October 3 to 28, 2018
131 Chrystie Street, between Broome and Delancey streets
New York City, sfaprojects.com

Benjamin Pritchard’s strikingly abrupt compositions remind me of a David Salle interview in which that artist explained how he used to try to pack a lot into his paintings until he realized that he just wanted them to say Yes or No. Initial impact is something that Pritchard evidently takes seriously, too.

But “Wayfarer”, his first solo show at SFA projects, reveals the elusive nature of contemporary abstraction. The modest sized paintings are hung in groups, each meant to explore a different organizing motif: parallel lines, blocks, circles, swirls, horizontal divisions, zig-zags, red. The simple geometry of these provisionally painted pictures makes them feel like signs directing viewers through the exhibition.

While most abstract painting begs the rhetorical question of whether a familiar form represents something, the language in which Pritchard paints is so distilled that my curiosity is drawn, instead, towards his initial impetus, the process by which he arrives at his legible shapes. For example, the first painting we see is a black canvas with white stripes, Zebra. The swirling ribbons of white on black could be read as a limited view of a zebra and perhaps they reference Victor Vaserely’s painting of the same title. Yet further viewing reveals a void-like space in the black behind the stripes. Perhaps this is generated by the nuance of the strokes themselves, or it could be created by the drips of white on the right side of the canvas. Perhaps this is a gritty rendering of the interior of the Guggenheim Museum.

Then there’s a grouping of four very dark paintings each comprised of blocks and columns with narrow tonal ranges and indecipherable colors. Viewing them is like peering over a dark cliff at night with ambient light playing tricks on the eyes. In my favorite painting, coincidentally titled Nighttime, the seemingly random swirls of complementary colors mimic an oil slick on asphalt.

The painting Dos Equis is a heavily built up painting that resembles two overlapping boomerangs. As is typical for Pritchard, layers range inventively from thin veils of paint to thick impasto strokes. This kind of playfulness with material recalls the painter Chris Martin, though I more closely associate his work with that of Forrest Bess for the psychological space he generates.

Fire, an explosion of gestural strokes of red with flickering accents of green in the underlying layers is another poignant painting. The buildup and tearing down of each layer is a Sisyphean feat not always obvious but coded, nonetheless, on the sides of the canvas. Rather than being about fire per se, this intense red painting is a metaphor for some kind of internal drama.

“Wayfarer” exhibits strong command of abstraction as well as an awareness of what a painting can and cannot be. It contributes to a current trend in painting that Paul Gagner calls “abstract art with quotation marks”, where materiality, symbolism, illusionistic space, and other tricks of the trade are treated as artifice to serve a greater statement. Pritchard happens to be coy with his statements so that he treats the act of painting as an act of theater. When looking at Pritchard’s work the directness of the compositions and the simplicity of the forms are a performance by which he is able to convey something deeper.

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Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

The post “This is how it’s done”: David Salle Curates Recent Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

The post Burning Inside: Passion, Politics, and Disruption at Paul Kasmin appeared first on artcritical.

It’s been almost a year since Hurricane Sandy wrecked havoc on New York City and much of the East Coast. Artists were effected in a number of devastating ways: from water-clogged homes and studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to decades-worth of work lost in flooded Chelsea galleries. Phong Bui, artist and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail is recognizing this anniversary with Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1, a benefit exhibition that is more in the spirit of celebration and solidarity than somber remembrance. Conceived in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation and Industry City, the show features more than 300 artists, roughly half of whom were directly affected by the storm, across a remarkable range of disciplines and career levels. Bui himself lost years of work and much of the Rail’s archive in his flooded Greenpoint studio. The two-month exhibition will also be the site of  poetry readings, film screenings,  musical performances, talks with conservators, and other cultural events.

Exhibiting artists include: Marina Adams, Susan Bee, Katherine Bradford, Mike Cloud, Cora Cohen, Tamara Gonzales, Ron Gorchov, Josephine Halvorson, EJ Hauser, Michael Joo, Alex Katz, Ronnie Landfield, Chris Martin, Carrie Moyer, Nari Ward, Wendy White, Richard Serra, and newer faces such as Becky Brown, Allison Ginsberg, Heidi Howard, Osamu Kobayashi, Brie Ruais, Gabriela Salazar and Nicole Wittenberg.

The opening of Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1 is Sunday, October 20 from 4 PM to 8 PM.

Industry City is located at 220 36th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The exhibition is open Thursday through Sunday, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM , and will run from October 20 to December 15, 2013

For more information and a full schedule of events, please  visit: www.cometogethersandy.com, or email: info@dedalusfoundation.org

The post One Year After Sandy…Brooklyn Comes Together appeared first on artcritical.

In Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat, the title character, exemplar of the flameout credo of the East Village, is assisting an artist-installer at the Mary Boone Gallery.  This mediocrity, played by Willem Da Foe, attempts to counsel the hero about the benefits of a reliable day job.  Basquiat replies that someday he would show on those very walls.  He quits on the spot and never looks back.  Likely Schnabel was not intending that the viewer inquire further into the Da Foe character’s pitiable existence, but let me suggest that he took the L train home to his Williamsburg sweatshop loft, stoked the woodstove with 2×4 scraps, and painted obsessively into the night, biding his time.

After the crash of ’87 (a laughable blip, in retrospect) the briefly pumped-up East Village galleries either closed or moved up the ladder to Soho.  Artists who didn’t get mowed down by hard drugs or AIDS got decadently rich and left yuppies in their wake – the price of a vacant Alphabet City “studio,” not to say an actual studio, moving out of reach of Midwest college kids.  A bridge and tunnel away, however, a scattered army of Da Foes popped their heads out their windows and noticed each other.

