Author: jameswagner

Cable Griffith Summer Pile 2007 oil on paper 11″ x 17″ [Seattle-based blog: Cable Griffith]


Martin Bromirski Untitled painting on canvas 8″ x 16″ [formerly Richmond-based, and now a New York State-based blog: anaba]


Fallon and Rosof 48 Useful Paintings from the Useful Painting Series 2001-2006 (this is a random pile of small paintings on found wood scraps) [Philadelphia-based blog: roberta fallon and libby rosof’s artblog]

[detail, table from above]

[detail, table upturned]

Bloggers do it on line – and some do it in studios too.
These folks don’t just blog about Art; they’re making some of that stuff themselves. There are some real treasures at “The Blogger Show“, installed at Agni Gallery in the East Village through January 12. Unfortunately I can only show a very few of them here.
The show was organized by John Morris and Pittsburgh’s Digging Pit Gallery. It’s actually a joint venture with Panza Gallery in Millvale, Pennsylvania. A list of the thirty or so artist/bloggers from around the country who are represented in the New York edition, together with the names of their blogs, can be found on the show’s own site, which is actually a blog itself. Looking at the art they produce it would seem they have nothing in common but their blogging, but there’s also an enormous, shared enthusiasm for other people’s work, something which couldn’t be missed when I met many of them at the New York opening earlier this month.

NO CAMERAS!

Barry and I had decided to stop by receptions at only two or possibly three galleries last night. At one point during the evening a friend of ours asked if we had seen the show at Claire Oliver. He had liked work by the artists (AES+F) he had seen elsewhere earlier this year. We told him we hadn’t been there. I wasn’t even aware there was an opening at Claire Oliver, mostly* because the gallery doesn’t usually show work that would attract us, and when it comes to receptions (only), we usually end up going to those where we know the artist, the gallerist or where we expect to know some of the crowd (even then, a return visit is usually necessary to see the art itself).
Not long after our conversation with our friend we realized we were passing by Claire Oliver’s space on the way to our next stop so we decided to check it out. A minute or two after entering the front door we were in a room on the lower level watching a video. It seemed to us it would be the nucleus of the show’s photographic images upstairs, so we had decided to start there. Seconds after I snapped a still image of the projection with my camera a gentleman stepped up to me, from I’m not sure where, to inform me that photography was not permitted. I turned around and we both went back upstairs. There I handed my card to the two women at the desk and asked them to give it to the director informing she or he that I was an enthusiastic fan of the arts, and a committed art blogger, but I had no interest in visiting, broadcasting or reviewing shows where photography was prohibited to anyone.
If this post is more strongly worded than most of my art entries, it’s because it’s not about a particular artist (collaborative) or a particular gallery, but because I feel very strongly about ensuring and increasing the public’s access and enlarging its connection to art, and issues involving cameras and photography are very much a part of this discussion and my activism. It’s always about control, just as it is when the controllers are outside the white box.
Claire Oliver has been added to a list of galleries whose shows I will neither discuss on this site, nor visit personally, because they maintain camera prohibitions. Shows will also not be recorded in ArtCal if the editors know there is a camera prohibition. There are some galleries which maintain prohibitions that are selective or vague, making avoidance more complicated and imperfect, but leaving the principle and its effect no less crucial. This list is subject to change, and above all we will welcome news which will enable us to remove names.
This is the annotated list at the moment:

303 Gallery (one show)
Gagosian (one show)
Capla Kesting
Jonathan LeVine
Pace on West 22nd Street
Paul Kasmin (vague)
Claire Oliver

*
Only once has the gallery’s name ever shown up on either of our blogs before. The story of our experience then might help account for our shared lack of enthusiasm for Claire Oliver. Oddly, it has a connection (almost certainly a coincidence) with last night’s incident. Nearly four years ago we found ourselves in the gallery’s old space on 20th Street during an earlier show by the same artists. This is from Barry’s post on December 7, 2003:

On 20th Street we tried to see AES+F’s King of the Forest at Claire Oliver, but I didn’t feel like spending much time with the work, given the reception from the gallery guy working there. We had come in from the snow to check out the show, and given that it’s a highly conceptual show, it seemed reasonable to ask to see the press release or checklist. His response? “Sorry, my friend. The show’s coming down today, and we’ve given out all of the materials.” Ugh. No wonder sometimes people want to go into galleries and say, “Oy, shopgirl!“

detail of a selection of Andrew Hurst‘s posters for the show


a moment during Hurst’s sound and slide show performance, created specifically for the opening


a re-creation of a piece referencing painting, which Weiner first exhibited in New York in 1968


one of several reading room areas reserved for further study of Lawrence’s work


holding the camera in my right hand, I picked up a book with my left and it opened here


a Weiner text piece, reading, “Aphorism of the Week: Art is not a game, it has no rules” (1997), the medium being rubber stamp, with colored pencil, pen and paint on paper 4″ x 6″ [installation view]

