I’ve uploaded two new sketches into the “Free the Art” gallery, both by W. Craghead, and they’re pretty wonderful.
Carol Bove’s Adventures in Poetry by W. Craghead
Jason Fox’s Peaceful Warrier by W. Craghead
Once again, For anyone only joining this conversation now, this “Free the Art” project is about helping to make visible hundreds of pieces of contemporary art to which the Museum of Modern Art seems to have been doing its best to limit viewing access. The works in the current show at PS1, which is MoMA’s child, are not even listed, either at the museum itself or on its website; of course that also means there are no images on line either, and visitors are forbidden to photograph anything whatsoever. Oh yes, a big museum book has been promised, but it’s not here now, and it’s certainly not going to be free.
Category: Culture
“Super Thursday”, including Mike Paré at ATM
Mike Paré Ditch Dance 2005 egg tempera and graphite on paper 22″ x 30″ [large detail]
We celebrated Super Thursday a few days ago with a relatively low-key tour of only a few of the new shows opening in Chelsea that night. Douglas Kelly had announced some fourscore gallery receptions, and even ArtCal‘s less democratic listings numbered a little over thirty.
Regardless of which guide was consulted, a complete tour of the openings that night, beside the point anyway, would have been impossible within the two hour window available. Huge crowds created the additional obstacle of, yes, some real lines and waits, so we distracted ourselves with the friends we ran into, but we did manage to see a few neat things.
One of our first stops was ATM, where Mike Paré has a beautiful show, “Blissed Out”, with work which straddles an [almost] no man’s land located between sensitive documentary photography and traditional genre painting, sometimes dressed up in black light.
Some enlightenment on the show’s title, from the gallery:
Expanding beyond the communal, counter-culture themes he explored in his Black Light Folk Festival exhibition in 2003, Paré now focuses his attention on moments of individual spiritual inwardness that made up, and continue to make up, the building blocks of the movement.
a broken trumpet in a red velvet-lined box
Barry and I were a part of this afternoon’s New Orleans Jazz Funeral March in Washington Square Park, where I managed to weave through an extraordinarily-diverse crowd to get a few decent images, even while encumbered by half of a sandwich board around my neck. My sign bore my simple conclusion:
NEED A REVOLUTION
The woman carrying on her shoulder a red velvet-lined case in which lay a shiny bent-up trumpet told me that some man she didn’t know had handed it to her, asking if she would carry it in the procession. For me that was the defining moment of the march and protest.
When we left and headed toward the West Village we had to squeeze through the phalanx of police motor scooters which had trailed this very peaceful group around the park for an hour.
Seconds after I took a picture of this solitary flautist they swarmed into the open ground in front of him and faced the “mourners”.
Then the real surprise: Barely ten feet beyond this disturbing display of obsessively-focused armed law enforcement we found ourselves parties to the familiar, repeated pitch, “smoke”? “smoke”?
Ahhh. Still maybe the people’s park after all.
ArtCal now has pictures!
Robert Boyd Heaven’s Little Helper (from the series Xanadu) 2005 video still (Manson Girls)
News flash! ArtCal now has pictures as well as information. Well, it is all about the visual arts, so offering some images along with direction only seemed [more than] appropriate.
Marking the unofficial end of summer, there are gazillions of art openings this week, and most of them are on Thursday (see “Opening Soon” on the home page). The site’s convenient geographical and, in the case of Chelsea, even sub-geographical arrangement of listings will help all you fanatics find your way through the rich offerings. Press the print button and you’re halfway there.
Maye we’ll all bump into each other. Say hi.
[image of a “Featured Opening” from ArtCal]
Jim Hodges at the Ritz-Carlton
Jim Hodges Look and See painted stainless steel 11.5’x 50′ x 1″ [detail of installation]
It appears light as a feather in spite of its medium, but I think Jim Hodges‘s enormous sculpture is more effective when viewed close up, at least while it’s located in its current visually-busy environment. Yes, I know it was supposedly created for the space at the base of this hotel, but I’d love to see it in a large, active public plaza.
Federico Solmi is King Kong
Federico Solmi is in the midst of assembling a stack of a thousand drawings for his newest project, an ambitious hand-colored videoanimation based on the 1933 “King Kong” movie, sort of updated for the twenty-first century, but filled with the kind of anachronisms which fire the imaginations of film buffs everywhere.
In addition to the cast of characters familiar to several generations the world over, the new film will feature the Statue of Libery, McDonald’s golden arches, Charles Lindberg and the Spirit of St. Louis, Gucci, Prada, the Guggenheim and the Gagosian gallery on 24th Street. Solmi and his beautiful wife Jennifer have the staring roles, but this time Solmi’s idol Rocco Sifreddi will be confined to a billboard in Times Square.
We had a peek at some of the gorgeous drawings and a lot of the background magic inside his studio on Thursday, but Solmi will first be showing the film itself in a gallery in Cologne and a museum in Naples this fall. He has also been invited to Miami in early December by a curator with the Pulse Art Fair, and Barry and I will be able to see the finished work there.
I can’t imagine it won’t be shown somewhere in New York this season as well, especially since Solmi promises to add larger-scale drawings, and sculptures reproducing some of its most memorable characters. Ask your local gallerists about their schedules.
[images are jpegs furnished by the artist]
special auras and fuzzes at d.u.m.b.o. arts center (dac)
Jonathan Podwil Assassinated (112263) #3 2005 oil on linen 22″ x 30″ [large detail]
Brooklyn’s DUMBO is still packed with artist studios, even if the gallery numbers have declined in the last few years. d.u.m.b.o. arts center (dac) is one of the very few still around, and it’s been even lonelier than usual down under the bridge during the time Smack Mellon has been closed (they will be opening in a new space in mid-October).