Marcin Ramocki’s new documentary Brooklyn DIY, which premiered at MoMA on February 25th, is subtitled The History of the Williamsburg Art Scene 1987-2007. The video is the first straightforward, Sundance Channel-style attempt, and one hopes not the last, to document the brief, happy life of the Williamsburg Scene – begging the question, in the process, as to the degree to which Williamsburg really was, or perhaps even still is, a coherent scene; a dissident view advanced in the video is that it’s just a bit of geography where numerous artists happened to find a place to live and work, an insignificant smattering rising to wider prominence.

One must be grateful that Ramocki, rather than some slick cultural tourist, has been the first to tackle this contested history.  He knows firsthand the experimental tradition ably evoked by the 75-minute video, having founded, in 2003, the Williamsburg gallery vertexList in the vacated address of the relocated 4 Walls, the most venerable of Williamsburg artist-run clubhouses.  Ramocki knows enough of the right people to interview, he covers the best of the early venues and events, and he was given access to crucial archives (in particular that of dedicated video chronicler Carleton Bright, credited as Associate Producer.)

Insider Ramocki’s do-it-yourself, laptop-edited history is thus in some sense an extension of its subject.  But he has chosen to play it close to the vest, adopting a familiar format of talking heads and supplemental footage.  He pretends to no innovation as a videomaker, strenuously avoiding not only the Williamsburg ethos of oddball, low-key subversion but, for that matter, vertexList’s more aggressive program of digital intervention.  Brooklyn DIY is content to showcase more imaginative acts of wry self-conscience, such as Ward Shelley’sWilliamsburg Timeline, a 2004 print in which the artist has ventured a disarmingly earnest, intestinal diagram of the comings and goings of Williamsburg’s significant people, places, and events, and Matt Freedman’s live drawing lecture, in which, accompanied by Tim Spelios’s percussion, he cartoons with deadpan erudition the convergence of economic conditions which emptied acres of cheap loft space just a stop away from the burnt-out, priced-out East Village.  Freedman’s performance puts us in mind that if Williamsburg is only geography, well, so was St. Louis in 1800, sited at the confluence of two mighty rivers teeming with beaver pelts.

Had Brooklyn DIY trusted its subjects more in the manner of its unhurried perusal of Freedman’s lecture, or its occasional returns to Shelley’s Timeline for close-ups of the particular node of activity under discussion, the video might have been both more entertaining and informative.  That said, when the interviewees are on the ball, Freedman and Shelley among them, and we are treated to priceless, thoughtfully correlated Hi-8 tape and photos of the ancestral events in play, the formula works breezily well.  Alas, Ramocki has a weakness for chopped up, artificially manipulated exchanges, which, while sometimes lively, tend to simulate debate in an all too familiar sound bite vacuum, as with the following sequence in which the much admired painter Amy Sillman, an acerb skeptic about the Williamsburg Scene, and Ebon Fisher, who was among the dedicated instigators of mass warehouse events, seem to be at odds:

Fisher:  “We began to figure out what makes a warehouse party work.”

Sillman:  “…and they were run by people with a sense they were doing something very important for everybody.”

Fisher:  “Of course we all assumed it would be revolutionary.”

Sillman:  “If you came here in 84, you didn’t necessarily party with people who came in 89.”

Fisher:  “Manhattan was learning from Brookyln, an entire community and its surrounding ecosystem…”

Sillman:  “East Village Two, why do we need it again?”

Now, a little of this can be funny and to the point, as here perhaps, with Fisher’s utopian spin cut down to size – so the editing disposes – by Sillman’s curmudgeonly charm.  But pitting isolated interview subjects against one another by proxy, intercutting words from different contexts and temperaments as if they were on the same page, is mildly sensationalistic.  In fairness, we are shown glimpses during the “exchange” above of menacing, funky installations, whacked-out nudists, S&M stilt walkers and lab-coated pranksters from Organism, a 24-hour “webjam” in a disused mustard factory.  In venerable documentary tradition the viewer will judge whether such events deserve their own Ward Shelleyan nodule along the spaghetti which connects the Human Be-In and the Happening to the Rave on the master timeline of American counterculture.  But if Ramocki’s habit of interruption and juxtaposition can work well enough on occasion, it tends to get diminishing returns, as later when he elicits a montage of disagreements on the definition of “hipster” – an excruciating sequence with little redeeming schadenfreude.  Yes, hipsters are the new yuppies, as one youngish fashion photographer has it, and he ought to know.

The “hipster” episode is part of an attempt to tie Brooklyn DIY’s historical survey of the art scene to reflections about gentrification, an important topic to be sure, but one that deserves more than lip service to “the notion of [white artists’] privilege from the very moment they moved into this neighborhood,” as artist Freedman puts it.  This Solomonic admonition is unkindly dropped like a sandbag amid the usual war stories of the old days –shots  in the night, muggings, stripped cars set alight – stories that pioneers like to tell with a certain pride and glamour, despite being perfectly well aware that they were in far less danger of being shot than the 14 year old Dominican kid down the block.  If a documentary were serious about exploring the impact of artists on real estate values, we’d need to see interviews with artist-renovator winners and evicted loft dweller losers, as well as with Polish, Latino and Hassidic natives; statistics on development, rents, and incomes; and a wider survey of the mercantile hipster culture that came to fill every nook and cranny with professionally distressed lounges and pre-packaged trends.  The video goes into needless depth about one such latter-day party scene, shot gunned into brief vogue as “Electroclash” by a DJ named Larry T.  Mr. T’s mercenary, take-no-prisoners self-promotion does make for an amusing interview, and perhaps Ramocki means to illuminate, by contrast, the self-effacing sincerity of proprietors of projects like 4 Walls and Pierogi, which Joe Amrhein describes as “more like a social construct for an artwork” than a gallery.  If irony is meant, a little goes a long way.  But one has the feeling, instead, that Ramocki really means to suggest a continuum from the loosely anarchic DIY scene of clubs and events like El Sensorium, Keep Refrigerated, Cat’s Head and Organism to a more recent vintage of bridge and tunnel cattle pens where, as Larry T declares, “Everybody got laid!”  Let’s set the record straight, then: good times Electroclash stands in relation to the more diffident Williamsburg Scene as Studio 54 does to the Pyramid Club; the antagonism is stylistic and fundamental.