“A Lawrence Weiner Salon” at Pocket Utopia may be one of the coolest shows in the city right now, not just because it was launched by Austin Thomas, and not because I still can’t figure out what’s going on in there. I’ve tripped over this modern icon for years, and the enigmatic promise of his work never disappoints. While I’ve always been convinced he’s the real thing, I don’t mind admitting that I should have some spent time in the several comfortable “Reading Rooms” scattered about the gallery this month.
All l dare offer here are some images snapped before the opening got too crowded, and this excerpt from the press release:

Pocket Utopia is pleased to organize an experimental salon of conceptual art’s key figure Lawrence Weiner. The salon will feature a reading room, a re-creation (“A 36″ x 36″ Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard From a Wall,” 1968) and a text piece. Weiner has long pursued inquiries into language and art-making and posits a radical redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship and the very nature of the artwork. Here too, the venue or gallery and its relationship to the artist also gets redefined.

ADDENDUM: In related news from inside today’s NYTimes, Roberta Smith (who almost never ventures into Brooklyn’s high-yielding art fields these days) writes about the Weiner exhibition which just opened at the Whitney: “Be grateful, then, for Lawrence Weiner’s mind-stretching 40-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is respite, wake-up call and purification rite all in one. It should be required viewing for anyone interested in today’s art, especially people who frequent contemporary art auctions.” She ends her review:

Driven by the joy of language and quite a bit of humor, Mr. Weiner’s ebullient work asks tough questions about who makes or owns art, where it can occur and how long it lasts. It reminds us that while art and money may have been inextricably entwined throughout most of history, art’s real value is not measured in strings of zeros, high-priced materials or bravura skill, but in communication, experience, economy of means (the true beauty) and, yes, the inspired disturbance of all status quos.
It also affirms that art ultimately triggers some kind of transcendence that can only be completed by the viewer. Mr. Weiner has elevated Robert Rauschenberg’s famous dictum – to the effect that “this is art if I say so” – to the more inclusive “this is art if you think so.” His polymorphous efforts create situations in which such thoughts feel not only natural, they feel like our own.

Ooooh.

One more reason to head for hot and friendly Bushwick this week: Thomas has declared this Saturday afternoon “Social Saturday at Pocket Utopia”. The gallery’s two artists in residence [not named] will be “receiving” from 4 to 6 pm, and the curious are invited to meet and discuss their continuing work. The announcement also mentions something about a “beeramid”.

images of two fictive young Swiss artists hanging above the t-shirt and thong table


a detail of the t-shirt display, showing the gallery’s unforgettable logo

What does an excellent young artist do when he wants to stretch his wings and diversify his brand or just investigate other tracks, and at the same time exercise his previously-tested and proven performance skills? Dan Levenson decided to open a shop, er . . . gallery.
Levenson was already known for his very smart, beautiful and bright, pop/torquey/Neo-Geo/black hole/bleeding-edge/perspectived, acrylic confections. I mean all of that in the very best sense: I’ve really liked everything I’ve seen him do. He’s also initiated some very cool conceptual projects [see FrEE MoMA!]. This fall the artist turned his studio at the Elizabeth Foundation [EFA] into an imaginary Berlin art boutique representing young Swiss (we probably don’t have to ask why “Swiss”) art and its accoutrements.
The invitation Levenson sent out to his open studio installation, “Little Switzerland” reads as follows:

A Switzerland of the Mind
For three days this week, a Swiss art gallery will open its doors in Manhattan. Little Switzerland is a Berlin-based art gallery representing a roster of eight emerging Swiss artists. None of this would be unusual except for the fact that the gallery doesn’t really exist, and the artists are all the fictional creation of one (American) artist: Dan Levenson.
This year Little Switzerland will present large-scale color photographs showing several of the gallery artists at work in their Zürich studios and modeling the new line of Little Switzerland branded apparel featuring the gallery’s distinctive logo. Little Switzerland apparel will be on sale for those who’d like to become a part of this conceptual project.
-Hans-Ruedi Girschweiler, Zürich

What visitors found when they arrived in Suite 506 was the artist’s conceptual project itself. Dressed minimally in commercial-looking photographs of the loft-like gallery’s eight artists posed inside their tidy studios as well as several examples of their paintings, executed in eight different styles (all ghosted by Levenson), the installation also included a stylish modern table and a chic industrial-pipe wheeled hanging rack, where various kinds and sizes of clothing and drinking vessels bearing the Little Switzerland brand – which always appears in German Fraktur – were displayed and offered for sale.
I really liked the photographs, enjoying the invented world each represented. I can also say that at least some of the paintings and drawings their creator attributes to his fictional artists could stand on their own, without help from the conceit carved by their Gepetto. Check the site. I wonder whether and where his experience with them might take Levenson from here? Oh yes, there were also some super examples of the very latest in Levenson’s primary and continuing series of paintings, the more recent of them incorporating elements of stylized, slinky highway markers (or star tracks?).
One of my favorite things was a thick, black, generic, fabric-bound artist-published book, “SWISS ARTISTS”. Inside there were 650 pages, each running four columns of full names printed in small type (not arranged alphabetically, so not very Swiss, it would seem). The given names were from a book of Helvetian baby names; the family names were taken from the Zurich phone book. I think I heard that there were no repeats, but I know I was told that Filip Noterdaeme bought a copy. Now Noterdaeme’s partner Daniel Isengart reads to him from the book every night before they retire. Even without a sensitivity to sound, to Dada and surrealism, this is poetry.


