Around The Neighborhood

A good day to just get out and walk around.

New

Mixed feelings about the results of this last firing, but I did finally manage to get it done, so I thought I'd better put up something.

Walton Ford @ Paul Kasmin Gallery

Impossible to get a decent photo of these enormous paintings because of the glass in front of them and the loads of natural light bouncing around the space, but in real life they are dazzling. The scale of these watercolor/gouache paintings is closer to what we expect for, say, a Jackson Pollock. Where does the paper come from that he's using? Everything I've read about this artist makes him seem like a cool guy, and a kind of insider/outsider vis-a-vis the NY art scene. The contours of the drawing of these animals are taut, assertively controlled and somehow help convey the energy of what is "happening" in the images. Species names scripted in Audubon style, and snippets of added notation heighten the degree of storytelling going on in these, tending to draw the viewer into some complicity with the subjects, and the effect can be ominous, poignant, or hilarious. The cassowary and emu battle shows a dinosauresque struggle between two 'biguns which simultaneously evokes the color and blase sensuality of the two gal pals recently seen lounging at the Met Museum in Courbet's "Demoiselles au Bord de la Seine". Bravura technique, perhaps to an extent some could find off-putting, even down to painting in the mushrooming points of mold usually found on ancient maps, prints, or illustrations. Gorgeous color. I could look at these a long time, but the show ends soon. Go.

Chelsea in Chains

Still plenty of grunge amid the glut of galleries and new construction, if you look for it - and I always do look. I was pleased to find this stop-work order posted along eleventh avenue, too. I didn't take the time to really read it, so I can't tell you what specific infraction caused the entire worksite to be shut down, but with the recent spate of crane-related accidents, and other negligences abounding, I'll take this as a step in the right direction. These two shots of chains are from different parts of the neighborhood. It was a good day for chain-spotting!

Tom Sachs @ Sperone Westwater Gallery

The title of this show is "Animals", and I almost skipped seeing it, because of a negative review I read and because I have been predisposed to think of the artist as somewhat overhyped. It has lots of very disparate work, much of it interesting and fabulously put together, and although his terrific bricolage sensibility finally does win me over, the intersections of stuff and ideas here seem crowded and chaotic. Branding, packaging, and luxe/status have been themes in a lot of his past work, and here he is exploring pyrography, a literal branding technique that sometimes has gorgeous results. He seems to be going in a lot of different directions with it at once, though: obsessively labeling the explosion of tool-stuff in an enormous, altarpiece-like chest in a way that catalogues a decade's worth of obscure and classic band references; then elsewhere using it as a mock-classical drawing technique that can resemble engraving or drypoint in large, overwrought parables populated by animals behaving badly - as in flirting lasciviously across species (would they call that bestiality?); finally in a piece called Connecticut, a laboriously burned background leaves a spirograph-like filigree around the exterior of a simple silhouette of the state on a ground formed by several cobbled together roadblock barriers. To me, there were some cool possibilities suggested in this piece, but no real room for expanding on that idea with so many others competing in this show. I could go on and on, and I did take quite a lot of pics. There were some great things, some duds, and just lots of it all, in a warren-like arrangement of small spaces. So, a kind of challenging show for the viewer. Glad I went, though.

Some More Street Art

No Pennies From Heaven

When is inclement weather more than just an inconvenience? When you are glazing and getting ready to do a kiln firing, and persistent power outages force you to postpone again and again, which has been the story here at the dojo for the past week. Massive winds and heavy rains have uprooted trees all through the area. Damage to homes and other structures is pretty significant, so I'll try to temper this little pout and take a moment to think of others. Okay, back to clay issues. I seem to have fixed on one of the most fussy and labor intensive glazing schemes possible for this batch of mugs, and so I am less inclined than ever to fire until I'm sure the power won't quit on me midway. Trouble is, I tend to fire overnight, and that seems to be when a lot of these mini-interruptions occur. Maybe the power company is doing this from their end while working on all the many downed lines. Here's a shot of glazed ware ready to be fired, and some trees that will be missed.

