I remember now why galleries used to just close altogether in July and August. On Tuesday afternoon I wandered into the Dearraindrop show, “Riddle of the Spinx,” in the large Wooster St. space of Deitch Projects [no website!]. It was very warm out, the garage door was open in welcome, and of course there was no air conditioning. Even before I had passed through the door cut into a paper pyramid to enter the exhibition space I had noticed what appeared to be a complementary installation directly across the street, but I was intent on the purpose of my visit.
The multi-media Dearraindrop installation will definitely reward the time I myself was unable to give it that afternoon; there appear to be scores of drawings and collage works hosting the larger constructions, and they are small only in their scale.
I had forgotten to bring my fan with me however, and so, since I’m famously impatient with heat and humidity, I left sooner than I would otherwise have wanted to.
I noticed that there seemed to be only one person babysitting the gallery, a smiling, very young man behind a table at the entrance. But then there was also the interesting more mature man seated just next to him, who was stretched out in his chair and appeared to be dozing. Only after I took the photograph at the top of this post did I suspect that he was the artist I should have engaged that afternoon. I regret I didn’t have the nerve to interrupt his rest to ask about the great work he had placed on the sidewalk outside, opposite the sassy pyramid in the garage.
And yes, as if in a salute to the broad talents of the collective installed across the street, there was music coming from his work as well.
Dearraindrop, Deitch Projects installation detail
Author: jameswagner
Julia Scher’s security check
detail from Julia Scher’s video, “Guard”
The third of White Box‘s planned nine weekly curated (RNC-oriented) shows opened tonight with a video and window installation by Julia Scher curated by Michael Rush.
Everything is on the outside of the gallery for these summer shows. This week the window reveals a real chain link fence topped with the ubiquitous razor wire, but this time everything is in pink, the whole threaded with a blue text welcoming the Republican National Convention to New York. The video installation next to the window is composed of two looped tapes (43 minutes total) each showing a solitary pink-uniformed security guard stationed, presumably, in front of a bank of monitors showing images of the viewer.
Scher has worked with surveillance issues for years. In 1991 she wrote, “The monitors of surveillance are the eyes of a social body gone berserk.” Today we cannot even imagine an escape from that insanity.
It’s a very good show. It’ll be there for only six more days, but the real surveillance is only getting started.
Pooh’s umbrella
Spotted on the way home from Williamsburg, on the uptown platform of the 14th Street IND station around midnight one rainy evening earlier this week: An attractive and serious young man, comfortably slouched on the bench, reading a copy of Ernst Cassirer’s “The Myth of the State,” small headphones holding his thoughts in place. At his feet rested a beautiful, wet, Winnie-the-Pooh folding umbrella.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the nerve to use my camera; this time I had to just squeeze my eyes and record it without mechanical assistance.
Lovely, New York.
[image from Umbrella-Shoppe.Com]
moving Champion Fine Art
COOL “EVEN BY THE STANDARDS OF WILLIAMSBURG”
moving party
The quote is from Bloggy, reference is to the smart Brooklyn gallery we are about to lose to Los Angeles, and the occasion for this post is this Sunday’s “moving party” benefit.
Champion Fine Art is nearing the end of the New York half of their two year exhibition series of artist-curated group shows.
Drew and Flora are asking a modest $25 donation for the party, but you can walk home with part of their Williamsburg history if you can spring for another $75. The $100 entitles guests to participate in a drawing of works by artists Champion has exhibited or by the curators who brought them to the space. Since the curators are all artists, it looks like a chance for a double indemnity.
See the gallery site for details.
[image from AUSTIN BUSINESS COMPUTERS, Inc.]
Brian Ulrich’s America
I had never seen Brian Ulrich’s photographs before he sent me an email commenting on my site. He’s going to be included in a group show, “Unframed First Look,” hosted by Sean Kelly Gallery beginning the 28th of this month. The show is described as “A juried salon for photographers without New York representation.” All sales wil benefit ACRIA, and the jurors are Adam Fuss, Jack Person and Cindy Sherman. I’m sure we’re now going to be hearing a lot about Ulrich.
His own site includes countless wonderfully-nuanced images related, in his own words, to [the peculiarly American?] “shopping and consumer culture since 2001.”
I take photographs with the hope to show how we appear caught within the excesses of a consumer-dominated culture. In 2001, consumer culture was redefined to include larger political and global implications: post 9-11, citizens were admonished to take to the malls to boost our economy through shopping. My photographs of excessive, corporate, and sometimes hyper-real retail spaces document the everyday activities of consumption. By scrutinizing these rituals – ones we often take for granted – I hope to help us evaluate the increasing complexities of our contemporary world. As world events grow beyond our control, is this how we will cope?
