Category: Culture

later the visitors did actually “step over the body bags” to reach the backyard bar

See Barry for the word on Susan Dessel’s first review. The writer seems to have gotten it just right, and this account of a Williamsburg show appears in the middle of a recap of Chelsea openings last week. Goodness.

Alejandro Diaz Unknown Artists at Unheard of Prices 2006 purple neon sign 24″ x 36″ [installation view]

I’m drooling.
Alejandro Diaz attached this [sad/happy?] image to an email greeting this morning and I couldn’t resist broadcasting it further. It also gives me a device for reminding myself and anyone reading this that the message of this piece is still valid, and in a new age of hype and price inflation it’s more exciting than ever.
There’s plenty of “affordable”, cheap or even free art by “emerging”, underknown or even secret artists still out there waiting to be discovered and picked up by intrepid patrons and impecunious collectors. I don’t know the price of this one, but it’s an edition, so at least the cool message could potentially keep several people warm.
More on this subject, including “less than the price of a movie ticket”, here and throughout the archives of this site.
More on Diaz here, here and here.

[image from the artist]

Chie Fuyeki The Nature of How We See 2005 acrylic, mixed media, paper/wood 96″ x 72″ [installation view]

[detail]

I’m not sure when I last walked into Mary Boone on 24th Street, (these days much of my decision-making about worthy gallery stops has to resemble the ordinary dilemmas confronting emergency workers in administering triage), but I have to admit I was happy about our visit yesterday. Chie Fueki’s paintings, in a show titled “Lucky, Star, Super, Hero“, manage to be both scary and cheery at the same time, while broadcasting the kind of rich textured detail usually seen only inside the glass case of a renaisance treasury.
I have to admit that the subjects she chooses were responsible for at least some of my interest.
Remember the Bill Maynes!


Chie Fueki Toward and Away 2005 acrylic, mixed media, paper/wood 86″ x 60″ [installation view]

[detail of “OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale” as it was being installed yesterday]

“They’re wrapped in the material used to make sandbags. The sandbags always arrive when it’s too late, don’t they?” Susan C. Dessel was answering a friend’s question about the outer layer of each of the pieces in her installation at Dam, Stuhltrager while she arranged the twelve differently-sized figures on the newly-sodded lawn behind the gallery building.
She bent over each wrapped figure, softly talking to the silent shapes and tenderly placing and positioning them (as family units?) according to a plan she had obviously been thinking about for a very long time.
Dessel had been with all of them from their birth. They were born in her creative mind and then throughout a very hot summer in her warm studio she had spent long hours shaping fully-formed individual bodies from the synthetic “clay” of the modern sculptor’s bucket. In the end, like the countless victims of the hideous unnatural disasters they call up from our conscious or unconscious, individual or collective guilt, they were wrapped in blankets, sealed in plastic and laid back in our yard.
There the beauty of these veiled figures partially confounds the horror of their significance.
How does an artist work in the environment we have created? Dessel’s sensitive installation invokes no specific wars; no specific catastrophes, whether the result of criminal negligence or deliberate policy; and no specific crusades embarked upon by an ignorant, manipulated and frightened populace, but it is clear these bodies do not represent natural deaths and that they have to be seen as our friends, neighbors and relations. Their presence here, in this very ordinary, even universal “backyard”, speaks to the continuing personal responsibilty we share for their deaths. Even an artist cannot make them disappear, but a humble moral and bold political awakening now would mean that the dead could be given a proper burial, and it would shut down the slaughterhouses which threaten the living.

