for the "Artes" section and found one about cybernetics in art from the 60s--I won't read it (or maybe I'll try to find the English original, I'm pretty sure it's a translation) but because of the timing of its publication and its thematics, as well as its handsome modern design, it seemed like a great memento to take away from this intriguing exhibition.

12/5/2013

The bacon/bratwurst sandiwiches on pretzel buns and the mac-n-cheese bites were so delicious that I would consider hosting a wedding reception here just to see trays of those apps again. Not that I'm in danger of getting married anytime soon, ha ha. But I would jump at the chance to party here again, in the big Biergarten with the outdoor tables, indoor tables, balcony, stage, etc. Very versatile space!

12/5/2013

This was the second elite event I've been to and I had a good time getting to know more members of the community. And I live in Jackson heights so it was really convenient for me! To be honest, I don't think that Delhi Heights has the tastiest Indian cuisine in the neighborhood. But that's not to say I or the other yelpers I talked to didn't enjoy it. Everyone ate up and had a great time. And that's what I love about the Yelp Elite--it's not about being a foodie, a snob, or a picky eater, as the word "elite" might suggest in other contexts. It's about positive attitude and cleanign your plate and going back for more! That's what I did.

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  funny and useful notice in the bathroom

  funny and useful notice in the bathroom

1/4/2014

Currently on view at Cherry and Martin is a small selection of works by Alan Shields, who I wrote about previously in the update to my review of Paula Cooper Gallery, in New York. To recap, he is a painter from the 60s and 70s who experimented with fabrics and techniques from the realms of crafts. I discovered a new side of his work here--some concrete poems, where he took words from ads or a newspaper, repeated them and mixed them up, and typed them out on a typewriter. It was interesting to know he did that but I prefer his paintings. There was one I really enjoyed at this show, a big rough and dirty canvas with a misshapen grid of splotches, concentrated in color in the center and wetly bulging outward, as if he'd laid out a bunch of watercolor ice cubes on the canvas and let them melt as they will. I don't know how he really made it.  I should have asked the people who worked there. They were very nice.