Category: Culture

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Tom Billings Our Founding Fathers 24″ x 18″


Holland Tunnel has a remarkable show, “Ménage à Trois“, of paintings by Tom Billings, Jacques Roch and Jennifer Toth. It continues through the rest of this week. Unfortunately the gallery seems to have lost its website and I didn’t leave the little garden shed on South 3rd Street with any more information about the show or the artists. Worse still, I can’t find anything on line about Tom Billings.
Finally, I don’t seem to have gotten an image of Jacques Roch‘s work in this show, but I’ll try to make up for it, with the gallery at least, by doing a separate post showing works by Jennifer Toth.

Roz Chast Cremaster Cycle Cartoon T-Shirt t-shirt

Not exactly Matthew Barney’s show, but rather “The Matthew Barney Show“. It’s a group exhibition currently at Jack the Pelican which has been curated by Eric Doeringer. This rich installation is probably more fun than any of the eponymous genuine originals, regardless of how seriously, or unseriously, you take Barney’s work. Doeringer has asked some 30 of his colleagues to create or contribute work referencing the Cremaster phenomenon, and the result is a scary delight.
You have to have seen at least some of the Cremaster videos to get the full effect, but even a cult novitiate will understand most of the symbolism in this collection of bootleg send-ups and tributes.


Liz Magic Laser Back to Nature #19 Lambda print


Carolyn Sortor Creamistress 6 DVD


Dan Levenson and Sean Meyer Kremaster video


Dax van Aalten The Mammarymaster Cycle video

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Liu Wei It Looks Like a Landscape 2004 digital B/W photography 60″ x 24.5″ [installation view]


Max Protetch has mounted an extraordinary show of recent Chinese photography. It will be up for another week, but China will be here forever. Don’t miss out on seeing the work now. Otherwise it will be that much harder to catch up next time. These artists aren’t going to wait for us to decide they’re there.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Double Fantasy II (sex) 2006 mixed media sculpture with cameras, lights, electronics, projected video output, approx. 7′ x 11′ [large detail of installation]

The show closes in two hours, but the gallery will still have some good images after today, and maybe a piece in the office. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be back again. I’m referring to Jennifer and Kevin McCoy and their Postmasters show, “Directed Dreaming“.
From the Press release:

The title of the exhibit refers to practice of willing oneself to dream about specific situations in order to resolve conflicts in one’s waking life. The works in Directed Dreaming fuse cinematic, personal, and historical images to become visual records of those conflicts, with the question of resolution left open to the viewer.
The McCoys’ sculptures are fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements. Camera views are sequenced to create live cinematic events. By exposing the image making apparatus along with the projected results, the work explores both time-based and physical reality.

I thought the smaller works with simpler mechanisms were just as effective as the larger, multicamera, multimedia installations which make use of several rotating sets and soundtracks. Either approach seems essential to the artists’ exploration of anxiety, but I have to admit that the the big guys really are spectacular.

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Rico Gatson Auction Block 2006 latex paiont on plywood, lights 25″ x 48.5″ x 24.5″ [installation view]

The show is “African Fractals“, the artist is Rico Gatson and the gallery is Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Great. The symbols and references are many, but Gatson’s art makes them a scary one.

Valerie Tevere UNITED STATES 1996 bluprint posters [large detail of installation]


Pedro Lasch Crumbs: Drawing on a Limited View of New York City’s Cultural Wealth 2000 [large detail of installation]

With its current exhibition, “When Artists Say We“, Artists Space would almost certainly take the prize for the current show which asks the most from its visitors. There are well over a hundred artists represented, “as colleagues, as collaborators, in collectives, as friends, as critics, as bystanders, and as allies”, but it’s not always a particularly visual experience. Whoa!
Think art school lecture hall, with some very interesting visual aids. The press release includes this note:

The needs that drive artists together are manifold: a discourse that educates, a horizon that widens, a complexity of knowledge, the ability to fail, or a larger capacity to remember critically and productively within their own field and beyond. But artists are also driven by the need for shelter, protection, and support. Such relationships are grounded in structures and language that are inherently self-critical and rarely reflected upon when art is shown. When Artists Say We takes up this task by trying to present some of the forms such collective exchanges have taken in New York City over the last thirty years.

Because we had to be elsewhere at a certain hour and because of the impressive steam heat pouring into the space while we were there, we didn’t stay as long as I might have otherwise. Or were those just excuses? I did see, or read, some very interesting work. The two images shown above can’t possibly represent this huge show as a whole, but these are just a few of the pieces which do good double duty as art which works well both conceptually and aesthetically. I’m also realizing only now as I write this that, in spite of the fact that they were each created at least a few years ago, they are both particularly topical today.
The printed statement below the identification label for Tevere’s work reads:

These posters were wheat-pasted on buildings, sidewalks, bus stops, and construction scaffoldings in San Diego and Los Angeles during the Republican Convention (San Diego, CA) and Republican election of 1996.