In reply to an email request I made earlier today, Susan responded within minutes with this wonderful description of her construction proces:

For the adults I began with the basic, but generic, form of female and male using mannequins as my models (three female, one male). The kids were made totally from freehand and for them I used cement and fiber glass bits.
I thought of each body as a representative individual, i.e., I did not give them names – I always bond with my pieces. The process is very important to me, and over the time that the whole piece takes from idea to research to selection of materials to actually making the work the work becomes a part of me. I think that most artists experience something similar.
I thought of each as a body type representing a human condition in a general situation. I made more females than males to represent the fact that it is the innocent (i.e., non-military, or what our government refers to as collateral) that are so often among the dead.
The forms (bodies) are made out of many layers of plaster gauze. (this is gauze already permeated with plaster that you dip into water to activate). I made each figure in two halves and then wrapped the gauze around the halves to create the whole.
I altered the forms after the initial body form was made (i.e., the first two layers or so of the gauze). For instance one woman is pregnant, another is fat, the others have slightly different bust sizes, arm and/or feet form/direction, body language. This is the same with the men, e.g. one of the men is emaciated. The infant, child, and adolescent are more based on size to represent stages in life than a particular body type or situation.
When the bodies were dry (you do recall the environmental challenges during the time I was working. UGH!), I covered each with two coats of marine shellac. This is for exterior use, primarily on boats. In particular I did this because the installation is an outdoor installation and it is sure to precipitate over the course of the exhibit.
This also eased my uncomfortableness with the fact that the plaster layers were basically white (as in caucasian). I wanted these forms to represent humanity not people of a particular background. So while none have dark skin the effect of the shellac was to turn them to shades that were creamy to light brown.
Also, as I do not believe that any of us is perfect (in any way. and how boring that would be, no?) there are lumps and drips and bumps, such as we each have.
The bodies that we see in print and the electronic media are wrapped in blankets and then sometimes in plastic. I selected medical emergency blankets that are used by EMS teams around the country. The color – amber, yellow, or whatever – represents to me caution and that was appropriate for the essence of the piece. Also the blankets are poly with about a 1/16″ layer of foam on the backside. The blankets are wrapped around the whole body and the edges hand sewn into place.
I decided to use sand bag tarps for the outer layer, because of the elements over the duration of the exhibit and because it is fitting for dead bodies that are to remain unidentified and in the public eye.
Sand bags are usually used when a disaster has already started (to shore up the banks of a body of water, etc.) and often do not work to prevent a disaster. Thus it felt like a good fit. These were also hand sewn to close the openings and tied (self ties, i.e., also sand bag tarp material) in the fashion that dead bodies are tied. The size of the three non-adults is emphasized by the outer wrapping that hangs below (the feet) and above (the head) of the actual body form.
For a dignity which is very important and often not heeded, the outer covering is an attempt to protect the body when it is no longer able to protect itself, or even try to.

Susan C. Dessel OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale 2006 sandbag tarps, EMS blankets, shellac, plaster gauze, cement, dimensions variable [view of installation]

The first part of the first real-time show either Barry or I have curated opens this Friday at Dam, Stuhltrager in Williamsburg. The opening reception for Susan C. Dessel’s sculpture yard installation, “OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale“, is the evening of September 8, from 7 to 9. The address is 38 Marcy Avenue, just west of the BQE on the corner of Hope.
The inside galleries will be showing the work of five Spanish artists, Yolanda del Amo, Ruben Ramos Balsa, Rafael de Diego, Esther Manas and Javier Viver, in “Echo”, an installation curated by Sara Abad & Elena Blanque also opening the same night.
Yes, of course we’ll be there.
Check ArtCal for the remaining 110+ openings we care about in the next few days, and see Bloggy for some suggestions for simplifying your cultural mapping for tomorrow, Thursday, by any account New York’s biggest night of the year for new art.
The second part of our own show opens inside at Dam, Stuhltrager five weeks from now, on October 13. More on that adventure in this space during the weeks to come.

