Culture

We visited three worthy groups shows in Chelsea at their openings last Thursday. Go see them — not all art is mindless in the summer!

Capsule has a big group show titled And one for Grandma. It was about 100 degrees inside at the opening, but we saw enough to notice several things, including a wall painting by [can’t remember, nothing on the site], the photograph on the invitation by Christine Callahan, and some great drawings by Andrew Guenther. I like his work, especially the fact that there is a big variety of work ranging from sculpture to drawings to installations.

Florence Lynch has a show, minimalpop, curated by Petra Bungert of CCNOA (Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art) Brussels. It includes sculpture by John Beech, whom we finally met at the opening. We have one of his rotating paintings.

My favorite work in the show titled The day after I destroyed the women, I wished I had not destroyed them at Oliver Kamm 5BE (curated by Lital Mehr) doesn’t photograph well, so I won’t put it up. It’s The Birds and The Bees by Aaron Wexler. It’s an amazing painting-like work created from cut paper mounted on wood. Go by and see it, and ask to see his other works in the back. Other work includes sculpture and installation by Agata Oleksiak (with dancers wearing some at the opening) and paintings by Tom Meacham. Tom is also in the current group show at Nicole Klagsbrun.

Also, don’t forget that White Box has a new show (and opening) beginning each Wednesday, 6-8pm, through September 1.

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UPDATED: In the comments, Jeffrey Chiedo from Capsule tells me the wall drawing was by Jen Kim.

I mentioned seeing some of her new work at Jessica Murray Projects back in June. The gallery sent me an image of one of the works. It’s hard to get a good feel for it from the image, but here goes:

Want to pick up a great piece of art for $100, while attending a party at one of the coolest Williamsburg galleries? If you can’t swing $100, pay $25 for just the party. Food and drink are supplied by Brooklyn Breweries and our favorite Williamsburg Restaurant, Relish.

On Sunday, Champion Fine Art is having a party to help pay for their relocation to Los Angeles. The web site has more details.

Even by the standards of Williamsburg, Champion is one of the least commercial and most artist-driven spaces out there. It’s not a permanent gallery, but a two year exhibition series of artist-curated group shows. The twenty exhibitions, titled numerically in descending order, have been in New York so far, and are about to move to Los Angeles. Each is accompanied by a gallery-produced catalog in an edition of one hundred.

I believe the last show will be a “closing party” touching on the various exhibitions of the two year period.

Images of their exhibitions will be up soon. I’m still working on the web site!

They’re changing the shows (a combination of a work on the video monitor outside plus something in the window) every week, so go now to see the excellent one up right now, curated by Lawrence Rinder.

The Lutz Bacher piece is Olympiad, a beatifully damaged video of the 1936 Olympics Stadium in Berlin, made famous by another woman filmmaker.

The Tim Hawkinson piece, called Seal, looks like an official seal made from an elephant skin.

Via rodcorp, I found this interview with J.G. Ballard in The Guardian. Fascinating stuff, including his interest in the visual arts. An excerpt:

Today’s art scene? Very difficult to judge, since celebrity and the media presence of the artists are inextricably linked with their work. The great artists of the past century tended to become famous in the later stages of their careers, whereas today fame is built into the artists’ work from the start, as in the cases of Emin and Hirst.

There’s a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means. Emin’s bed, Hirst’s sheep, the Chapmans’ defaced Goyas are psychological provocations, mental tests where the aesthetic elements are no more than a framing device.

It’s interesting that this should be the case. I assume it is because our environment today, by and large a media landscape, is oversaturated by aestheticising elements (TV ads, packaging, design and presentation, styling and so on) but impoverished and numbed as far as its psychological depth is concerned.

Artists (though sadly not writers) tend to move to where the battle is joined most fiercely. Everything in today’s world is stylised and packaged, and Emin and Hirst are trying to say, this is a bed, this is death, this is a body. They are trying to redefine the basic elements of reality, to recapture them from the ad men who have hijacked our world.

I am currently reading Ballard’s War Fever, a rather prescient set of short stories published in 1999.

You only have a week on two of these:

crits’s pix at Black & White has great stuff, especially Julian Montague’s “The Stray Shopping Cart: An Illustrated System of Identification” and Jon-Paul Villegas’s brilliant mix of wall paintings and sculpture. I’ll add images if I can get some. Closes 7/19.

“a dot that went for a walk” at Plus Ultra Gallery includes Katinka Ahlbom (who had a striking installation that was part of “Sunrise Sunset” at Smack Mellon), Vanessa Conte, Rosemarie Fiore, and Medrie Macphee. Closes 7/19.

We will have to go back to “Grotto 2” at Jessica Murray Projects, as it was very hot and difficult to absorb the 60+ artists in the show. A few things did manage to stand out, such as Rachel Mason’s video “Model Anthem”, the White House sculpture of Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua (we bought the “Todo List” work that went along with it), and Diane Meyer’s “Redemption: Professional Confessional.” Some lucky person at the opening bought a Reed Anderson work based on a page from a 1977 Penthouse at a very reasonable price. Closes 8/1.

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Updated: There are some photos here from the Black & White show. I also forgot to mention how much I liked Nick Brown’s work in the back patio.

I hope I didn’t embarass myself too badly. We were interviewed for a Studio 360 segment on Eric Doeringer’s “Bootleg” project.

In New York, the program will air on 93.9 FM at 10 AM Saturday, July 10 and on 820 AM at 7 PM on Sunday, July 11. You can also listen online to WNYC.

To find broadcast times/stations in other areas, visit this page. The program will also be archived for one week after the broadcast — after that you have to pay to listen — here.

No, this isn’t a post about Dale Peck. It’s about a review in the NY Observer by Mario Naves of our friend Susan Wanklyn‘s show at Cheryl Pelavin. I think it’s hilarious — the heart sinks! And it’s never bad to have your review next to one about Robert Ryman.

Notwithstanding its virtues, Ms. Wanklyn’s art points to a problem common to artists who have come of age since the rise of Conceptualism: a disconnect between form and content. You remember that old saw—well, it’s been so thoroughly trounced upon by deconstructionists, postmodernists and nihilists of one stripe or another that it’s time to take the saw out of the closet, run a damp cloth over it and look at it anew. The legacy of Conceptual art is not a culture bereft of artistic talent, but a culture that is merely talent.

The scene is full of painters and sculptors with impressive technical skill who have, in essence, nowhere to go with it. So they paint about something, burdening the work with Meaning. The ambition to imbue color or space or shape with meaning—to grace form with a full-bodied and independent life—is alien to a generation conditioned to believe that art is an adjunct to something else. Ms. Wanklyn has done some fine paintings in the past; she’s likely to right herself in the future. But when her snarled doodles reveal themselves as stick figures of riders on horses, the eye cringes and the heart sinks.

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Susan Wanklyn Action Figure #7 (2004) 9 x 11.5 inches, Casein on Paper

Empty Studio, 70 Washington Street, DUMBO

The area under the Manhattan Bridge overpass is being condominium-ized, and art spaces are on the move. Smack Mellon will soon leave its fragrant gallery in an old spice factory for other quarters. The many studios in 70 Washington Street are emptying out. During this transition, an arts group called TAG Projects, run by Derick Melander, Tim Kent and John Silvis, is using one vacated space for a very short-run exhibition, with Peter Corrie as curator.

— From Holland Cotter’s review of ‘Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People’

The show, which we saw today (its last day) was great. Watch TAG Projects for future cool things. I think James will be writing up something soon.

Oops. I forgot my blog disappears if I don’t post for a week. Busy, plus technical difficulties at home – A/C, wiring, two computers failing, cell phone problems…

Last chance stuff for today (a couple end tomorrow), by neighborhood:

DUMBO

Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people
Gallery 800 • 70 Washington Street, Suite 800
(That’s a quote from the Symbionese Liberation Army, in case you’re fuzzy on fringe political movements.)

Sunrise Sunset – group show curated by Amanda Church and Courtney J. Martin
Smack Mellon
Closes Sunday

Tribeca

OK, America!
APEX Art

Susan Wanklyn
Cheryl Pelavin
This closes today. Ignore the gallery web page which says it ran April-May. Bad cut and past job I assume. See here for more on Susan.

East Village

Rowdy Remix
ATM Gallery
Group show that includes Jules de Balincourt, Brian Belott, and Tom Sanford. Closes tomorrow.

Chelsea

Carrie Yamaoka
Debs & Co.
Her best show ever, and the last day of existence for this gallery. We saw the show already, so I don’t know if we’ll make it by there for the last day. Tell Choire and Nick we said hello.