Not to say that self-promotion and battles over ownership were ever entirely absent from what Shelley denotes on his timeline as the Creative Golden Age.  Still, it’s substantially true that, in his words, “it was art for art’s sake, the artists were all pitching in, and they weren’t worried about the borders of what their work was.”  In Shelley’s mordant analysis, this foul-weather utopianism was inextricable from the fact that no one could get a show in Manhattan.  Things began to change as the art market expanded again, with opportunities for local artists to disentangle themselves not only across the river but also in their own backyard.  By then there were perhaps thousands of artists living and working in close proximity in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and environs, and a parallel world of galleries emerged to show them.  In an omniscient statistic Brooklyn DIY claims that 145 galleries have come and gone, but that number is generously inclusive.  Only a few have had true grit, laid-back but competent DIY style, and/or staying power.  And of these, a 75-minute survey can only cover a sampling, with significant players relegated to passing mention or, in some cases, insufficiently identified footage.  (A Roxy Paine periscope installation at Momenta, for example, in which the artist’s upstairs studio was surveiled goes uncredited.)  Seminal spaces like Brand Name Damages and Test Site get welcome remembrance (though oddly, the film never mentions that Test Site’s Annie Herron, Williamsburg’s matron saint, died tragically young in 2004) but when it comes to choosing gallerists to interview,Brooklyn DIY must resort to an attempt at cross-section: the old-time guerrilla (Aaron Namenwirth of Art Moving), the clubhouse impresario (Mike Ballou of 4 Walls), the for profit pioneer (Amrhein of Pierogi), the ambitious ship-jumper (Becky Smith of Bellwether), the bad boy Chelsea reject (Don Carroll of Jack The Pelican), and the persistent, if pragmatic idealist (Daniel Aycock of Front Room).  If a few of DIY’s choices seem marginal compared to other spaces that go unmentioned despite being on the leading edge or right at the center of the alternative gallery scene – such as, for the record, Flipside, Momenta, Arcadia, Sauce, Roebling Hall, Eyewash, Parker’s Box, and maybe also Sideshow, Plus Ultra and im n Il – one can forgive Ramocki his personal skew; at least he has troubled to get the bulk of it right, and we are amply referred to Shelley’s conscientious Timeline if we want to fill in some of the blanks.

With a lively exhibition scene, then, centered first and foremost around Pierogi since 1995, it’s inevitable that the completely fatuous question is going to be asked, is there a Williamsburg “look?”  Perhaps this sort of thing is an inherent folly of mental anatomy, like the tendency to map parents’ faces onto an adopted child’s.  The East Village or Downtown “look” is a historical grain of sand around which layer upon layer of commentary has accrued, a pearl of conventional wisdom.  But in fact, no obvious common factor denominates between Basquiat and Koons, Wojnarowicz and Holzer, Coe and Scharf, et al.  Without the fiction of revolutionary alignment, a fiction that was artificially inseminated into the media slipstream by narcissistic gallerists, artists, and writers with a chip on the shoulder (and two in the pot), the East Village would have been just a loose, vibrant locus of activity.  Against this Machiavellian fait accompli, poor, innocent Williamsburg is forever held to a double standard in which it fails to achieve EV-level scenedom because its “paradigm” – to borrow from the title of a prescient 1993 show in far-off Illinois curated by trend-spotter Jonathan Fineberg – is either too predictable or else not predictable enough.  BrooklynDIYperks up when, in its patchwork fashion, talking heads weigh in on the question of aesthetic alignment, yes or no, good or bad.

Mike Ballou: “One of the dangers is that it becomes a little incestuous.  It does become a clique and a club.”

Amy Sillman: “[…] If you said something bad about someone’s art, they’d hear about it and it would be awful and so you’d refrain. […]  The Williamsburg thing, at least its deep roots, I think it does not have any particular aesthetic position, nor was anyone going to really argue about it, and without that you can’t have any kind of strong aesthetic platform.”

Joe Amrhein:  “I don’t think Williamsburg has that regional look [as with Bay Area or Liepzig School art] and I like it that way.”

Becky Smith:  “My friend calls it the International Williamsburg Style, a certain kind of painting it looks like Joe would show, out of this certain time.”

Sillman:  “I don’t think my work has any kind of aesthetic relationship to Williamsburg at all.  It wasn’t really an aesthetic community, it was really a geographic community.”