two of the artist’s own recent paintings


the opened name book, “SWISS ARTISTS”

[first two images from Barry]

a small Yayoi Kusama painting from the mid-sixties (less than 2′ square)


Sonia Khurana Lone Women Don’t Lie 1999 video [large detail of still from installation]


Mekhala Bahl Ramp and Slide acrylic, ink and collage on printed canvas 60″ x 60.5″ [large detail, including reflections on plexiglas]


Junya Koike Japanese Movie/Japanese Tragedy 2006 (approximately 5′ high) [large detail of installation]

Junya Koike Japanese Movie/Yae-chan, the girl next door and TANGE Sazen 2006 (approximately 1.5′ x 2′)

Junya Koike “DISCOVER JAPAN” 4 2001 (approximately 2′ square)


work on paper by Young-Sup Han (approximately 3′ wide)

I want to see everything, because my interests are pretty broad, but I’m getting better at “filtering” the work I engage with when visiting large art fairs. Even in the outside world I’ve always been able to make myself pretty much blind to anything visual that doesn’t please me (unless I decide I have to look). For an arguably-too-sensitive guy huddled inside this pretty tawdry and often incredibly shoddy modern American civilization, I think it stems largely from an instinct for aesthetic survival. When it comes to the specific environment within art exhibitions, or even the pattern of a long afternoon going from one gallery to another, it’s more a simple matter of the triage required by calendar-keeping and blogging obligations.
My visit to the Asian Contemporary Art Fair is a good example of what I’m talking about. I really don’t remember much about the bad stuff, but in this post I’m sharing a few of the more memorable things I did come back with.
The attractive booth of Bill Brady’s ATM gallery (New York) near the entrance had the dazzling piece by Yayoi Kusama shown above. I remember first being introduced to Op Art in 1963 by an artist friend studying in Munich while I was there myself under a DAAD fellowship. It was very exciting, and it was also like being a privileged initiate in a new cult. Now over forty years later I have to say this piece looks better than anything I saw then or since. It’s an alien life form which positively shimmers inside its handsome yellow box.
Gallery Espace in New Delhi was to me one of the best exhibitors in the show, if not the best. My favorite works were the videos and video stills of Sonia Khurana* (Barry and I both love this artist), the paintings of Mekhala Bahl, and the photographs of Ravi Agarwal.
Junya Koike was represented by Tokyo’s Gallery Yamaguchi. The large graphics of “Japanese Movie/Japanese Tragedy” was what first attracted me, but the smaller pieces with film and invented images are just as successful.
The Seoul-based gallery Chosun had a few very beautiful paper abstractions by Young-Sup Han. I was as least as much interested to two smaller monochromatic pieces; I’m not showing them here only because they were hung very high and my photographs were disappointing.
Among the other works I remember well were a very impressive Mannerist Wei Dong in the Goedhuis booth (New York, London, Beijing); u-fan Lee’s delicate drawings at Jean Art (Seoul) and Wool Ga-Choi’s delightful small oils, each titled “for enjoy play”, also at Jean Art; the intense, compulsive beauties of Anil Revri’s canvases at Sundaram Tagore (New York); and Li Luming’s small, gray Richter-ish paintings at Alexander Ochs (Berlin and Beijing).
And then there was the “Simulasian” exhibition, a very interesting show within the show, curated by Eric C. Shimer and Lilly Wei. There I saw Ataro Satu’s large paper drawing installation (courtesy of Mehr Midtown), Ran Hwang’s huge pink Buddhist wall sculpture (courtesy of 2 X 13 Gallery), Chitra Ganesh’s wonderfully-disturbing mixed-medium-on-board pink and blue goddess (courtesy of Thomas Erben), some more Yayoi Kusama, and much more.
Oh, a reminder to those who can take advantage of it, tomorrow is the last day of the fair. It’s open from 11 to 5, and on this day it’s totally free.
And an editor’s note: Assembling this post would have been much easier, and the information more complete, had I been able to take home a catalog Thursday night. They had run out by the time we left; we were told they would put one in the mail, but that was no help in the meantime. I thank my hard-working digital camera for its excellent note-taking skills almost every day of the week, but it can only record what the label tells it – and that’s if there’s a label.

*
Khurana will be part of what is sure to be a fascinating show at Elga Wimmer opening on Tuesday in Chelsea. “Out of the Box: Body Related Performance Art After Carolee Schneemann” includes work by Schneemann, Heide Hatry, He Cheng Yao, Minnette Vari, Regina José Galindo and Khurana.