Brian Belott “Books, books, books, books, books, books and books” detail of installation
Brian Belott “Books, books, books, books, books, books and books” detail of detail of installation
We really overstayed our invitation welcome to the three shows at the Chinatown gallery Canada which closed a few days ago. In fact, Barry and I had wandered into the space after they had officially closed the official run of work by Brian Belott, Jocelyn Shipley and Frankie Martin.
On one side of the front gallery Belott showed a large renaissance-revival oak library table overflowing with his handmade books, each of their pages bursting with his infinitely-inventive collages. Belott covers the surface of every page of these found volumes until they can no longer close, but must stand upright in sensual invitation. We poured through dozens of them before we could tear ourselves away and let Whit (Canada’s co-founder) leave for the night.
Author: jameswagner
making it in Chelsea
cash and carry
Are the big collectors now paying in cash?
Jutta Koether at Thomas Erben
Thomas Erben Gallery, installation view of the work of Jutta Koehter (reflected in the mylar screen and in detail on the right is Falling . . . Waters from 1995
I’ve been fascinated with Jutta Koether for years. I knew nothing about her earlier reputation in Germany, so I have to believe it’s Pat Hearn‘s fault. I revered her artist choices even when I didn’t understand them, and during the 90’s she gave Koether, then a New Yorker, six solo shows in about as many years.
Thomas Erben has assembled something of a New York retrospective (1990’s to the present) of an extraordinarily colorful creative artist who is at home in many disciplines considerably removed from the dramatic paintings included in the exhibition on West 20th Street, and the gallery has donned a party dress for the occasion.
Thomas Erben Gallery, view of gallery entrance and installation of the work of Jutta Koether (in large detail on the right is Das Wunder from 1990)
For a straight view of more current work, here is an image from the gallery website:
Jutta Koether Coronal Holes and the Sunny Eyes of Women 1999 oil on canvas 72″ x 52″ (inscription: “Trompe L’aime”)
[image at the bottom from Thomas Erben]
Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters
Anthony Goicolea Fleeing 2005 acrylic, ink, graphite and collage on Mylar 85″ x 75″ installation view
It’s not just the (always amusing, sometimes enigmatic) manipulated, multiple-self-modelled large-scale photographs any more. Anthony Goicolea is also now working with complex layered drawings, sometimes almost monumental in both their size and imagery, and with large-scale video installation.
The photograph-based work continues, with still more complex manipulations, but everywhere the simple amusement quotient has been suppressed a bit, and the work has grown immensely as a consequence.
It was a relatively quiet afternoon in Chelsea today but the benches in the little rustic barn Goicolea had erected in the back room of the Postmasters gallery space was full, with a crowd (mostly very young) waiting or peering in from outside. Methinks the artist is on to something here.
The show is called, “sheltered Life.” From the gallery press release:
The sense of foreboding tinged with playful fantasy characteristic of many of the photographs is mimicked in a suite of complex figurative drawings on mylar. Androgynous figures of indeterminate age float on top of and through each other in a layered composition separated by planes of semi-opaque vellum paper. The ghostlike figures are caught in free-floating, awkward, transitional states: sometimes their images are doubled; sometimes they seem like as much animal as human. As the figures migrate through the forest in small packs, they fade in and out of each other in a series of tentative lines that read like traces of previous drawings and refer to memory and transition.
A large white barn occupies the second room gallery and acts as a shelter within a shelter while housing a 15 minute single channel video entitled “Kidnap”. The video recounts the tale of a young boy’s obsession and paranoia of being kidnapped. Shot in the Swiss countryside, several characters dressed in red-hooded uniforms engage in a series of clandestine rituals that unfold in a fairytale-like sequence.
Anthony Goicolea Kidnap 2004-2005 video installation, 17 minute DVD
box waiting
untitled (526 box) 2005
chapel computer
Europe’s fastest supercomputer, an IBM capable of making 40 trillion calculations per second, was booted up for the first time yesterday in a chapel [italics mine] of the Polytechnical University in Barcelona, Spain
A beleaguered American atheist, I was startled by this picture and caption when I came across it in Newsday this morning (I couldn’t find it on their on-line edition). I showed it to Barry who said, “This is not your father’s Spain,” and then he went on with something about using churches more productively, for performances, galleries or . . . computers.
NYC police are now proven liars, but nothing will change
Welcome citizens! (wire and flesh, inside the holding pen on Pier 57)
AND THEY’LL DO IT AGAIN
This is the political nightmare we fear the most. — joseph Keiffer
Six letters in the NYTimes today discuss yesterday’s news article about the confirmation of the false arrest of hundreds of people during last year’s Republican Parteitage in New York. They cover a lot of ground and every one of the short contributions is worth a read, but I feel compelled to add my own observation here:
All of this almost certainly means nothing over six months after the damage was done. These people were held captive in miserable conditions, their voices silenced, for up to five days. That time and those assaults can never be restored. The speech silenced then was not and will never be heard; it was unable to influence or effect anything while voices were locked up inside a filthy abandoned pier. [see my archive for posts from the end of August and the first week of September, 2004]
Even if the innocence of these victims is affirmed now, and the malfeasance of the police and city administration is made clearly manifest to the world, what most people are not thinking about is the fact that it worked very well. It silenced a people who thought themselves free, including countless numbers who were frightened into staying at home.
A radical, quasi-fascist regime is now firmly entrenched in the most powerful nation on earth, and there is no effective dissent anywhere.
Worst of all, in spite of what happened in the courts last week, it will work the next time too. The police will continue to suppress all dissent; it’s what our leaders want them to do. There will be no reprimands, no directives or new systems which might prevent a recurrence of last summer’s shame or an even greater debacle in the future.
[image, repeated from my September 3, 2004 post, via indymedia, by anonymous]
more on Chris Martin
installation view of two Chris martin paintings at Moore College
Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof each wrote about Chris Martin‘s work earlier this year in their wonderful Philly Artblog. For a bit more insight into his mysteries than I gave the other day, and a few more images, see “The question” and “A painter’s question.”
[image from fallonandrosof]
Hunter window
untitled (red bus) 2005
back HERE: Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle
Six weeks ago I wrote about a terrific theatre piece at HERE, “All Wear Bowlers.” After a brief hiatis Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle are back with the same show. Performances begin once again on April 22.
If you missed it the first time around, you can still get to heaven, and it will cost you only $20, $17, maybe $15, or even $10, depending upon your status when you ask for tickets.
[image, by Greg Costanzo, from 1812 Productions]