I’ve heard Pierogi criticized for favoring dense, handmade, graphic imagism (disclosure: the present writer has shown there), but gallerist Smith’s cavil, given Bellweather’s heavy rotation of off-kilter academic realism, is a stone cast from a glass McMansion.  If ever there was a Williamsburg aesthetic it probably had more to do with the sort of electro-mechanical “bricolage” shown in footage from 1991’s multi-space show, Tweaking The Human and exemplified by hybrid instrument sculptor/musician Ken Butler, whose opinions and AK47-cello riffs are agreeably laced throughout Brooklyn DIY.  Pierogi, for that matter, has often showcased absurdist sci-fi spectacle, and has now rededicated its program to large constructions with its cavernous new Boiler space (an act of typical Williamsburg optimism so out of step with reality that it might single-handedly turn the economy around).

Where Smith sees tired parochialism, Sillman sees the opposite, the blobby incoherence that arises in a vacuum.  Can there be an aesthetics, she asks, without a bit of tough-minded dialectics?  Sillman picks at the wound of the larger question about Williamsburg: Was low-key, inclusive niceness a deliberate and characteristic virtue, or was it a symptom of artistic mediocrity?  If the former, street events, clubs, anonymous and borderless artworks should be taken seriously in appraising Williamsburg’s historical importance, andBrooklyn DIY makes a down payment on video-logging the wealth of crazy stuff that went on, from Gene Pool’s unicycling Can Man, to a panel at 4 Walls on jokes, to barely contained pyromania in the cavernous Mustard club.

But in Sillman’s terms Williamsburg would only matter if its islands of individual artistic achievement were connected underwater, as it were, by an “ecosystem.”  Critic Sarah Schmerler further articulates this rather pitiless view, asserting that Williamsburg art won’t make it into books aside from a few success stories – and here she names Sillman, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, and Roxy Paine.  (Interviews with the last three, by the way, would be essential to any comprehensive reckoning.)  “How many hands do we need?” Schmerler asks dismissively.

Quite a few, actually.  Here’s a very short additional list of internationally respected artists who can be said to have more than passed through – who lived, worked, curated, showed, partied and did it themselves in Williamsburg:  interviewees Amrhein, Ballou, and Shelley; Michael Ashkin, Francis Cape, Diana Cooper, Charles Currier, James Esber, Jane Fine, Su Friederich, Joe Fyfe, Rachel Harrison, Perry Hoberman, Byron Kim, Mark Lombardi, Chris Martin, David Opdike, Joyce Pensato, David Scher, James Siena, Mike Smith, Eve Sussman, Dan Zeller, and Brenda Zlamany.  Among these, a number have been in Biennials, had solo museum shows and, pace Schmerler, made it into art history books.  Dozens of impressive artists might be added to that list.  The real question is, how densely interwoven is the network that connects them?  Is it like loose seaweed floating among the waves, or more like a coral reef, anchored in place and bristling with exotic life?

Schmerler, to her credit, was the first mainstream critic to novelty-shop in the neighborhood, covering the Crest Hardware Show, a stealth art extravaganza, for Time Out as a harbinger of new energy.  And in Brooklyn DIY she extols the value of having artists still congregate within the precincts of New York, “like gold backing the dollar,” though this hardheaded choice of simile comes off as grudging.  She’s right that a sea of artists, writers, and musicians are required to buoy up the few celebrities, and maybe a materialistic headcount of the famous is the only objective way to judge the vitality of a scene, in toto.  Schmerler, however, draws the waterline so high as to make her verdict seem truculent, as if wishing to repudiate her early association with Williamsburg amateurism in order to avoid being tarred by the same brush.  But given the recent mid-career emergence of formidable forces such as Martin, Pensato, and Sussman I would suggest that it’s still too early for a final assessment, in any case, of what may turn out to have been a singularly slow-ripening phenomenon.  (Full disclosure: the present writer would like to think there is still room for a generation of under-known mid-career artists to emerge from local notoriety into the light of wider recognition.)

For all the hand wringing about gentrification (and the dark jokes about artists mixing paint on the marble countertops of abandoned luxury condos), what if, instead, the most salient characteristic of Williamsburg was its longevity?  Yes, things change fast in New York, but maybe a little more slowly in Brooklyn, and that opulence of time in many cases allowed for a different studio approach.  Could Martin, Pensato, and Sussman have matured in the pressure cooker of Avenue C in the ‘80s?  Maybe there’s a particular flavor to the Williamsburg Scene, a rare terroir that connects the DIY attitude to a kind of work that takes years to ferment.

In the end, what Brooklyn DIY does best is to resuscitate the energy of a time of underground events and wacky street theater that may have begun as a footnote to the East Village Scene but flourished on its own gleeful terms, innocent of the sort of fashion despotism and lust for fame and fortune that came to rule the EV.  Of that earlier scene Gary Indiana has written, “Many artists made no objects but did things that were art, like keeping dull people out of the Mudd Club.”  To be sure, Williamsburg was duller, partly because the scene was too small to afford to be exclusive, but also by design, in reaction to the psychic price of snobbery.  No guardians kept clueless artists from bringing their work to Crest or hanging it at the Salon of Mating Spiders.  Anyone was welcome to cobble together a pile of junk at Cat’s Head or read bad poetry at The Ship’s Mast or pontificate at 4 Walls, if they were thick skinned and shameless.  The only gatekeeping mechanism against dolts and poseurs, effective enough at low densities, was negative word-of-mouth.