“Kamp K48”, a large detail of the installation inside the “JCP Annex”


Shay Nowick Protest Banner 2005 acrylic on cotton fabric 4′ x 6′ [view of installation, with a glimpse of Hrafnhildur Arnardottir’s “The Hairy Hunchback” on the right, Hug & Magnan’s “Chainlink wallpaper” behind, A.L Steiner’s “Untitled (trail of loathsome slime)” to the right, and rachel Howe’s “We Lit the Fires (Misfit)” on the left]


Noah Lyon 50 Cent Friendster (aka White Tees) 2005 marker and collage on canvas 9″ x 12″ and It’s Lonely Being Lonely aka Breeeaaaast Milk You Made My Daaayaaa!!! 2005 paint and marker on canvas 9″ x 12″ [view of installation]

John Connelly’s last show of the summer, which closed last week, was ostensibly about camp, but not the one in Susan Sontag’s notes, and not the one your parents thought they were sending you to. “Kamp K48” was the inspiration of Scott Hug, the artist, curator and publisher of the magazine K48. From the press release:

For this outing, Troop K48, consisting of artists who have been affiliated with K48 throughout the years, will take you on an artistic hike through the breathtaking scenery and boundless beauty of the natural world.
The exhibition plans to explore both the stereotypes and realities of our relationship to the environment, how nature is sometimes used as a marketing campaign and how we have cultured nature to suit our own needs. In the installation, nature and the art it has inspired has been visually fenced in, either to keep you out or to keep it in. The 48+ contributors in Kamp 48 have been working from their own ideas of nature to create a campsite where mass media’s manipulation of nature is fully explored. Featured works take cues from horror movies, abduction stories, troop leaders gone wild, alien abductions and the army-like transformation of boys to men under the stern direction of the Boy Scouts of America.

But if you made it to 27th Street last month, it wasn’t really that simple; camp probably never was.
See the review by Wayne Northcross in Gay City News.

I have to single out the work of an artist in this show of whom I haven’t seen enough lately. Deborah Mesa-Pelly had three modest-sized photographs mounted in different areas, and I can show images of two of them here. The second was a big surprise when I uploaded my card onto the computer, since it hung in almost complete darkness inside the gallery’s smaller room described as the “JCP Annex”.


Deborah Mesa-Pelly Racoon Eyes 2005 C-print 19″ x 24″ [installation view]

Deborah Mesa-Pelly Wiener Hole 2006 C-print 15″ x 19″ [large detail of installation]

busy

Everyone in the arts world is going to be out and about beginning next week as the galleries reinvent themselves for another season. Even Barry and I are uncharacteristically formally committed to more visibility than usual in the next two months.
We’re curating a gallery show at Dam, Stuhltrager in Williamsburg, including separate openings (four weeks apart) for a one-woman show in the sculpture garden and a small group show inside. In addition we’ve been invited to be guest speakers as part of “Muse Fuse”, NURTUREart’s informal monthly salon, also in Brooklyn. Later in September we will be travelling to Providence where we will be visiting the studios of visual arts undergraduates at Brown University with an artist friend of ours as guests of the curator of the List Art Center.
It’s all enough to spoil a couple of humble bloggers, except that I think we both already feel pretty spoiled: We’re already doing what we want to do most – the way we most want to do it.
The Dam, Stuhltrager sculpture garden show is an installation by Susan C. Dessel, one of the Brooklyn College MFA degree students whose work was censored and destroyed this past spring [their legal case is continuing). Her opening is Friday, September 8, the same night the gallery’s front rooms open with “Echo“, a show of five Madrid artists.
“Muse Fuse” was created by Karen Marston of NURTUREart, a valuable community non-profit registry and gallery, as a forum for its artists, curators and guests to exchange ideas and information. This month’s gathering will be held on Wednesday, Sept 13 at 7 pm. Details are on the NURTUREart site.
My relationship to Brown goes back decades, beginning even before my graduate school ambitions introduced me to the wonders of Rhode Island. At that time this sober old Yankee institution expected the fine arts to be left to technical schools – if they could imagine they should be taught at all. Fortunately for my spiritual health RISD was just down the hill, where no one was surprised when The Velvet Underground* was invited to play class dance [ordinary schools had “proms”] the year I arrived in Providence.
Anyway, Brown now has an Arts Faculty, and as I’m writing this our good friend Sharon Louden is up there busy installing a large sculpture outside its home on the hill, the List Arts Center. She has persuaded the curator at the Center’s David Winton Bell gallery, Vesela Sretenovic, to invite us to join her when Sharon tours the studios of new and returning students on the September 21, and later in the afternoon she and her New York gallerist, Oliver Kamm, will join Sretenovic for a lecture/demonstration at the school. Barry and I will be in the audience, by that time I imagine sitting with some new friends.

