Author: jameswagner

Vidal’s multiple exposure

We’re going to the mall on Saturday. It will be my very first visit, since the day I exited a highway in Victorville, California looking for a place to pee, to a representative example of Middle America’s substitute for the urban experience.
I won’t just be looking for the sanitary facilities at Dress Barn this time. Instead, it’s going to be all about art.
Jacques Louis Vidal is creating a sculpture/event he describes as a “surrealist county fair” at the Metro Mall in Queens this Saturday. I don’t think anyone who manages to get out there is going to be disappointed, regardless of the degree of her or his familiarity with the form or the place.
Somebody’s PR gods have been working overtime: Timely supplementing the young artist’s own wacky event website, the NYTimes has both a story and a picture in today’s METRO section. An excerpt:

On Saturday, which is April Fools’ Day, Mr. Vidal is staging a public art spectacle there. “The mall creates this absurd space where all is equal,” he said.
Inventors, artists and hobbyists will joust, in the form of double-sided posters (“the anti-painting: can’t hang it on the wall”) and trifold cardboard sculptures. Among the curiosities: “The chewing gum brain,” a drawing of a pink wad and a collection of watch ads that all tell the same time. There will be an exhibit on a quasi religion based on the link between art and science.
“People will be making volcanoes erupt all day,” Mr. Vidal said, referring to a series of planned miniature baking-soda-and-vinegar catastrophes. Mentos and diet soda, he added, work too.

[image by James Estrin from the NYTimes]

Paolo Arao and John Miserendino Cabinet 2006 tube televisions, DVD players, plywood, screw, flashe paint, blue extension cord [detail of installation with still from DVD]

It’s like walking into a wonderful playhouse populated by four very good, gentle friends. But the installation and the images might just possibly be even more beautiful than the party itself.
Jeff Bailey has installed in his gallery (or has seen installed) “Intermission“, a delightful mix of photographs and drawings surrounding a sculpture of a very unBabel-ish tower. It’s basically Paolo Arao’s show, but together all of his images document a weekend road trip which included the artist John Miserendino and two other very good friends, Patrick and Dennis.

John and Paolo and Patrick and Dennis went on a weekend road trip to the Catskills. The drive took far longer than they’d thought it would, but despite various mishaps along the way they had a good time. By the time they arrived at the cottage, all four were faint with hunger. Of course, restaurants are scarce and close early in small Catskill towns, so they cooked what they could find at the Stewart’s convenience store in the next town over. The meal came out marvelously. Microwave pizza, ice cold beer, and even a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice!
The four decided to have a party. They sang songs and danced and drank and got very drunk.

Innocent affections are rarely represented with such grace as they are here. You’ll probably wish you went to the Catskills with them, as I certainly did, but this gallery show offers something almost more satisfactory.
Until now I’d only seen Arao’s works on paper.
As the low lighting made documentation virtually impossible last Saturday, I’ve gone to the gallery site itself to upload one of the drawings.


Paolo Arao Patrick with Lamp 2006 graphite on paper [dimensions not given] [large detail]

And I’ve uploaded below an image of one of the works which I think I had seen last year in the back of the gallery.


Paolo Arao Untitled (Ted) 2005 oil, flashe and charcoal on panel 11″ x 14″

[the two lower images from Jeff Bailey Gallery]

Barbara Probst Exposure #11A: N.Y.C., Duane & Church, 06.10.02, 3:07 p.m. 2002 Ultrachrome ink on cotton paper, 2 parts: 16″ x 23.5″ each

It’s so simple, but so very beautiful. This was just one of the multiple-image pieces Barbara Probst showed at Murray Guy earlier this month. Her process is only slightly more complex than it appears to be, but rarely is the result so delicate as it is here.
From the press release:

In Barbara Probst’s photographs, the subject of the work becomes the photographic moment of exposure itself. Using a radio-controlled release system, she simultaneously triggers the shutters of several cameras pointed at the same scene from various viewpoints. The resulting sequences of images suspend time and stretch out the split second.