Scenes come and go according to cyclic factors as dry as real estate values, as mysterious as the wheel of kharma.  A notable few persist in memory.  You have the feeling of needing to be alone, so as to give yourself over in deeper peace of mind to this ambiguous wink from nirvana; and at the same time, you need the presence of others, like gently-shifting relief figures on the plinth of your own throne.  Walter Benjamin was writing about hashish intoxication, but the sentiments might equally apply to the condition of making art within a community.  Time has begun to tell, and the Williamsburg paradigm, in which artists might explore the nirvana of solitude without loneliness, may someday turn out to have produced as much lasting art-market value as certain louder, more spectacular, and shorter-lived bubbles.  With a new age of stagnation upon us, such a combination of amateurism, communalism, and elbow room will take root again, whether in the looming forest of bankrupt waterfront condos planted in the asbestos of warehouse parties past; in Bushwick or Bed Stuy; or someplace neither yuppies nor hipsters nor Barbara Corcoran have yet heard of – someplace plain wrong, and thus exactly right.

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February 8, 2008 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr joined David Cohen to review Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, Katy Grannan at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 Freemans, Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy, William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Chris Martin at Michell-Innes & Nash.

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Even for seasoned navigators, there’s a lot of getting lost to be done in Miami, with everything oriented NE, NW, condo towers being built everywhere blocking one-way streets. Looking for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) near downtown, we first passed a group of boxy nightclub buildings. These are the after-hours places, which pick up the crowds after South Beach closes down at 4 am. Even at 3 in the afternoon, there was still a crowd of glazed ravers lined up, waiting to get in.

Then, like a mirage, emerged CIFO’s glass mosaic façade, a free-standing converted warehouse on North Miami Avenue. Seen from a distance, the pixilated Bisazza tiles make up an image of a bamboo jungle, the conception of architect Rene Gonzalez. (The benefactor, Ella Fontanals Cisneros, is a Venezuelan real-estate developer on a mission to promote Latin American contemporary artists.) The exhibition, “Fortunate Objects: The Appropriated Object,” is first-rate, a succinctly curated affair that juxtaposes works by Ai Weiwei, Amelia Azcarate, Marcea Astorga, and others.

Next, off to Wynwood proper, to see the Rubell Family Collection. Opened in 1996, the 45,000 square foot former DEA confiscated goods warehouse looks unassuming, even drab, from the exterior. That only sets you up for a bigger surprise when you get inside. It’s a huge space, incredibly appointed, filled with first-rate examples of recent art. (For comparison, it’s about on the scale of New York’s Whitney Museum.). I was blown away. This is the last signifying frontier of private wealth in action. There’s a 40,000-volume art library behind glass in a room with no one in it, a New Media room, a Phaidon bookstore with volumes extending dramatically to the ceiling, a Cerealart gift shop and a new sculpture garden with monumental works by Thomas Schutte. Two exhibitions there were especially strong, a survey of Hernan Bas (b. 1978) who studied in Miami and “Euro-Centric, Part 1,” featuring Thomas Zipp, Urs Fisher and others.

Trying for a trifecta, I embarked for the nearby Martin Margolis Collection, hearing that it had installations by Olafur Eliasson and Anthony McCall. I circled the block, but couldn’t find it. Instead, I spotted a handmade sign, made of paper, advertising a temporary show by Mike Cloud. This turned out to a makeshift outpost of New York’s Max Protetch gallery in a rented retail space. Cloud’s assemblage art inside gives new meaning to “slacker”-ism, raising crappy-looking to unimagined heights. The gallery assistant told me that the Margolis warehouse was indeed next door, but closed early at 4 pm. Closed early? On the Saturday of Art Basel Miami Beach? That’s nuts.

I wanted to see the Peter Coffin show at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. The Paris-based operation was one of the more visible presences at the fair (it even publishes its own art magazine, BING, to promote its artists). They have opened a permanent space in Wynwood, impressive in its scale and ambition. Coffin is a New York phenom, whose smart neo-conceptual works were to be seen all over the fair. His show, with the fractured title Model of the Universe (e.g. sweet harmonica solo, e.g. the idea of the sun, e.g. frisbee dog c included one of the weekend’s most impressive pieces, a steel spiral staircase twisted into a continuous circle: Tthink MC Escher’s impossible stairways to infinity meets a DNA double helix meets utilitarian found object.

One thing that’s great about Wynwood is—unlike New York’s West Chelsea or Bowery gallery districts—it’s still genuinely gritty. The cross-cultural juxtaposition with what’s going on in the surrounding neighborhood is so strong that it creates shocking 21st Century frisson. On SE Fifth Avenue, for example, is a colorful strip of ethnic fashion stores, in case the likes of Peter Coffin need to buy a sequined prom tuxedo—or some human hair.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7

“The Art Miami fair has redefined itself,” explains Eli Ridgeway, of Paule Anglim, San Francisco, of the original fair that preceded Art Basel and the legion spin off fairs.  “Here galleries are showing new works in a historical context.” This means cutting-edge galleries such as Chinablue, Beijing, can cross-contextualize with established programs of New York galleries.

Chinablue, Beijing, mounted an impressive wall-sized photo mural by Wang Qingsong, showing the interior of a vast warehouse with hand-painted employment posters papered from floor to ceiling. I engaged gallery employee U Han to tell me about her experiences here. At first, she was shy, but once she got talking about how Qingsong makes his elaborate photo set-ups, she wouldn’t stop talking.

Bjorn Wetterling, who has run a leading contemporary gallery in Stockholm for 29 years, devoted his entire booth to a multi-layered photographic mixed media installation by New York twin brothers Doug & Mike Starn. He told of how he decided to participate. “I was not supposed to do the fair,” he told me, “because I was already in the photo fair. But they kept calling me, begging and begging. Finally, I was in Malaysia—and they called me late in the evening. I told them, ‘I have an extraordinary idea.’” And that’s how the Starns show was born.