The statement below Lasch’s label is more elaborate, but definitely worth a read:

soldier Lewis, sung by David Adam Moore, has been dying in battle for two thousand years

Until the boy is asked his name David Adam Moore is called simply ‘the Hunk’ by Brine, our underworld guide in “Hell“, an extraordinary new opera continuing this week at Performance Space 122.
This is our own “Inferno“, and it’s an almost perfect work by the composer Michael Webster and the poet Eileen Myles, and they are extremely fortunate in their collaborators. Yes, the libretto is brilliant and beautifully drawn by the composer, performed by a very good ensemble of eight conducted by Jonathan Yates, and brilliantly directed by David Chambers, but there are no weak links anywhere among those responsible for costumes, lighting, or video and stage design (I think this is just about the most successful video/stage integration I’ve ever seen), and I think the attractive cast couldn’t have been better.
Barry has more.
Speaking of attractions, I’ve seen and heard Moore once before, playing the male lead in Gotham Chamber Opera‘s production of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” four years ago. I can vouch for the fact that the chest is not a prosthetic, and the tattoos and piercings were not done just for this role. The man is magnificent to look at, but his acting skills are tops and his voice is superb. I have no idea why it’s still possible for an ordinary mortal to secure a seat only a few feet away from his frightening beauty.

[image by Beth Moore from PS 122]

Nicole Cherubini [details of three pots included in installation]

I can’t promise to upload a big bunch of pictures for just any gallery which happens to have none on its own site, but this is a very special circumstance. I’m very fond both of Nicole Cherubini‘s sculpture and the wonderful work always to be found at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, but the happy combination, as seen in last night’s opening, is sensational.
Cherubini has re-invented pottery, making it finally (again?) indisputably safe for art. This is very serious sculpture but with a fundamental good humor which, for anyone who experiences its beauty, can be as forward or latent as needed.
I have no list of the individual pieces, so the images I’m showing will have to go undoumented, at least for now. I doubt these strong, glorious pots will mind that one bit.

Here are portraits of three of the nine pots:

Nicole Cherubini G-Pot with Rocks 2006 ceramic, fake gold and silver jewelry, chain, white feathers, luster, white ice, marble, wood, blue foam, targel, approx. 16″ x 16″ x 41″ [installation view]

Nicole Cherubini G-Pot, Black Vanitas 2006 ceramic, fake gold and silver jewelry, chain, luster, enamel, plywood, walnut stain, blue foam and acrylic gel, approx. 16.5″ x 12″ x 61″ [installation view]

Nicole Cherubini G-Pot, Vanitas #3 2006 ceramic, terracotta, luster, yellow and crystal ice, fake gold and silver jewelry, chain, purple rabbit fur, plywood, polyurethane, enamel and red plexi-glass, approx. 33.5 x 21″ x 64.5″ [installation view]

And finally, three more images of the red pot shown immediately above and at the very top of this post:

Lindsay Brant Bush Wackers 2004 Trader Joe’s bags, papier mâché, egg shells, foam, wire, plastic, glass eyes [installation view, including a detail of Lisa Sanditz’s wall mural, Pussy Den]

I’ve been feeling just a little bit guilty about showing so many [almost]cum shots on this site lately, so I was delighted to finally make it to the excellently outrageous/outrageously excellent show, “Ridykeulous“, curated by Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner at Participant. But ouch! It was the last day. My answer to the challenge that represents for my readers, or viewers, was to put up as many images as I could muster, giving them a chance to float into the ether forever.
The show is based on the two women’s publication of the same name, making both, in the words of the press release, very much the same “collaborative effort on the part of the two curators to subvert the languages, both theoretical and visual, which are commonly used to define Feminist or Lesbian art.”
It sure worked for me!
And how do we get to see more of these wonderful artists?


Nicole Eisenman Ridykeulous Recruitment Center 1993 installation view]


K8 Hardy Fashionfashion Money Look 2006 C-print [installation view]


Carrie Moyer Chromafesto (Sister Resister 1.2) 2003 acrylic on canvas & wheat pasted posters [installation view]


Keith Boadwee Snowmen #2 2006 [instalaltion view]


Paige Gratland Celebrity Lesbian Fist (Eileen Myles) 2006 silicon [installation view]


Ulrike Mueller 9 drawings pencil and spray paint on paper [installation view]


Christian Lemmerz Charles Saatchi’s Dick mixed media [installation view]


Victoria Robinson Ship Went Down 2006 DVD


Claude Wampler A despondent Pomeranian appears to be detained in underwear 2005 black & white c-print



Laura Parnes Blood and Guts in High School 2005