I was shocked I was
I went to a presentation by the artists and book signing at Aperture on Thursday night, and this is one of many duplicate posters I found clipped up and down parking signs and light posts along West 27th Street when I left to go home. This particular block is all about commercial businesses and galleries during the day and straight clubs late at night.
The sexy bills are part of a marketing blitz for “A Guide To Recogizing Your Saints” which, regardless of its merits or demerits, is apparently not actually a “gay film”.
Author: jameswagner
Cory Arcangel opens Team’s new SoHo digs
It was a wonderful block party, and I have no doubts that the show which attracted the crowd is a hoot, but I’m going to have to go back to check out Cory Arcangel’s latest magic show. Openings are usually a real challenge for anyone who actually wants to check out the art, and this one one one of the toughest I’ve seen yet. I couldn’t even get a decent photo image because of the crush.
I’ll try again later in the run of the show.
Meanwhile, the parade of SUVs emptying out of the Holland Tunnel and heading east across Grand Street in pursuit of Friday night excitement in Manhattan had to squeeze through the smart, celebratory crowd which poured out of the doors of Team’s new SoSoHo quarters and then proceded to just hang out for a few hours. There wasn’t even the attraction of drinks, alcoholic or otherwise; just good conversation, pretty people and lots of smiles. The NYPD squad cars inching by didn’t seem to know what to do about large numbers of happy people gathered together in polite society, without benefit of wheels of any description, on pavement laid a hundred years before the invention of the automobile.
I noticed that Mary Boone and gallery neighbor Jeffrey Deitch had to check out the goods inside, or maybe they just wanted to say hi. In any event I didn’t see either of them hanging out on the street on their way in or out.
A couple of crowd shots:
Closing in on Jacob and Jessica Ciocci, two thirds of Paper Rad, comfortably-ensconced on the ancient wall shelf with Noah Lyon:
And, in separate smart clutches, two of our favorite gallerists, John Thomson and Michael Gillespie:
Gerald Davis at John Connelly
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Gerald Davis E.T. and Grandma, 1986 2006 colored pencil on paper 50″ x 38″ (each drawing in diptych) [large details of the installation’s two framed drawings – including ambient reflections]
Gerald Davis’s show at John Connelly is breathtaking for both the simple beauty of the pencil drawings and and the richly personal images they describe. The dates in the title of each work refer to their autobiographical content, although even someone who is not part of Davis’s own generation is immediately and totally drawn into his creative memory of the world which shaped the artist’s passage into adolescence.
It’s an awesome show in the most genuine sense of the word.
Gerald Davis The Rumor, 1986 2006 pencil on paper [installation view]
the American Airlines homo scare: even worse than reported
UPDATE ON THE AMERICAN AIRLINES INCIDENT:
the airline’s straights-only security rules don’t fly
I have now heard from our friend David Leisner, who was quoted in the The New Yorker story I wrote about on Thursday evening. David was one half of the couple which witnessed the threats delivered to two other passengers seated in front of them, a homosexual couple, by (successively) the flight attendent, the purser and the captain of an American Airlines flight en route from Paris to New York. Both he and his partner Ralph Jackson were quoted in the magazine, but David has added some perspective and one damning fact which makes the airline’s confrontation even more outrageous than initially reported.
David writes, in part:
You can assure anyone that questions the degree of affection these guys were showing that it was very innocent – hand-holding, resting one’s head on the other’s shoulder and repeated kissing (but not French kissing!). Nothing disturbing about it at all, unless it had been a straight couple :-).
Also, the New Yorker writer got the punchline wrong: what the captain said to one of the couple was that he would divert the plane not if the arguing continued, but if he heard any more reports of such behavior (kissing). [my italics – JAW] It made an increasingly weird situation even more surreal and disturbing.
[image from pedalcarzone]
Taylor McKimens at Clementine
Taylor McKimens has a single large piece installed inside Clementine Gallery.
An exhibition featuring Taylor McKimens’s first comic book, published by PictureBox. All of the artwork used to make the comic book has been re-mixed to make a single freestanding large scale artwork in the space.
No old board fence ever looked so pretty – or so wonderfully yucky. The show’s title, “Drips”, only begins to explain the latter; the two details of the untitled 2006 work shown above should also help if you haven’t been there yet.
Barry and I bought the comic – and the editioned small print – on the spot. We both find it hard to stay away from McKimens.
odd couple
untitled (yellow pole) 2006
it flies differently in The Netherlands
Terence has two fathers, and that’s good
This amazing video excerpt from an ordinary Dutch children’s TV show sings and speaks for itself, but following upon the story about the American flight diversion threat appearing just below this post it just about explodes on the screen!