New York gallerist Alexander Gray is featuring confrontational works by Kathe Burkhart (“Up Your Ass”, from the Liz Taylor series) and Cary Leibowitz (the artist formerly known as “Candyass”). His booth’s exterior has a Karen Finley piece consisting of a blank wall with Sharpie markers for people to write their mother’s maiden names (by the time I saw it, it was already completely covered). I asked Gray if his fares shocked anyone. He told me, “No, it’s not possible to scandalize any more.” Of the Finley, he said, “the public has been incredibly engaged in this monument to matriarchy.” Gray’s painting program is really interesting, as well, as it includes 1970s-era abstract works by Jack Whitten as well as contemporary offerings from Jo Baer and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.

Meanwhile, young artist Crystal Kanney drove “all through the night” from Savannah, Ga., to attend—and to wear her full-body Elvis suit, a kind of self-promoting art billboard.

Next, I headed back to Miami Beach, as I still hadn’t seen the “containers,” metal shipping units fashioned into galleries for Art Basel Miami’s Art Positions section. (This means, sadly, I had missed Iggy Pop’s performance Wednesday night).

By the time I got there, it was after nightfall. I had yet to see the ocean, so I wandering alone down the vast expanse of empty beach, gazing up at the illuminated million dollar condos and stars above. As you approach Art Positions, it sounds like a party, thanks to WPS1.org’s radio DJ booth and booming sound system.

The containers fair is hilarious. Stoned-looking gallerists slouch in their expensive clothes in inexpensive beach chairs as legions of curious unfatigable visitors troop through, jamming themselves into these brightly-lit air-conditioned shoeboxes.

I could hear the sounds of Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC coming from the central bar area next door. Curious, I wandered over toward the colored lights and fog machines. Under pop graphic signage by Ryan McGinness and a giant video screen featuring assume vivid astro focus’s neo-psychedelia was a plywood skateboard ramp with a demo going on. For myself, having spent this past late August skating at Owl’s Head skateboard park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, preparing for the “Old Man’s Bowl Jam,” I was intensely curious. Turns out, this was Art Radio WPS1.org’s “Concrete Waves: Homage to Skate Culture at Art Positions.”

A strange figure, with flowing dreadlocks and a sweat-drenched plaid shirt, carved elegant kickturns from side to side of the elongated half-pipe. I did a slow burn. It was Tony Alva, legendary 1970s cult hero, Z-Boy of Santa Monica Dogtown renown, the inventor of pool riding and the frontside aerial. For the first time since arriving in Miami, I was genuinely star-struck.

I approached him afterwards, told him how closely I had studied his pictures in Skateboardermagazine in the 1970s (this was before I started reading Art in America). He was gracious, but physically spent (he’s now 50 years old!). He autographed a paper Ryan McGinness skateboard deck for me. Finally, I could go back to New York satisfied.

It was time to hit the party circuit, off to the Belle Island apartment of collectors Alfred Gillio and Paul Berstein for an exclusive soiree for Art Basel Miami’s Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. But that’s another story…

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6

After the glamour, glitz and polish of Art Basel Miami, the Pulse fair seems funky, almost shabby, by comparison. That’s good. It gets you rooting for the underdog.

The Pulse fair, having built its reputation in a tent in years past, has moved to a Deco-era concrete warehouse with adjoining sculpture courtyard. (The outdoor pieces include a working one-man submarine by Duke Riley, the Brooklyn artist who was arrested last summer as a would-be terrorist for impinging on the water-space of the Queen Mary 2, docked off of Red Hook.) Here, hipsters milled about aimlessly, while bigger fish arrived in black limos and yellow pedicabs.

I had talked to Pulse participant Magda Sawon, director of New York’s Postmasters, at the David Yurman/Whitney Museum party the night before. She was super-enthusiastic, saying the fair had great energy and brisk commercial action. Upon arriving, that mood was palpable, as gallerists enjoyed free beer being doled out from a galvanized metal wash tub of ice on a rolling dolly.

Postmasters, true to its politically-conscious program, was showing an outrageous video by Kenneth Tin Kin Hung, “Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People,” which included, among other photo-collaged imagery, a tableau of Condoleezza Rice riding a giant turd above the capitol city.

For people who hadn’t yet realized that buying art is a form of shopping, Jonathan Seliger’s editioned bronze Gucci shopping bag at Jack Shainman, New York, brought the point home with post-Duchampian panache.

An engaging wall of big buttons with slogans at Catharine Clark, San Francisco, [photo 5655] turned out to be by artist Walter Robinson. I queried, did this mean the return of Walter Robinson, now editor of Artnet magazine? (His paintings from the era of his showing at Metro Pictures in the 1980s have since gained a cult following.) No, an exasperated Clark responded, there is anotherWalter Robinson, in California, now making art.

I ran into veteran independent gallerist Paul Morris at the booth of Bischoff/Weiss, London, showing the work of Olivier Millagoul. When he struck up a conversation, the two young partners asked him who he was. He produced a card, and pronounced, “I founded the Armory show.”[photo 5673] For me, having attended the first New York alternative art fair at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I knew his history. But I wondered how amazing it must be for him to think that he, Pat Hearn, Colin de Land and Matthew Marks dreamed up this whole fun art fair movement—the nonstop moveable feast—and look where we are today.

Upstairs from Pulse is a highly appealing mini-fair, GEISAI. It was founded in 2001 by the artist-led enterprise Kaikai Kiki, brainchild of Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami. In it, individual artists are given booths from which to present a one-person show. Most were there, on site, to further engage the public. Some 20 international artists were selected by a jury from a pool of 716 applicants.