*
from a piece by Robert Greenfield which originally ran in Rolling Stone on February 18, 1971:

The Velvets suffered from all kinds of strange troubles. They spent three years on the road away from New York City, their home, playing Houston, Boston, small towns in Pennsylvania, anywhere that would pay them scale.
“We needed someone like Andy”, John [Cale] says. “He was a genius for getting publicity. Once we were in Providence to play at the Rhode Island School of Design and they sent a TV newsman to talk to us. Andy did the interview lying on the ground with his head propped up on one arm. There were some studded balls with lights shining on them and when the interviewer asked him why he was on the ground, Andy said, “So I can see the stars better.” The interview ended with the TV guy lying flat on his back saying, “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

We still love Andy, and we still love RISD – to which we owe so much of Rhode Island’s cool.

[the Rolling Stone excerpt from howdoesitfeel; image from Bloggy]

Darmstadt, newly popular avant

I definitely don’t post enough here about arts other than the visual. Serious or non-commercial music is extraordinarily important in our lives, and while I suppose a lot of people can make that statement Barry and I are fortunate to be able to live with an enormous collection of recordings, including an accumulation of more DVD’s of underknown or underappreciated operas than we can keep up with.
One of the reasons for our inevitable neglect of the music recordings, at least in warmer months, is the enjoyment we get from the complex songs of birds in the garden, but in the evening, when we are more likely to sit down at home in front of a screen not attached to a laptop, the competition is even keener. We actually spend as many evenings (and a few afternoons) away from the apartment watching live performances as we do days visiting galleries or museums.
Our enjoyment of music, dance, theatre, or their combination are rarely recorded in my blog. I suppose the reason is partly the difficulty or impossibility of capturing a visual image of my own (and the inadequacy or even the unavailability of promotion images), even when there is visual content, and partly the fact that most of the obscure experimental works which attract us are scheduled for only one or two performances.
Once in a while, and unfortunaely more often than you would know from looking at this site, a performance is just too wonderful to let me keep my silence.
To begin describing what we saw and heard last night, I have to admit that a certain credit has to be given to the venue, the Spiegeltent. I had heard about this temporary, very downtown performance space all summer, but I think it was July’s weather that had discouraged me from investigating it earlier.
The tent is an almost unbelieveably perfect relic of the European cabaret and music salons of the 1920’s and 30’s, but last night we spent hours of pure delight inside carried away into the twenty-first century. No, “Absinthe“, wasn’t on the program last night, although the authority of good friends whose judgment we respect tells us that it’s great fun.
Instead we were a part of a wonderful audience for a performance of the Brooklyn collective Darmstadt, Classics of the Avant Garde [I like the reference to Darmstadt, but I love the phrase in the second part of the name!] in collaboration with ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) and pianist Emily Manzo. The works we heard/saw performed in this colorfully-spotlighted, smoky (artificial) mirrored and brocaded tent were by both contemporary composers and the those of the classical avant garde who still inspire adventurous musicians and audiences with works which haven’t gathered a speck of dust in the years which followed their composition.
Cage, Ligeti, Xenakis and Andriessen works were interspersed with newer pieces by Rodney Sharman, Aaron Siegel and Du Yun. Maybe it was partly the buildup of enthusiasm, since they were the last wo works on the program, but I was totally crazy about the performances and the music of Xenakis’s “Dmaathen” (Claire Chase on electric flute and David Schoztko percussion) and Andriessen’s “Workers Union” (David Reminick on saxophone, Gareth Flowers on trumpet, Daniel Lippel on electic guitar, Randall Zigler on bass, Cory Smythe on piano and David Schotzko and Adam Sliwinski percussion).
This kind of stuff totally wipes out the boundaries of “classical Music” which have been assigned to its acolytes over the last century. The enthusiastic, standing-room-only audience was composed of much more than the older, sober and often slumberous faces found uptown in our heavily-funded music museums.
There are three more nights of ICE performances at the Spiegeltent: September 11, 18 and 25.


