November 15, 2018 to January 13, 2019
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, gavinbrown.biz

A Brian Belott show is an occasion that can resemble the release of a long-awaited book from a reclusive scholar, and his current exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise is no exception. At once a mini mid-career survey spanning 20 years of production and a showcase of things he just cooked up, there are lessons here for neophytes and refreshers for devoted followers. While the solo shows can feel far apart, Belott is an important driver in the New York art scene.  Best known for his more or less constant flow of performance art pieces (both his own projects and as participant in the work of other artists) and as a pied piper for the neo-beat wing of the downtown art scene.  It seems fitting that Belott looks to highlight the variety of his very various practice in his current show, but Belott shines most in the more recent work, as he pushes his practice into strange new territories.

“Puuuuuuuuffs,” a group of recent, large-scale collaged paintings (two are in the 85 by 75-inch range, big for Belott), are extremely inventive materially and totally odd. The title comes from the oversized cotton balls Belott slathers in paint and uses to frame the paintings, like non-structural stretchers. The works are formally tight but never fussy. They feel like they skidded into existence: paint, paper, string, glue all landing inches away from disaster, as if he slammed on the brakes in the nick of time, or is playing a jazz solo just on the verge of failure. The biggest pieces in the series have actual box fans inserted into their surfaces. Wobbly, spray painted and lacking grills, these blow recycled air of questionable freshness on the viewer and serve as formal devices referring to geometric abstraction and heaps of post-summer garbage. You can peek through the spinning blades and spot the bricks, pipes and windows behind the partition walls of the gallery. Despite the simplicity of the devices themselves, the works are oddly disorienting, yet the confident scale and the subtle color are declarative and welcoming.

Belott embodies the model of artist as archivist and hoarder, finding a use for everything. Looking at the show it is easy to sense the mountains of material he must have pawed through in order to arrive at just the right assortment of detritus. Can Opener Keyboard is made of up vintage electric can openers attached to a board that’s invitingly set up at table height, awaiting a fool who has learned to play such a faux-fancy instrument. The idea of incorporating and elevating such a diminished object as electric can openers to art status startles. Never one for subtlety, Belott underlines the abjectness by leaving dashes of petrified tomato sauce on the yellowing retro appliances, leaving one wondering whether to laugh or cry.

The show reaches its crescendo in a darkened side gallery containing three large, mysteriously lit, commercial stand-up freezers with glass doors.  Inside, clamped to stainless steel poles, stand multi colored rectangular hunks of ice containing a kaleidoscopic assortment of flotsam and/or metaphysical talismans. A plastic hand, nesting measuring cups, an abacus, old doorknobs, puzzle pieces and bits of yarn are folded into a frosty enigma. Belott lists his materials lovingly on the gallery checklist. These small portrait-sized surrealistically formal concoctions evoke Arthur Dove and Ed Kienholz in equal measure. To look on the Belott’s frozen works is to sense both the absurdity and depth of his project.  He succeeds in implicating himself, the audience and his culture through his screwball ode to waste, novelty and a life spent sifting trash in the pursuit of art.

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March 8 to 11, 2012
548 West 22nd Street, between 1oth and 11th avenues
New York City – Sunday hours: 11am to 4pm

Strolling through Independent with its open, airy installation one feels something akin to calm – an emotional state alien to the usual art fair experience of cluttered booths and madding crowds. Architect Christian Wassmann designed the layout,  in the former Dia Center for the Arts building along with a “site-specific environment” on the roof intended, in the words of the press release. to “align with the true North-South axis of the earth.” Whether or not visitors buy into this ambitious concept – or even notice it – the fair is a delight.  There are few dividing walls, allowing one gallery area to flow seamlessly into the next, a joyful antidote to ubiquitous, claustrophobic cubicles.

On each of Independent’s three floors there are moments of surprise and aesthetic reward.  At The Approach on the second floor, three achingly beautiful white-on-white works by Sam Windett represent the best paintings in a fair diversely populated by installation, sculpture, work on paper, photography, and film.  Daria Martin’s 16mm film projection, Closeup Gallery, at Maureen Paley is a mesmerizing depiction of smiling performers shuffling multicolored decks of cards as they slowly twirl on a kaleidoscopic table.  The colors are bright and nostalgic – the palette of a children’s TV show in the 1980s – though the film’s content is determinedly inscrutable.  It is 10 minutes long, and looped, and it is nearly impossible to walk away.  Mac Adams’s sinister 1976 installation at gb agency, Black Mail consists of a half-eaten meal on a table in disarray, an overturned chair, and dripping candles burned down to their nubs.  An act of violence has taken place, and the title hints at the cause, but with no victim or suspect, we are left to make up our own narrative: a do-it-yourself murder mystery.