[image from Murray Guy]

Fiona Banner [detail of installation, including various graphite drawings on paper and the reflection of the set of three neon sculptures, Backfire (a force of nature)]

As difficult as it may be to add superlatives to what this bookstore already means to the arts community, Printed Matter is making itself even more indispensable every time it integrates the work of a new artist into the corners of its wonderful shop on 10th Avenue.
Right now AA Bronson and his collaborators are sheltering Fiona Banner‘s installation, “All the World’s Fighter Planes“.
The work is striking and very smart. But as I think about the terrible, very dispensable inspiration for this work and the real-world scale of the monsters which appear here only in small representations*, I think I’m going to be sick again.
While there are sculptures, drawings, text works, source materials, a window installation and posters, appropriately for a bookstore it all starts with a matter of print.

The book, All the World’s Fighter Planes 2006, is a compilation of found newspaper images representing every type of fighter aircraft currently in commission anywhere in the world. The name of each plane is listed on the front and back covers, 170 in all. The book compiles newspaper clippings of each of the different aircraft models. The clippings (as well as the aircraft) come in a variety of shapes and sizes, both small and large, some cut following the contours of the planes, others ripped carelessly from their source, some scattered haphazardly across the open pages, others in full page close-up.

*
with the single exception of this actual cutout from a trainer/fighter plane:

Fiona Banner Nature Painting 2006 cut metal section of Jet Provost 28.5″ x 58″ [installation view]

David Humphrey [detail of installation, “Snowman in Love”]

David Humphrey said goodbye to his “Snowman in Love” at Triple Candie last night, and we were there to watch as fifteen dancing and very physically-engaged, recently-retired holiday airbags were rapidly reduced to sad nylon sacks* when their lifeline compressor was switched off.
The work was a challenge to photograph as an instalaltion but a delightful subject for abstraction in closeup.


mug

bum

*

post-party

Faile is a more-than-conventionally-stealthy street art collaborative whose work is typically spotted first in the corner of an eye. This sighting was in Williamsburg, on Wythe Street I believe.

Tara Donovan Untitled (Plastic Cups) 2006 plastic cups, installation dimensions variable, approximately 5′ x 50′ x 60′ [large detail of installation]

Pace Wildenstein is showing Tara Donovan‘s remarkable ‘landscape’ installation of stacked plastic cups in the space on 22nd Street once identified as an annex to the DIA Foundation.
Plastic cups. You have to be there.


(closer)

(closest)

(when they looked like siblings)

(although only one of them could have passed as an angel)

The tiny Envoy gallery has currently has a show, “(Un)masked“, which includes the work of three artists or artist-collaboratives, Crackerfarm, George Duncan and Judy Linn.
The two wonderful silver gelatin prints shown above in a detail of the gallery’s installation are Judy Linn’s A saint in any form and Robert Mapplethorpe in bed at the Chelsea #2, both from the 1970’s, while her friends Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were living together in the Chelsea Hotel.


Judy Linn Robert cloud head 1969 gelatin silver print [large detail from installation]

Foxy Production [installation view of the gallery show, with a large detail of Jacob Dahl Jürgensen’s Untitled Construction in the foreground]


Frank Hannon Abbyssinium 2006 archival inkjet on brown paper bags, collage, ink, spraypaint [installation view]


David Noonan Untitled 2006 silkscreen on linen, framed 30″ x 22″ [installation view]

It may only be coincidence, but Foxy Production‘s three-artist show, which also opened last night, seems at least somewhat related to that of Jacob Dyrenforth’s installation at Wallspace next door.
The Foxy press release describes the untitled show as:

. . . recent work by Frank Hannon, Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and David Noonan, three London-based artists who examine interconnections between memory, performance, and ritual. Making the known seem uncanny, they mix references and genres to explore how common practices and codes can determine notions of self.

I think this is what I may most look forward to in an encounter with any of the arts: I like the fact that the mind is always challenged by [especially new] art, or art by the mind. The result is that the most ordinary things never look or sound the same but also even the most ordinary idea is never unchallenged, even if I don’t always know how this is being done.
At Wallspace right now we may see the extraordinary made more ordinary; at Foxy, the ordinary is made more weird. Or is it actually the other way around? No, let’s see, it seems to be going both ways at both shows, which means that I may not understand the process inside either. Still, within the eight walls of these two galleries the physical results are stunning.