John Moran, as if at rest

Everything I said in the last paragraph can be said in spades for the performance which followed Darmstadt, John Moran‘s “Zenith 5! (Vrs. 2.0)”, programmed by Performance Space 122. Moran is something of a legend among downtown music and performance entusiasts. I had first heard about him, I believe, soon after I moved to New York two decades ago, maybe in a tribute from Kyle Gann. I searched everywhere for a recording and kept my eyes open for any notice of a performance, but for years I found nothing.
This was In the early and late 80’s, when I often often visited small to medium-sized rooms where the “downtown” or “new music” audiences numbers often barely exceeded those of the performers, and this was for groups I was already virtually worshipping. These were musicians who had already produced a number of records, and I knew I had most of them at home – or would have them in my hands by the next day. There was one hot evening in the late 80’s when I stood in Manny Maris’s CD store on Bleecker Street, called “Lunch for your Ears”, crowded together with maybe seven other people (including Manny) to hear John Zorn do a solo horn gig. There was no AC and the door was closed to protect us from the neighbors’ wrath. I was physically miserable, but I couldn’t believe my privilege!
But back to Moran. I finally tracked down a CD. It was “The Manson Family: An Opera“. And it was only a few years ago that I finally heard about a live performance of his ahead of time and of course I went. I was delighted, and I snatched up every CD he offered for sale after the music and the wonderful madness stopped. I resolved never to miss another opportunity to see what he’s up to. It still happens once in a while, but only because this brilliant artist apparently doesn’t keep a mailing list.
Unfortunately the piece performed last night was a one-off, at least for now. He’s sure to be back, and what may be just as sure is the fact that the work will not look the same when we find him again.
For all of its innovation, even within the context of his own exotic body of work, “Zenith” was probably more typically Moran than anything I had seen before – precisely because it was a new direction as well as being so truly bizarre. “Zenith Five” was annoying and disturbing but totally unforgettable. We may not all be ready for it yet, but its beauties were real. The music was concrete and sampled and homemade; the movement was the same. I once wondered where “minimalism” could go once it had become part of our canon of styles; Moran seems to have found an outlet in the direction assumed by this exquisite piece. He’s calling this work a ballet, at least tentatively; if he sticks with both the form and the appelation the virtually dead-ended world of “the ballet” can only be enriched by what started in the Spiegeltent last night.

ADDENDUM: I just realized that as respects the Darmstadt program the two pieces I had singled out for mention, of the eleven included in the program, were both written by recognized giants of the late twentieth century. Even though one of them is very much alive, my notes may look like a deliberate slight of Andriessen’s younger colleagues and that was certainly not my intention.
The acoustics of the tent were not kind to the solo piano that was Emily Manzo’s instrument during the first part of the evening, and it was in this portion of the program that Siegel and Sharman’s compositions were heard. After the pause the ICE musicians moved in with their multiple instrument groupings and it was during this segment that we were treated to Du Yun‘s “Vicissitudes No. 1” (David Reminick on saxophone, Daniel Lippel on guitar, Kivie Cahn-Lipman on cello, Cory Smythe on piano, Randall ZIgler on bass and David Schotzko percussion).
The piece was totally new to me and I was equally unfamiliar with the composer, but I loved what I heard and I would really like to hear it again – elsewhere. Even with these larger forces the tent took its toll: I’m guessing that it was because of a lack of familiarity with the quirks of the space that the easy asssertiveness of the electric guitar and the natural power of the larger percussion instruments ended up bringing their players’ contributions distractingly too forward of those of the ensemble. I think of the work itself – and its interpreters – as otherwise truly powerful and “electric” – in the very best way.

[unattributed Darmstadt image from Darmstadt; John Moran image by Chang W. Lee from NYTimes]