Category: Culture

detail


the long view


the day unfolds

The erotic frisson of much of the work in his earlier walls is missing in the installation Joe Ovelman completed early this morning. Ovelman has been spending a lot of time in São Paulo and it seems to agree with him.
The photography is almost painfully beautiful, but his work is always beautiful and very often there’s some pain too. These photographs are also, well, very happy, but they are not dull. There is nothing casual about their composition and they are clearly the work of a master. They are also intensely personal and they reveal a private world which is, while not quite exotic, warmly exceptional and pretty inaccessible even to those who may be privileged to travel a lot.
It’s very interesting to me that many of the images are of walls, but these walls seem to shelter more than they exclude. Ovelman lives in these spaces in more ways than one, and we can wish we did too.
Actually, until these fragile paper bills disappear this world really is a little bit of ours as well.

The following thunbnails are only samples from the rank of images.












UPDATE: the wall remains almost entirely intact (as of last night, May 10)

It was a very small piece of paper on the back of a traffic signal. I couldn’t read the words from down on the sidewalk, so I held the camera high above my head and aimed. I took the image home and enlarge the text area.
“Bozack Nation” is more than a sign.

In the last 24 hours I’ve heard or read comments from several people suggesting that the Brooklyn College MFA thesis show difficulties [see also] might have been avoided had the gallery posted a “warning label”. I’m also dismayed by the recent sighting of these labels outside some Chelsea galleries.
I totally disagree with the idea that we have to warn people – anywhere – when human sexuality is addressed. Only in America would such a suggestion be met with anything but ridicule.
I think “warnings” are particulary inappropriate where art is concerned. Nothing interesting ever happens when people encounter only what they expect.
Is it necessary to point out that if you can find your way into an exhibition you can find your way out?
And I cannot accept the argument that it’s for the sake of the children. Kids will only be traumatized if their parents make a scene.
I would add that this country has already become far too “infantilized” if I didn’t have so much respect for Les Enfants we think we are protecting to use that word. Let’s just agree we do no service to people of any age by dumbing-down an entire culture.

We visited the two floors of the School of Visual Arts MFA open studios event last weekend where Sarah Schich was projecting a small moving image onto one wall of her darkened studio. The walls were all shingled with seriously-blank sheets of white typewriter paper. Across from the “screen” and also just above the floor, lit by one dim bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, was a typed list of names pinned to the wall.

Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allen Poe
Anne Sexton
Michel Foucault
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Yukio Mishima

The little lantern relayed a looped series of six short animated videos illustrating the story of the deaths of six famous writers.
The image above is a still from the story, by the author’s own account, of the social circumstances in which Michel Foucault contracted the disease, HIV, which eventually caused his death.
I know this may sound weird and probably disrespectful, but the animations are graceful, beautiful, and absolutely charming.

maybe our guardians now plan a special exhibition of their own

Don’t they ever learn? NYC Parks authorities have abruptly shut down the MFA thesis exhibit for the art school of Brooklyn College/CUNY.
It will be interesting to see how the art collector successor to Giuliani deals with this one. See Barry for the story up to now. There you will learn that this dedicated blog has been set up to provide continuously-updated information.

Pictured is the cover of the catalog for the Nazi’s 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition. I have a copy here at home, a very precious and tragic relic of a product of what I once thought was an alien mind.

UPDATES: See follow-up posts done as the story developedhere and here and here and here and here and here and here and still again and again and now the suit

[image from Deutsches Historisches Museum]

Joe Ovelman (São Paulo wall)

Joe Ovelman will be doing another of his huge photo installations on a very fortunate Chelsea wall early Saturday morning. This will essentially be the first street project to include work done while he has been living in Brazil. I’m assuming all of the images we will see this weekend were captured in the southern hemisphere.
Joe in Brazil with his camera. This is certain to be a great ride. Other than the possibility that there may be more than one dimension to the idea of wall this time, I know almost nothing else about the new piece.
Papered along the west side of 10th Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets, the work should be whole and complete by about 6 am, but don’t wait too long to check it out. There’s never any way to know how quickly the images may be destroyed or removed; ironically their mortality, and especially the uncertainty of the number of their days (hours?), contributes to the incredible vitality of every one of Ovelman’s wall projects.
I hope to have pictures of the piece here later in the day on Saturday.

[image from Joe Ovelman]

Judy Glantzman Untitled 2004 oil on canvas 90″ x 80″ [installation view]


[detail]

We’ve lived with two drawings by Judy Glantzman for years, one of them quite small. We’ve also seen her small paintings over even a longer period, but until now I don’t think we’ve seen anything as monumental as the large canvases included in her current show at Betty Cunningham.
The madly-re-worked facial and body gestures work on every scale, but they’re definitely not the same on every scale. Scary wonderful is much easier to hold onto when there’s only one figure to contemplate. These ghostly crowds are of a different order altogether. They are as beautiful as the best renaisance altarpieces, and they may oddly serve a similar purpose in spite of their profaneness.


Judy Glantzman Untitled 1996 Super Sculpey 6.25″ x 8″ x 10″ [installation view]

And then there are the sculptures, which almost no one has seen until now. Perhaps its only because of their full dimensional form, but these pieces speak to something perhaps even more elemental than whatever it is that is claimed by the paintings and drawings.

Downtown at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist studio program the New Orleans artist Christy Speakman had installed a number of works relating to environments where materials are in transition, with or without borders. I stopped by on Sunday, the last day of an open studio weekend.
The first image above is only vaguely related to the geography of her native city, but on the top of a painted floor in her studio, which suggests sharp black and white shorelines, she has built diked islands within which cut-out photographs of land- or skyscapes are flooded with clear water.
In the second image, the two photographs mounted to a wall are unmanipulated shots, of rain puddles enriched by errant drops of oil, which Speakman captured on New York City streets.
Thirteen of the fourteen artists transplanted from the Gulf Coast and settled temporarily in LMCC studios will be together in a show at The Bronx River Art Center opening May 12.




The exception, Bernard Pearce, works as a composer and performer of experimental music rather more than in the visual arts, but I can say that his studio was one of the most interesting spaces I saw Sunday afternoon. A little later in the day I heard him performing in LMCC’s 120 Broadway workspace. If he’s been doing that at the same time the rest of them have been doing their thing, it must have been a very pleasant few months. No, it’s not Dixieland.

One of the coolest and most progressive non-profit galleries in the city will be holding its annual fund-raising auction and raffle tomorrow evening.
Saturday is Momenta Art appreciation day.
Barry and I would never miss this one. It’s a chance to be with a great bunch of people while surrounded, if ever so briefly, by some of the most interesting art to be seen anywhere right now. Then there’s the excitement of being able to actually take something home, knowing that this boon is also for the future of the art and artists we love.
Although there are never any duds at a Momenta benefit, this year the offerings are particularly fine. Dues/tickets however are still only $175 (less a 10% discount for artists). There are 110 works and 110 tickets. No one goes home empty-handed, and there’s little of the stress which is always a part of a silent-auction format.
For those who can’t do without that competition there will be a silent auction, of eight additional select works, preceding the drawing itself.
Even if you can’t make it to White Columns, where the works are now on display and where the event is being held, you can still order tickets and arrange for a proxy to make your selection from among the items in the raffle.
See Bloggy for more.