Category: Culture

These are two mixed-medium works by Bryan Zimmerman currently installed in the show, “Begging a Proper Donnybrook,” at Archibald Arts. The image at the top is a detail.
By now it’s pretty clear that both Barry and James think a great deal of Zimmerman’s work, and not just because it doesn’t seem to owe its intelligence, its sensibility or its aesthetic to anybody or anything.
We’re also not going to ignore Archibald Arts, now that we have an idea of what we’ve been missing. Saturday was our first visit, I’m almost embarrassed to admit, and Anthony Archibald‘s space has been open for twelve years!

[detail of the huge mural on the south side of Williamsburg’s North 4th Street, west of Bedford]

Brandon Balleng�e Cleared and Stained Clearnose Skate, Rajaegianteria 2003 digital C-print mounted on Plexiglas 60″ x 48″ [detail of installation]

It’s only a coincidence that this image and post follows my lizard report, but I like the connection. Brandon Balleng�e‘s skate was one of the works in a very interesting show at Archibald Arts we visited on Saturday. Balleng�e is an environmental artist fascinated by fish and amphibians, notably lizards. In a remarkable show of haunting images of nature, and our corruption of nature, “Cleared and Stained Clearnose Skate” was the beautiful elephant in the middle of the room.


Skate [installation view of full image]

Bob and Roberta Smith Left is the New Right 2004 screenprint 30″ x 20″ [installation view]


Mike Par� and Marc Swanson It Will Be The Same (Blacklight Goya) 2004 five-color silkscreen 17″ X 26″ [installation view]


Scott King Gold Madonna 2003 screenprint 32″ x 24″ [installation view]


Charles Goldman Your Name Here 2000 poster 12″ x 17.75″ [installation view]

It was the last day of a large group show when we finally made the ten-block trek to White Columns on Saturday, but I couldn’t resist doing a post on it anyway. I found Matthew Higgs’ “Post No Bills” so impressive (and sometimes even a lot of fun, in between the more disturbing posters) that I wanted to be on record for saying so. There were dozens of artists represented, hung more or less salon style (bill style?), and none of them was a dud. The images shown above are almost a random selection, and partly a consequence of relative success with the camera, but they were all in a long list of favorites.
The complete roll:

John Armleder; Fabienne Audéoud and John Russell; John Baldessari; Fiona Banner; Derek Barnett; Simon Bedwell; Walead Beshty; Matthew Brannon; Matthew Buckingham; Clint Burnham; Steve Claydon; Jeremy Deller; Sam Durant; Shannon Ebner; Harrell Fletcher; Ryan Gander; Charles Goldman; Wayne Gonzales and David Silver; Rodney Graham; GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand; Mark Hagen; Steve Hanson and Frances Stark; Inventory; Scott King; Jim Lambie; Cary Leibowitz; Robert Linsley; Lucy McKenzie; Aleksandra Mir; Jonathan Monk; Alex Morrison; Paul Noble; Mike Paré and Marc Swanson; Kelly Poe; Allen Ruppersberg; Igor Santizo; Steven Shearer; Karina Aguilera Skvirsky; Kathy Slade; Slimvolume 2004; Bob and Roberta Smith; Michael Smith; Ron Terada; Rirkrit Tiravanija; Kelley Walker; John Waters, and William Wegman.

There’s no longer any excuse for boring dorm or apartment posters, no matter the budget, but of course there never really was.

Phong Bui Hybrid Carnival for Exupéry #2 2005 [detail of gallery installation]

Phong Bui‘s site-specific installation takes over almost every inch of Sarah Bowen‘s gallery space. The press release talks about flight, “exhuberant fantasies of lightness,” the painted language of cubism and his free evocation of “the mystifying vision of Modern art’s rambunctious youth.”
I also like the gorgeous collage drawings shown on a wall in the rear gallery. They suggest studies but they could only have gone so far in directing the kind of spontaneous exuberance seen in his three-dimensional intervention.

Aaron Wexler Flowers Through the Weeds 2005 acrylic, ink and paper on panels 96″ x 104″ [detail]

– being another work from the current show at Jack the Pelican Presents. Barry and I had first seen Aaron Wexler‘s beautiful art exactly one year ago at Oliver Kamm’s 5BE Gallery in a show curated by Lital Mehr. Wexler’s older paper collages were so subtle they were virtually invisible, especially in photo reproduction. I only had to wait.

[image from Aaron Wexler’s site, where the piece is titled, Out of Darkness]

Katherine Daniels Multi-Colored Pendant 2003 wired plastic beads on plastic spool [large detail of installation, with details of two works on paper in the background]

I realize this site has been looking pretty grim lately, and that I was risking the loss of its art blog aspect, so I went through my photo stash and found something which would brighten up the space and at the same time show some beautiful work most people would not have seen yet.
This piece by Katherine Daniels was installed in one of the rooms at the Pool Art Fair earlier this month. Daniels was included in the show David Gibson curated at Jack the Pelican last April, “Culture Vulture,” with another wonderful, even more extravagant piece.

Bethany Bristow, dropped off on the way to the museum

I’ve had this weird reaction to her art since coming across it (in a switch, it was sometime after we had met). Bethany Bristow‘s messy alien-organic sculptures attracted and repelled me at the same time, and I even forgot that this response usually meant that I was likely to end up liking a work, or a body of work, very much.
I now like it very much indeed.
She has work spread throughout the current PS1 Greater New York 2005 show, all of it placed as if it were something waiting to be cleaned up. But nothing worked so well for me as this image I saw in a link on an email she sent out this afternoon. Maybe it’s the daylight, maybe it’s the space. It’s a great photograph, the piece is perfectly installed and I can’t really blame the artist of a guerilla installation for having art inside a museum at the same time.
It’s all public art, even if you may need $5 to see the stuff inside.

[image from Bethany Bristow]

No, not that one, it’s about the one we ordered.


Danny Lyon 327, 329, and 331 Washington Street, between Jay and Harrison Streets

It’s all gone now. Sixty acres of lower Manhattan’s nineteenth-century buildings were demolished during the mid-sixties, including what became the site of the World Trade Center towers. There was also a new vehicle ramp to be added to the Brooklyn Bridge, Pace University was to be enlarged, and historic Washington Market was moved to the Bronx, its buildings reduced to rubble.
Danny Lyon writes today in The Village Voice about his documentation forty years ago of a massive “urban renewal” project in Manhattan:

It was a huge story in New York City at the time. (I’m from Queens, and when you’re from Queens, you really admire Manhattan . . . and this was the most historic part of Manhattan. The oldest part of Manhattan was vanishing.) And it was an ignored story at the time, or I wouldn’t have done it. Part of how I saw myself, as a journalist, was finding the truth and delivering it to the American people. To put it in a really crude way.
. . . .
You have to understand that I was—and still am, although I’ve aged and mellowed— I was obsessed with the power of photography. I thought you could take a bike rider, