Author: jameswagner

Louise Fishman’s “Dartmouth Quartet I” at New York’s Cheim & Read


large detail of Xu Zhen’s “ShangART Supermarket” at Shanghai’s ShangART Gallery


Ann Craven’s “Stripe” at New York’s Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert


large detail of still from Miguel Ángel Rojas’s “Caquetá” at Bogota’s Alcuadrado


Juan Uslé’s “Mardi Gras I” at Cheim & Read


detail of Carol Bove’s installation at New York’s Maccarone


Charles Goldman’s “Scrapwood Sculpture” at Toronto’s Birch Libralato


Zilvinas Landzbergas’s 4-part installation, “JPG 3”, at Amsterdam’s Fons Welters

Two years ago Barry and I missed Art Basel Miami altogether (car rental problems during the vernissage), even though it was the first of what has morphed into a virtual circus of annual trade shows, er . . . art fairs throughout the Miami area (there were dozens this year, and they came in all sizes). We ended up having a great time visiting and looking at so much else that year.
We skipped last year’s excitement, but returned this year seduced by a friend’s generous offer of a part of his beautiful South Beach apartment, and by the prospect of meeting people around this country and beyond with whom we’d only communicated on line.
We did make the Basel vernissage this time, arriving only minutes after the doors opened. Of course the big-deal collectors had already had their preview earlier in the day and by the time we arrived they were probably sprucing up for the a large private dinner party scheduled for that night. While we were boarding the plane at Newark we had spotted Paul Miller and learned that he (aka DJ Spooky) would be showing one of his latest projects, “Rebirth of a Nation” to 150 invited guests at the Rubell Family Collection across the water. Now that would definitely have been worth a detour had we been offered the opportunity.
Meanwhile the aisles and the gallery booths at the fair were crowded with both press people like ourselves and “ordinary” guests, including many artists. Many of these folks, including some of the exhibitors, were our friends. With that kind of stimulation, plus the lively mosaic of individual works which competed for our attention, it was pretty difficult to focus on a single piece, even a single gallery set up. We had three hours, but in that time we were able to get through little more than the booths on the periphery and two special rooms.
We made one sortie through the center of the Convention Center to check out Cheim & Read, since we were told they would be showing Louise Fishman’s first work in acrylic, done this past summer in New Hampshire. Only near the end of our tour did we realize we had actually lucked out in our chosen route around the edge, since it was to the spaces on the outside walls that the less mainstream galleries new to Basel Miami were assigned – galleries more in tune with our normal appetites.
The images at the top describe only a few of the more interesting pieces I encountered along the way:

Louise Fishman‘s 66″ canvas turned out to be pretty spectacular.
Xu Zhen’s convenience store was a huge hit, and many visitors couldn’t resist purchasing samples of its (totally empty) containers and wrappings.
Ann Craven‘s birds had really gotten to me several years ago and since then I’ve watched her move into even more conceptual work. This “Stripe” painting opens up very new territory.
I’d been attracted to Juan Uslé‘s work when I had seen it in group shows before, but this vivid painting really stood out even in the rich company of both its gallery colleagues and those in the larger show itself.
Carol Bove‘s peacock blanket had been covered in the media, but nothing had prepared me for the unearthly beauty of the thing itself.
Miguel Ángel Rojas was our first “discovery” in Miami. The fact that Barry and I hadn’t known this artist’s work before probably demonstrates our New York provincialism. The Columbian gallery, Elcuadrado, showed nothing other than work by this wonderful, mature artist, and I thought it was awesome, the video and photography-based installations in particular.
The video cited here shows a 21-year-old lieutenant who lost the lower part of both arms in the Columbian government’s war against the peasants in Caqueta province. It’s a continuous loop which begins with his face covered in grease paint camouflage and it continues as it records the labored process of the young man washing it off from a basin of water.
We’ve seen and loved Charles Goldman‘s work for years, and eventually came to know and love the artist as well. At Basel he was represented, in this wonderful piece and another not shown above, by Torontos’ Birch Libralato.
Zilvinas Landzbergas‘s work was pretty special, for its very ordinariness, a pile of things so easy to overlook beside a partition, as well as the non-ordinary choice of subject, the extraordinary skill of its execution (in cardboard and plastic) and its surprising beauty.

Barry here, to say go visit the show created by Pierogi, Ron Feldman, and Hales galleries around the corner from Pulse. Today (Sunday the 9th) is the last day. More information is on bloggy.

Aaron Young Untitled (silver and gold) 2007 acrylic paint and rubber on aluminum 144″ x 144″ engineer: Wink 1,100

[detail]


William Stone Branching Drawings 1996 computer printout on paper, dimensions variable, engineer: Charles Waldman

[detail]

I knew we had made a big mistake for not having visited James Fuentes’s gallery yet. I mean, it’s near our scary Police Headquarters, but I used to live not too far away from the site, and it’s not really so very far from the Lower East Side neighborhood now hosting more and more worthy new gallery spaces. A visit to a new space on Broadway this past week confirmed the error of our neglect: It’s going to be very hard to miss a show at 35 St. James Place in the future.
The latest show in his own gallery has just closed, but Fuentes was given responsibility for curating the inaugural show in the New York gallery of the Emily Harvey Foundation. After our visit there this past week and a look into the history of Emily Harvey and the ambitious young foundation bearing her name I’d say it’s a perfect fit. The EHF space is a classic, finely-patinated second-floor loft on Broadway in SoHo. Fuente’s installation, “Programming Chance“, continues through this Saturday.
This small group show includes work by John Cage, Jean Dupuy, Alison Knowles, Ken Knowleton, William Stone & Aaron Young. Their connection here is the artists’ shared interest in connecting their art to the genius of machines or computers (working with collaborators the curator calls “engineers”), although there are at least sixty years difference in the ages of the artists and engineers, and the works themselves range from the mid-sixties to 2007. This is clearly no fad.
And it didn’t start just forty years ago: Da Vinci liked machines, but then he was his own engineer.
I confess I hadn’t read Carol Vogel’s NYTimes article on Aaron Young’s installation/performance/painting last September. At a distance, the whole thing looked to me too much like hype and excess, perhaps both, but when I saw the large work by Young which concluded the chronology of this show I understood the excitement. It’s terrific. Of course it was a great help, and a privilege, to have Fuentes himself deliver a commentary on this piece, and on each of the others in the show.

David Reed #575 oil and alkyd on polyester 40″ x 160″

[detail]

I’ve enjoyed looking at David Reed‘s work for years, and this is one of the most beautiful paintings I’ve seen yet. He’s definitely not standing still.
The show is “New Paintings“, and it continues at Max Protetch through December 22.

In my earlier post, and its addendum, I’ve shown views of the inside of the New Museum building itself; with this one I’m uploading images of [only some of] the works I found most interesting, and photographically accessible, on my too-brief visit during the press preview.

But first a serious, negative note about New Museum policy:
While I was able to take pictures as a member of the press visiting during a press preview, photography is not permitted in the Museum galleries to anyone without this status. This is a serious affront to the purpose of any museum of the visual arts, but especially for an institution devoted to broadcasting the work of artists who do not have public exposure or critical acceptance. In its own handout it describes itself as “A site of ongoing experimentation and questioning of what art and institutions can do in the 21st century . . . through programming that is open, fearless and alive.” Especially in our contemporary world, where the camera is increasingly ubiquitous, and its own creative purposes progressiveley more diverse, how can photography be considered the enemy of an agenda of light, one devoted to making emerging visual art more visible to more people?
I am genuinely saddened, and a little frightened, by the kind of blindness I see among certain individuals and institutions in the arts world which produces blanket photo prohibitions. If you agree, don’t be shy about telling the offending museums, and the occasional gallery, what you think about their wanting to keep some people in the dark.
I think no-photo policies are at best foolish and misguided, and at worst an indication of a craving for power or control. I see the phenomenon as an anachronism, and I have to believe it will ultimately be discredited as common sense comes to prevail among people of good will. If I am proven totally wrong on the last point, I think a gallery or museum photo ban will be among the least of our concerns: It would be only one aspect of a new, very dark age everywhere in our society.