I ran into painter Charles Clough, a familiar figure from the New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, who has since moved to Rhode Island. He told me, “I did my last show with Tricia Collins in 1998. When she closed, I went out with the tide.” He has published a compelling book for the event,Pepfog Clufff, which displays methods of rephotographing painting details to develop a new working language (a project he began in 1976). So, how was the fair going? “It’s funny running into a lot of people from the past 35 years I’ve been amongst in the artworld,” he told me. “But,” he continued wistfully, “I’m still waiting for the ‘legendary sales’ to start.”

By contrast, two booths down, Eric Doeringer was having the opposite experience. He makes small knock-offs of well-known works by art stars—and sells them for $250 apiece (usually on the streets of West Chelsea). How were sales for him? “Fantastic,” he gushed, “like nobody’s business.” He told me that he had brought “four gigantic suitcases full of works, a few hundred.” He says his best sellers are Richard Prince, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Rob Pruitt’s panda.

Around the corner was a wall-mounted flat screen TV featuring Walter Robinson talking (he’s one of the GEISAI jurors). But was this the real Walter Robinson?

I left, battling insane traffic, to get to the hotel fairs at South Beach, along Collins Avenue.

There were literally throngs of art soldiers and fabulous trophy specimens to be seen crowding the overflowing hotel lobbies. At the Dorset, hosting the flow fair, an exhibitionistic DJ Hottpants [photo 5687] was spinning CDs (I didn’t know they “spun”) in front of a garish painting. At the bar, a youthful hustler approached two young females. His pick-up line: “I’m surprised to see two cute girls here. I thought it would just be ‘artsy’ types.”

I ventured across Collins Avenue, dodging Lamborghinis and Bentleys, to go to the Red Dot fair at the South Seas hotel. Here, a few quality galleries had decamped in their rooms with surprisingly esoteric works. At Howard Yazerski, Boston, I saw beautiful paintings by Cologne’s Peter Tollens. At Brian Gross, San Francisco, there were exquisite historical works on paper by Richard Pousette-Dart. New York gallery Anita Shapolsky, which specializes in artists who were represented in the 1940s and 1950s by Martha Jackson Gallery and Betty Parsons Gallery, had brought unusual small works by Buffie Johnson, Ernest Briggs and others.

I came away thinking there might be a true heart and soul art community here somewhere—even on Collins Avenue.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6 – BREAKFAST TIME

At the Vicente restaurant this morning, a Spanish joint on Collins Avenue, I ran into Paul Ha, a familiar face from his time running White Columns in New York, who has since decamped to St. Louis to run the Contemporary Art Museum.

Paul had befriended a young artist from Washington, D.C., Adam DeBoer, 23, exhibiting his figurative paintings at the booth of his home city’s Conner Contemporary Art at the Go Go Art Projects section of the Pulse Fair. It’s “like a farm team,” DeBoer explained. He was riding high, as he had sold his largest work the night before. “It’s the first painting I ever sold,” he told me. “It was wild out there. A buying frenzy. Red stickers all over the walls after only four hours.”

This was the youthquake I had been warned of. “Aren’t you worried about pushing out all the mid-career artists?” I asked. “No,” he replied, he was only worried about “burning out at an early age.” I told him, “Move to New York.”

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5

The Art Basel Miami Beach fair at the Convention Center opened at noon sharp, with a literal rush through the gates. (Think Aqueduct Raceway, but with stiletto heels, not horseshoes.)  Inside was a glittering spectacle of art and excess, laid out with impeccable Swiss style.

To the left of the entrance, at the booth of Deitch, N.Y., the first painting that viewers saw was Kurt Kauper’s “Bobby 3,” a full-length realistic portrait of the Boston Bruin hockey great Bobby Orr, nude. The funny thing was, instead of looking like Orr, the figure resembled Kauper’s rival painter John Currin.

Also near the entrance was an impressive installation by Christof Buchel at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. It was culled from the artist’s recent debacle (cancelled show) at Mass MoCA, consisting of metal storage container with a ladder leading to a make-shift roof deck. Mounting this structure, one could see the trashy leavings of a kids’ pizza party—Jello coagulating, half-consumed Kool Aid, etc, with an official US Army 750 lb. “leaflet bomb” hanging above. Looking through the Gauntanamo Bay-style cyclone fencing, viewers could then survey the entire fair.

Two booths chose retail themes: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, fixtured to look like a Prada store, and, at Shanghart, Shanghai, a full-blown convenience store, with external street façade. There, outside, a woman told her friend that she had just sent her boyfriend inside to “buy condoms.”

Among the early VIP attendees, competitive buying was fierce. At Gladstone’s booth, a woman was looking at a Richard Prince painting, “My Life as a Weapon,” 2007, which has a joke text painted in blue and black over a grid of color porn magazine photos. Turning to her husband, she said, “This is your thing. The fact that you don’t own this is terrible.”

I also heard the whispering murmurs among gallery employees, “the Kapoor just sold.”

Mary Boone’s booth was true to her 1980s West Broadway glory days: Barbara Kruger, Ross Bleckner, a large group of new Eric Fischls, “Scenes from Late Paradise” (sold already, together, according to Ron Warren, the longtime public face of the gallery).

Speaking of Mary Boone, I was surprised to see a painting by her wunderkind noir photorealist Damian Loeb at Acquavella’s. The Color of Money (2007) shows a house on a darkened street.

“How much is that painting,” a woman demanded.

“It’s sold,” a gallerist informed her.

“Do you have another?”

“We have another work, but it’s of another subject.”

“How much was this one?”

“$80,000.”

Then, the woman exclaimed, “That’s my house. That’s my house. That’s the house I grew up in.”