Most of the photographs seem to capture the environment centering on his adopted home, Chicago. The technique is stunning, but it’s the melancholy beauty of his subjects and the tenderness of his own gaze which holds the eye and the soul of the viewer. In spite of the project’s description, this is not a cold social commentary.
Two more previews from notifbutwhen.com, and then you can go look on your own:
[images from notifbutwhen.com]
no election
. . . until, whatever
I wrote these three paragraphs as part of my ruminations on the eve of the last Congressional election, in 2002, prior to the monstrous Iraq War but just in time to see Hussein used as the bogey from which we needed the Republicans to defend us. The post was titled, “rigging the election.”
Almost two years ago, in the months after the 2000 elections, I bored or frightened my friends with my prediction that we would never have another Presidential election, and we would very likely be relieved of the messiness of another congressional election as well. I believed that the Republicans would never give up what had been so ill-gotten in the winter of 2000-2001.
I was certain that some pretext would be invented to distort the electoral process, or even entirely suspend the Constitutional niceties providing for the election of a Congress and a President, in order to protect us from enemies at home or aboad.
If they get away with it this fall, a Republican executive, a Republican Congress and a Republican judiciary will virtually guarantee their success with a frightened and gung-ho citizenry in 2004. Dictatorship accomplished.
If some were ever bored by cries about the sky falling, none of us are today, but we are all certainly frightened.
Going forward, I expect to append certain posts with the seven words, “We will never have another Presidential election.” I would be delighted to have to admit I was wrong, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
[image from ICSC 2001]
postpone the election?
Dictatorship will be the answer.
Why of course we can’t go on as a constitutional republic if a terrorist act occurs within our borders – or so the Administration would have us believe. Essentially it’s what has already happened since September 11, but now the only people who profited politically from the events of that day now want to make it official.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday.
The Democrats will probably sign on of course. Perhaps someone should first point out, as Barry did this afternoon, that even during the Civil War there wasn’t an interruption in the election process.
Still, one way or another these people will see to it that there is no real election, this November – or ever.
Brooklyn Grand Ferry Park
untitled (Grand Ferry Park sunset)
It’s just a slip of a thing right now, but some day the site which once saw ferries, loaded with farm produce and passengers, crossing to Manhattan every few minutes from downtown Williamsburg may be a real destination once again. Meanwhile the small park is a modest delight for a neighborhood cut off from its great river and hungry for park
A red brick smokestack rising above a circular pattern of cobblestones was part of a molasses plant that Pfizer Pharmaceuticals used in the early 20th century for work that led, eventually, to the large-scale production of penicillin. The cobblestones were salvaged from the section of Grand Street where the park was constructed.
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working art
Julianne Swartz Can You Hear Me (2004) installation view, PVC pipe, mirror, Plexiglas, existing architecture and participants
I like what the New Museum is doing this summer. The plucky, real estate-blessed institution has sold its building and closed its doors while it re-builds itself on the Bowery. Although the images that street name has evoked for more than a century are dissolving rapidly, those blocks still wear their history and the Museum seems to want to slip into the neighborhood with some grace and respect.
Its perambulatory exhibition, “Counter Culture,” opened last night in a number of venues on and just off the Bowery. We braved the party, which commandeered a local bar, only long enough to grab the map of the installation locations, and then we were off. Because of another commitment in Williamsburg however, that night we were only able to have a quick look at what two of the artists were doing.
Marion Wilson has set up a snappy little pushcart in front of the Bowery Mission, and in this conception, called “This Store Too,” she was showing and selling merchandise that was a collaboration between herself and the men who are served by the Mission’s programs.
With “Can You Hear Me,” Julianne Swartz has constructed a bright yellow sculptural system of pipes and mirrors outside and entering into the facade of the building which houses the Sunshine Hotel. The result is an opportunity for interaction between residents of the hotel and passersby.
Ivan Navarro You Sit You Die (2000) installation view, fluorescent tubes, electric cables, and list of people executed by electric chair in Florida 33″ x 24.5″ x 48″
Who still doubts the power or the aesthetic of so-called political art? All art is political by definition, especially in this culture, but when it’s as good as what we saw in Brooklyn later last night it should not be scorned – or missed.
We had ended the artier part of the evening in Williamsburg at Roebling Hall, where there was a lively opening reception for their group show, “Bush League.” We will have to go back for a better experience of the individual works, even though we had already seen some of them bedfore. I believe most are by artists who have shown in the gallery. Especially if the curators had to work with a limited number of names, the results are pretty impressive.
shiny cart and happy people
KING JOSIAH’S is surely the cleanest and most beautiful hot dog cart in the city of New York. Note the condiments. We spotted Josiah, and a few of his friends and customers, parked at the curb on the northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 14th Street tonight at 11 o’clock. Frankfurters on a bun still only $1 each, even with all this style.