And now, from my privileged camera:


Sharon Hayes I march in the parade of liberty, but as long as I love you I’m not free 2007 site-specific performance piece [detail]
Hayes’s wonderful, noisy piece is not part of the museum’s major installation, “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century”, the first of a four-part exhibition to be mounted this winter. The images which follow however are all from “Unmonumental”.


John Bock Untitled 2005 plastic bottle, cardboard box, paper and ink 8.5″ x 10.25″ x 10.25″ [installation view]

[complete installation of all 14 works]


Martin Boyce We climb inside and everything else disappears 2004 powder-coated steel tubing, wire mesh, cast aluminum, one deck chair (white) and one hose tube (yellow), two parts, dimensions variable [large detail of installation]


Tom Burr White Folding Screen (T.C. II) 2005 pained plywood, mirrored plexiglas, photographic material, hinges and pins 47.25″ x 68.75″ x 25.5″ [detail of installation]

[full image, obverse]


Jim Lambie Bed-Head 2002 mattress, buttons and thread 20.25″ x 75. 25″ x 50.75″ [installation view]


Manfred Pernice Commerzbank 1 2004 painted particleboard and plaster 38″ x 32.5″ x 66″ [installation view, showing Pernice’s “Untitled” to the right rear, and Rebecca Warren’s “Cube” left rear]


Gedi Sibony The Circumstance, The Illusion, and Light Absorbed as Light 2007 various materials [large detail of installation]

Timothy Marvel Hull Untitled 2007 ink on paper 11″ x 8.5″ [installation view]


Tex Jernigan [one image, not in this show, from “One: Across America” (2006)]

Lauren Ross has curated a very neat group show, “Divine Find“, inside a new space in SoHo. Yes, SoHo, and it’s even northern SoHo. Er . . . it’s actually just north of Houston, so technically it might be in NoSoHo. The artists are Timothy Marvel Hull, Tex Jernigan, Christopher Miner, Mariah Robertson and Peter Rostovsky, and the theme is described in the press release as “locating the sacred in the commonplace”.
I’m pretty sure that phrase doesn’t refer to the venue itself. The gallery Artspace Stonefox is no commonplace. Showing emerging art in a working office: It’s a great concept, and I’ve seen it happen before, sometimes with mixed success. The curating must be sensitive to the art and the environment, as it is here, and even with the best wills and the finest curatorial resources it’s not an innovation easily accomplished – or reproduced – since neither the appearance nor the routine of most office environments lends itself to the requirements of a gallery space. Cheers to the people of Stonefox for going out of their way to do it, for doing it right, and for playing such gracious and enthusiastic hosts. The architecture and design firm has set aside a significant portion of their office to create Stonefox Artspace. They describe it as a temporary project and exhibition space. A lot of artists and curators will be hoping that “temporary” only refers to the duration of individual shows.
This one continues until December 4th. Since it is an office, we shouldn’t complain that (except by appointment) the hours are Monday through Friday only, from 12 to 6.
But a small note about the exhibition itself: If I leave wanting to run to my computer for more information about the artist or artists, a show has been a success, at least for me, and that goes for any art, including performance. This one more than qualifies, since a day later I’m still wanting more and frustrated with how little I can find on line. Christopher Miner is a good example: Try looking around yourself, and you’ll see why I’m going to have to visit Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
I’ve learned to trust Lauren Ross.