Sighted: Author Tom Wolfe, in trademark white suit, greeting well-wishers with his skull-cracked smile… New York art consultant Kim Heirston, elegantly educating her clients (and, no, she was not the tallest woman there—in the context of this XL Germanic crowd she is average height)… Brit scribe Anthony Haden-Guest looking pale-but-determined, notepad in hand… Talent scout Clarissa Dalrymple, puposeful in white cowboy boots… Miami’s own supercollectors Don and Mera Rubell, ever optimistic… 1980s East Village doyenne Gracie Mansion… OmnipresentArtforum publisher Knight Landsman in white suit and yellow tie (no doubt he has packed six such natty outfits)… 1980s art stars Doug Starn and Mike Starn looking smashing in matching frayed denim jeans and hair gone gray… New York painter Melissa Meyer (a friend, at last)…

Overheard: A woman complains to her female companion, “I can’t find anything to buy for $15,000.” Another man scolds a dealer, “Call us when the dollar gets stronger.”

Two observations: When it comes to art fairs, there is no such thing as fatigue. Also, after about four hours, everyone starts to look familiar (you begin to “know” the characters).

Finally, I was actually looking for art, paintings in particular. Some notable examples:

At Paula Cooper’s, Dan Walsh’s Pass (2007) consists of horizontal violet bands stacked upon a white background to buzzy hypnotic effect.

Kai Althoff’s dispersion work of blocky forms on cloth, created a gentle play on the optic relationship between gray and red, at Barbara Gladstone’s booth.

At Hetzler’s of Berlin, Arturo Herrera’s acrylic on felt work looked like a Robert Moskowitz in its silhouetted reduction—and was set up against a recent Bridget Riley.

At Michael Werner, New York, a self-contained Sigmar Polke room was installed with four fantastic ghostlike figure-ground abstractions (all sold as a set, at $5 million, a prospective buyer was informed).

Anselm Reyle, the hottest young abstractionist of the moment, had a sexy/decadent purple mylar-on-violet painted canvas work, encased in lucite box, at L & M, New York (marked sold, with a red dot at $250,000).

A new Baselitz “Remix” cowboy (!) painting (image right-side up) at Ropac, Salzburg, looking fresh and neo-Richard Prince.

Brooklyn’s own Pop Tantric Chris Martin with two forceful works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Lydia Dona, recombinant and delirious, a large diptych with engine parts outlined over shimmering silver, to the electronic soundtrack of the Dino Bruzzone piece next to it, at Karpio, San Jose.

Fabian Maracaccio and Jonathan Lasker, masters of mutant formalism and extruded brushstroke, facing off at Schulte, Berlin.

Kate Shepherd’s Pewter, American, Death, Revere (2007), white interstices of geometric netting undulating against a graphite ground, with elegant contained light, at New York’s Galerie Lelong.

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September 17 – October 24, 2005

Art belongs to everyone. So Chris Martin has it at his current show at Sideshow. Or should I say around Sideshow.  The first thing one notices on the approach is one of Martin’s signature abstractions looming large in black and red on the gallery’s adjacent brick wall. Closer still, one sees the façade of the building opposite peppered with Martin’s work. It seems perfectly at home framed by boarded windows and a wrought iron fire escape. After that, it comes as no surprise to enter Spoonbill bookshop down the street and run smack into another Martin installed between bookshelves for the occasion. He leaves his work out there, vulnerable as could be, as seemingly unconcerned about a drawing exposed to the elements as about careless passers-by and their fast fingers. Martin’s message is clear: art is meant for the streets and its inhabitants. It’s not a commercial object, but a most intimate effort at communication aimed at the broadest possible audience.

Intimacy on a grand scale – it sounds like a contradiction in terms. Mark Rothko was a master of it. He had an ability to infuse giant swaths of canvas with the most delicate feeling. It’s this that has drawn so many to his canvases over the years. In Sideshow’s front room, Martin shows himself in some measure possessed of this quality prominent in Rothko and present throughout the New York School. The one huge painting in the room is not intimidating but inviting. At 10 by 23 feet, its forms are generously hewn in black and white. They stretch with the painting’s length – lozenges punctuated by dots at three foot intervals and rectangles supporting and enclosing the lozenges. The seams of Martin’s signature drop cloth canvas contribute to the composition beneath the cake of paint. Across the room there’s a plush armchair and couch inviting the weary viewer to rest while they look. Judging by the fractious energy with which each inch of this mammoth painting is cut, Martin himself has rested little.

The painting is of a simplicity that often provokes those unfamiliar with art to balk though even the uninitiated must recognize that, by virtue of his sheer ambition, Martin is in earnest. Abstraction is a form often noted for its impenetrability. People wonder why artists would make things so hard to understand. From the painter’s perspective, it’s the other way around – their painting is clarity itself; a means by which the world is brought into focus. Martin’s forms have the feel of condensed experience, the mystical clairvoyance of things seen in great breadth and reduced to comprehensible order.

Martin appears to have installed a good portion of his studio in Sideshow’s rear room. Beside magazine clippings, old photographs, and student drawings hangs work by many of today’s finest painters. The artist is giving us his history. Three painters I imagine he’d have there if he could are Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock and Forest Bess. Though their scale is Martin’s obverse, these painters make similar use of focused form to transcribe experience. Their painting reveals how distortion of observed form is sometimes essential to fully communicate one’s feeling before nature. Martin is only a small step further toward abstraction, a step akin to that taken by the New York school more than half a century ago. His staunch determination that his paintings be seen as a part of the world that is their subject is a stance I imagine this latter group would admire.

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