Christopher Adams @ Ricco Maresca Gallery

I first came across this artist's work about 2 years ago at the Scope Art Fair, and I remember it as a glorious hodge-podge of wildness. He is now showing this slightly more sedate wall installation as part of a group show. This work is composed of porcelain pieces that range from about 3 inches across to about 8 or so inches length for the larger ones, and the palette of bone white, black and brownish-bronze glaze color unifies things and somehow lends a posh feeling to it all. Reminds me of undersea forms, sea anemones and the like. Maybe the kind of thing you would step on in the ocean whilst vacationing and get poisoned by. Lots of nice variety. The extreme delicacy of some of the undulating tendril forms has the potter in me, inescapably, wondering what kind of attrition rate he has on these babies and what kind of scheme he has come up with to support some of the extended parts through the firing. I am afraid the glossiness of the glazes has made my photos lose a lot of the detail, unfortunately.

Scenes From Chelsea

Out & about, looking at art and surroundings. Here are a few shots. Though these I-beams share similarities with some of the sculpture I've been seeing lately, these ones are actually shoring up a building on 11th ave. I am intrigued by entrance ramps to parking garages lately, don't ask me why. This one has a screen door that would seem more at home out in the suburbs. Some peripheral messages in & out of galleries.

street

David Altmejd @ Andrea Rosen

This group of very big, figure-ish sculptures have a sort of involved, mannerist-expressionist thing going on. Lots of materials, handled with lots of panache. I mean, I like them. Not quite so sure about the mirror/crystal thing, however. They seem to have some sort of gestural stance, like the arms-folded one that is impersonating Mr Clean. They seem to be dwelling on (and in) their issues. The one I enjoyed the best was the giant whose body was composed of many painted, or dyed-over casts of hands, because its physical made-ness was great to investigate ( colors sort of reminded me of the edible-candy necklaces we used to get at the boardwalk during summers at the jersey shore ) and because its story seemed to be potentially spooky ( Who stole my Golden Arm? ).

Robert Therrien Sculptures

This show at Gagosian on West 24th street had some fun things to look upon, and I'd like to share my appreciation for the truly sweet, and engaging guard who was on duty there. He gladly stood for a photo to help show you the scale of these sculptures, although he declined to give me a boost up so I could sit on one of these folding chairs. Oh, well...

Benefit Pottery Show

The Greenwich House Pottery studio in nyc is having a fundraising show & sale of historic proportions. Lots of the best-known american potters have taught and studied there over the years, and this show affords a glimpse of their various ideas and approaches to clay. Essentially, the school is selling much of their collection of works, amassed over time, which were donated while these artist/teachers were in residence. Wonderful work from super well-known and lesser-known names, selling for a really good cause! ( ends June 1st ).

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Mark.di.Suvero

Completely.gorgeous.sculpture. This show is right across W. 21st street, in another space of Paula Cooper Gallery. I won't be so wordy here as I was in my last post. This work should be seen, if you can get to it.

gallery

This fairly anonymous-looking stairwell could be from just about any gallery. I noticed it for its pleasing generic-ness, but it belongs to the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea where I saw a fantastic show of Donald Judd woodcut prints that were touted in their advertising as "rare". Well, it turns out they are kind of rare, in more ways than one, although my efforts to get a decent photo of them had questionable results. These are very early efforts, though already clearly in the minimal vein, save for the very earliest, which has some playful pictorial things happening that could conjure most anyone except Judd. One thing I actually appreciated seeing in these was the lack of slick perfection that came to dominate printmaking for so long. It seemed clear that the prints were printed by the artist himself, and when I asked the gallery assistant if that were the case, I learned that yes, he had printed them with the help of his father, who had been a woodworker. Okay, so there was a smudge or two here and there at the margins of these: this show gave me a chance to think some new thoughts about something I felt I was pretty familiar with. Some of these thoughts revolved around time, and its effects on artworks themselves. Seeing silhouettes of oil leeching from printed lines to the surrounding paper is commonplace for engravings, and older prints; we get used to it and don't really notice it so much. But here, a large area of oil seepage is found on all of these prints, and I couldn't help thinking that someone who might not know what it was could take it for an element of the image. Which, I guess, it now is. Whether it is a detriment to the print is a question for paper conservators, I guess...