On the third floor at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Andrea Bowers’ Tree sits – Canopy Camping, earth First! Direct Action Manual with Dream Platform, an ode to environmentalist civil disobedience, presents a fully functional tree sitter’s platform complete with instructions for residence (dedicating one side as kitchen, the other as bathroom because one “wouldn’t want to do both in the same area”).   Bowers has explored many activist tropes (Feminism, Immigration reform) but her gallerist explained to me that while the work is about activism, it is not actual activism.  This neat semantic hat trick in no way detracts from the sincerity and idealistic appeal of the work.  In fact, given Dia’s treacherously steep staircases, the ropes and carabiners might prove extremely useful to fairgoers.  Other works not to miss on the third floor are Moyra Davey’s grainy close ups of the back of a ten dollar bill from 1989 at Murray Guy and Michel François’s exuberant bronze splatter evoking Jackson Pollock at Bortolami.

Rob Pruitt’s silver-tape covered chairs, The Congregation (2010-12) at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise almost steal the show on the fourth floor, but it is well worth lingering around the corner at Creative Growth Art Center where Dan Miller has created spellbinding odes to the power of language in pen, paint, and typewritten words on paper.  The works are both confounding and compelling – alluring, indefinably sad, and creepy.  Their poignancy is almost overwhelming when one learns that the artist has Autism, and can hardly speak at all.  His words are all in his art.

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Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson, and Ken Johnson join David Cohen to discuss Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters, Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly, Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

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David Carrier, Eva Diaz, and Marjorie Welish joined David Cohen to discuss Alison Knowles at James Fuentes LLC, Jaq Chartier at Morgan Lehman, Iván Navarro at Paul Kasmin, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

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Ken Johnson, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to review Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, R H Quaytman at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery, and Mary Heilmann at 303 Gallery.

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May 22 to June 28, 2008

If you turn from reading Tim Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life to looking at contemporary art in the galleries, you cannot but be a little disappointed. Who is our Degas, our Manet or our Pissarro- who, that is, displays the hidden political and social dimensions of our public spaces, revealing how our private desires are externalized there? Modernist high art turned inward, leaving this task to mass art. Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain (1952) shows, by comparison, how confined were the explicit social references of Abstract Expressionism. Last Fall Dara Friedman hired sixty people, children, tourists, and workers of all ages, to sing in public without accompaniment. They sang in daylight and at night, in coffee shops, on Manhattan street corners, in museums, and in Grand Central Station. Mostly they did popular songs, with a little opera, mostly lyrics about longing. Some of the performers are very good, a few sound great, but they wouldn’t attract attention in concert. Musical, a sixty-minute large screen, high definition digital video presents these performances.

In New York, you can be pretty eccentric without attracting attention. At one point, someone gives money to the singer. And sometimes bystanders try to avoid walking into the scene. But generally people on the street let the singers be, without interfering.

Being an art critic often is dispiriting. You see the art stars in the upscale galleries, then look at shows of a few, mostly hopeless idealistic kids in the marginal spaces. Pretty soon then you are ready to sit down, have a drink.  But now and then, though this is sadly rare, you have without any warning an experience that redeems this exhausting walking. That happens when you come upon art by someone unknown to you, which stops you in your tracks. Like sexual pleasure, this aesthetic ecstasy cannot be faked. Twenty seven minutes into Musical it was transparently obvious that this video was a masterpiece. Coming from me, here you need some context, this critical judgment needs placing.

A few years ago, Modern Painters magazine commissioned an essay on video. “Most people, myself included,” I wrote,

are much more willing to tolerate boredom in the art gallery or museum than when watching television. In the 1960s and 70s, Susan Sontag and other writers argued that rejecting art because it seems boring marks a refusal to engage with revolutionary artforms. But most videos are just dull. If we had home televisions with such large screens and good sound systems, video art would not attract so much attention. A great movie is worth viewing many times, but few museum videos deserve such attention.

No wonder that distinguished commercial journal rejected my cranky commentary. But as every critic knows, judging art involves responding to immediate experience, which can be entirely unpredictable. Then, of course, one goes home to reflect. I passionately admire Musical because it animates our contemporary public spaces. People do this privately, listening to their ipods. We want, many of us, that music give rhythm to street life. Friedman’s greatness comes in making public this widely felt  desire. In Hollywood musicals, the setting typically is artificial. You know that Gene Kelly is just dancing on a stage set. But Friedman’s singers perform on the very streets you will reenter as soon as you leave the gallery. And so when you exit Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Manhattan looks different. Like the Impressionists, Friedman transfigures the contemporary world. What more could we ask of any artist?  But then, greatness is only another name for total directness

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