[second image from Tex Jernigan]

Heide Hatry Expectations IV, 2007 C-print

Since my Friday post about “Out of the Box” show at Elga Wimmer I’ve gone back to the desk and written a paragraph on each of the artists included in the installation:

Regina Jose Galindo‘s 47-minute video, “Piel” [skin], documents the artist striding very deliberately over the stones of Venice, beginning at a stone wall of a busy passage where she shears and completely shaves the hair from her body and scalp and removes all of her clothing. It ends simply, with very little drama, on a broad terrace at the edge of the Grand Canal. The performance requires the participation of both her cameraman and the many pedestrians we encounter along the way, most of them remarkably indifferent to her appearance. This piece, like many in this show, left me wondering what the effect might have been had the the artist been presenting to her collaborators a body less beautiful than the one we see here.

In the past Heide Hatry has repeatedly worked with another kind of epidermis, pigskin, and it’s the one most closely related to the one we all share. In the video diptych she shows here however, which she has titled “Adaptations” [2 min 47 sec], she works with her own, and not much else. The work represents two very different, even extreme, responses to the fulfillment of the principle biological function of a woman’s body, birth. We first see her naked in an leafy Eden of sorts, giving birth and immediately performing the role which society has traditionally demanded of one half of its members, that of nurturing mother. In the second segment another successful (and equally abbreviated) labor ends with a very different outcome for a young, smartly dressed professional carrying her MacBook out of that same jungle.

Sonia Khurana may first attract our attention because the proportions of her naked body represent something less than the modern ideal, but her art is what holds us, and it’s the art which brings us back. “Bird” [3 min 20 sec] finds the artist in a number of excited dances magically eliciting imagery related to its title. The silence of the video and the gorgeous purple, satiny sheen and bleeding contrast of the picture is extremely attractive and a perfect instrument for this tender piece. Khurana’s success in realizing her avian compulsion may be improbable, but we are first curious, then charmed, even solicitous, but finally we are captivated by the documentation of her efforts.

Carolee Schneemann is both the inspiration for and the grande dame among the artists in this show, and so perhaps that is why she is represented by two [more or less separate] pieces. The first is “Unexpectedly Research” (1992) something of a “story board” of laser prints and text representing performance work done in the twenty years after 1962. The more recent piece is the video, “Cave” (1995) [7 min 30 sec], projected high on a wall not visible until the visitor has completely entered the gallery. The sound dominates the room, and eventually the images themselves become inescapable, composed as they are of documentation of a 1995 group performance which included the artist and seven other nude women re-enacting her 1975 piece, “Interior Scroll”, where she painted her body with mud slowly extracted a paper scroll from her vagina while reading from it.

He Chengyao‘s has always used nakedness in her art, and her art has usually related to her personal experience of growing up in a Chinese society far less open to individuality than today. Whatever difficulties she had to overcome in a rural county were magnified by a nightmare which arose from the circumstances of He’s birth. Her mother suffered a nervous breakdown and subsequent insanity brought on by community displeasure and a social and economic ostracism, but the family survived together. Her mother has been a part of most of He’s work that I have been able to see on line. Her mother does not appear in the piece included here, “Broadcast Exercise” (2004) [5 min], but since its traditional Chinese exercise form relates to the conventions and solidarity of a rigid society as much as to the conflicting demands of attachment and independence, her mother is not really very far away.

Considering the richness, the tragedy and the hope represented by the modern history of her ancient homeland, it’s no surprise that Minette Vari’s identity as a South African is very much a part of her art, but “REM” is more than an evocation of that history. It’s a gorgeous strip of animation with the wondrous feeling of the earliest form of “film”, more “magic lantern” than modern, manipulated video. In a dreamy, continuous loop images representing the glorious and the horrible in the geography and culture of the South African experience float behind a cut-out of Vari herself, the proportions of her torso and limbs expanding and contracting in a luxurious weightlessness. The figure is that of the artist sleeping, hence the title. The poses and the magnificent bulk of her thighs suggest the heroes found on early Greek, red-figured pottery as much as images found in Bushman cave paintings.

[image from Heide Hatry]