(dac) is currently showing the work of ten young artists in the wonderfully-spooky exhibition, “Nimbi and Penumbrae.” The show’s title explains why much of the art cannot be easily reproduced in an on-line photograph. This helps explain why I’m including only one image from the installation with this post, Jonathan Podwil‘s reworking, in a very traditional medium, of iconic photo stills attached to an American catharsis* from another era. But actually I’m very fond of Podwil’s work, and these newest paintings are stunning.
*
they seem to be piling up faster these days
saving a living archive of American social and cultural history
the author’s home, before the flood
I have a stack of neglected newspapers on my right as I sit here at my laptop looking at the staggering reports of human tragedy flowing in from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. I saved yesterday’s NYTimes “House & Home” section for later, mostly because of this article [with another, very different picture] which appeared at the top of the front page. A few minutes ago, while looking for something else, I saw it for the third time on Tyler Green’s site.* I decided I had to read it now, and I’m glad I did. In the midst of so much reason for despair, the writer, Frederick Starr, recalls a community which has been all but destroyed this week, but he also offers some hope for its survival.
My home is there, a West Indian-style plantation house built in 1826, standing as an ancient relic amid a maze of wooden houses a century younger. Some are classic bungalows, but most are distinctly New Orleans building types, with fanciful names like shotguns and camelbacks. I watch as a neighbor is rescued from his rooftop. Dazed, he has emerged from his attic, wriggling through a hole he hacked in the roof, swooped up by a Guardsman on a swinging rope. He is safe. Scores of others aren’t. Bodies float through the streets of the Ninth Ward. Presumably they are from the diverse group that inhabits this deepest-dyed old New Orleans neighborhood: poorer blacks and whites, Creoles of color and a sprinkling of artists.
My neighbor Miss Marie is also one of the lucky ones. Born on the ground floor of what is now my house, she is 81, residing in a shotgun house that her husband, now deceased, built 60 years ago. She has spent most of her life within a perimeter of barely 30 yards. Both her speech and her cooking were formed right there. A painted plaster statue of the Virgin has protected her through all previous storms. But this time she pleaded with my friend John White to take her as he left town. Satellite photos show the shadow of her roof beneath the filthy water. Her house is gone, but John saved her life, driving to Atlanta, sleeping on benches at rest stops.
. . . .
We are just beginning to appreciate the human disaster occurring in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have already perished. Hundreds of thousands will lose their homes and all their worldly possessions. Untold numbers of businesses will close their doors, throwing huge numbers of people out of work. New Orleans, its population already in decline, now faces economic and social collapse.
It also faces the loss of some of America’s most notable historic architecture. Maybe not in the French Quarter, which may emerge relatively intact, or the Garden District, which was spared most of the flooding. The dangers lie in neighborhoods like Tremé and Mid-City, which extend along Bayou Road toward Lake Pontchartrain and are rich in 18th- and 19th-century homes, shops, churches and social halls. They have been badly hit by the violent winds or torrents of water. And so have hundreds of other important buildings and vernacular structures throughout the city and across the breadth of South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.
. . . .
Louisiana, especially South Louisiana, is a living archive of American social and cultural history, and not just in its buildings. In no other state is the proportion of people born and raised within its borders so high. As a consequence, they are something that is ever more rare in a homogenized and suburbanized America: the living bearers and transmitters of their own history and culture. Katrina, and those fateful levee breaks in New Orleans, put this all at risk.
. . . .
Now [my own house] is under water. If it survives at all, it will need massive rehabilitation. Just as likely, it will go the way of Miss Marie’s house and of hundreds of other pieces of the region’s heritage.
But I do not intend to give up easily. Why? Because I am absolutely convinced that New Orleanians will not allow their city to become a ghost town. And I intend to be part of the renewal that springs from this determination.
*
Go to Green’s site, “Modern Art Notes,” for regular updates on cultural loss in the Gulf area, and suggestions on how to help, along with very helpful links.
[image from the NYTimes]
on the sunny side of the street
[spotted this flock on York Street in the new DUMBO late this afternoon, just steps from a large pack of black Town Cars waiting for their masters to leave the office]
the art of United Architects
United Architects World Trade Center Proposal Project 2002 Plexiglas [detail of installation]
It was my favorite when I saw it in a magnificent exhibition organized by and presented at Max Protetch now more than three years ago. It may have been the only proposal which looked like a work of art as much as it looked like it would actually work. I think that suggests great architecture. Apparently MoMA now agrees, since the model of the United Architects study for the site of the World Trade Center has entered the collection. [see the architects’ site for more]
Yes, I know that in recent years, because of the stupidity and the chaos which has accompanied discussions since this structural model was first shown, and the banal or junky designs which have been advanced in its stead, I have argued for a big green lawn or, more recently, a grand pedestrian plaza.
But if build we must (this is still New York) my heart would still be with this gorgeous proposal, in spite of its size. It somehow remains the least monstrous, on account of its elegance and its irregularity. It may be the safest structure, because of its structural connectors and its multiple exits; and, oddly, it comes off as the most humanist, for its anthropomorphic shapes and the suggestion of an organic community within.
Every one of the extras which have been suggested or promised for the site since this model was built could fit within its mass. At this point I’m even willing to do without those two holy holes, although the United Architects design actually does contemplate keeping those areas clear and the combined segments of the building actually embrace them.
Also because this is New York however, this great proposal is likely to stay just where it is – a work of art.