We love the Dutch.
[many thanks to Slava for the tip]
American airline threatens to divert flight over queer kiss
SEE AN UPDATE IN THIS SEPTEMBER 26 POST: “the American Airlines homo scare: even worse than reported”
Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off, leaning his head on Tsikhiseli. A stewardess came over to their row. The purser wants you to stop that, she said.
I opened my eyes and was, like, Stop what? Varnier recalled the other day.
The touching and the kissing, the stewardess said, before walking away.
This isn’t fiction; It’s right there in print, in “The Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. The two people told to cut the show of affection while on a transatlantic flight one month ago were two gay men.
They asked to speak to the purser, who denied instructing the stewardess to tell the men anything. She admitted there was nothing inappropriate about the behavior they described and while she initially seemed to be supportive she ended the discussion by announcing that kissing was improper behavior on an airplane. She then said she was busy with meal service and left, promising to come back afterward.
Half an hour later, the purser returned, this time saying that some passengers had complained about Tsikhiseli and Varniers behavior earlier. The men asked more questions. Who had complained? (She couldnt say.) Could they have the stewardesss name, or employee number? (No.) Would the purser arrange for an American Airlines representative to meet them upon landing at J.F.K.? (Not possible.) Finally, the purser said that if they didnt drop the matter the flight would be diverted.
After that, [a passenger whom we know who was seated behind the couple] said, everyone shut up for a while. Maybe an hour later, the purser approached Tsikhiseli and said that the captain wanted to talk to him. Tsikhiseli went up to the galley and gave the captain his business card. The captain told Tsikhiseli that if they didnt stop arguing with the crew he would indeed divert the plane. I want you to go back to your seat and behave the rest of the flight, and well see you in New York, he said. Tsikhiseli returned to coach.
This is just one of the reasons why Barry and I are thinking about leaving the country. Such an assault may be worthy of a few paragraphs in a sophisticated New York magazine, on the basis of its outrageousness, but this sort of thing – and much worse – is still taking place all over the country, even on and above international waters. I just don’t think there’s a future in this country for people who think, even if they’re careful to kiss the people they’re supposed to kiss.
It’s not only about queer terrorists.
[image from Women in Uniform]
Christopher Reiger at AG Gallery
Christopher Reiger this now, like the beginning, again and again 2006 watercolor, gouache and marker on stretched Arches paper 25″ x 25″
I’m finding it harder and harder to leave this work alone. I regularly see Christopher Reiger‘s vibrant images in my head when I’m not in front of them, and they never look the same to me when I return to look again.
I didn’t know what to make of Reiger’s painting when I first came across it. Even the encounter itself was a little quirky, since it involved a successful online bid for a 2001 work he had generously contributed to a small benefit assembled to help a mutual friend with green card expenses. The piece is much more abstract than most of his work I’ve seen, but it seems to inform, and is informed by, all the others. It’s the first thing I look at every time I walk into the room where it’s currently propped against a window. In a large, very busy salon-hung environment of competing images, that’s just weird.
I understand from the press release for his show at AG Gallery, “Mongrel Truth”, that Reiger’s art is supposed to be bound up with our age’s generally problematic relationship to the natural world and grounded in the artist’s own youthful, very likely profound (and continuing) experience of nature in an Eden most of the people who see the paintings and drawings can barely imagine. But the art doesn’t stop there, for his painted-paper images of plants and animals are neither entirely innocent in their nature nor entirely abused by modern man’s distraction with his own constructions.
They have been redrawn by and for an anxious, creative age which can leave neither inherited nor created sciences and myths alone. I suspect neither nature itself nor these intense paintings and drawings will sit still for any of us now.
Christopher Reiger a dead silent cock 2006 watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on stretched Arches paper 25″ x 25″
[images from the artist]
Alice Könitz at Hudson Franklin
Alice Könitz Magazines and Stand 2006 wood, Chromolux paper, magazines 47″ x 25″ x 20″ [view of installation]
Hudson Franklin has a wonderfully-challenging (okay, it’s actually pretty baffling, and for me that’s like catnip) show of sculpture and collage by Alice Könitz.
Much of the work shown is assembled from cut paper, but what beautiful paper and what beautiful cuts! Most of the other materials used are pretty common as well, even if the installation is anything but. If we were only looking at an elegant room, it would be as sterile as such a space always is when empty of people and dreams, and this gallery is not unoccupied. There’s solid stuff underneath Könitz’s paper glitz, and it’s worth exploring.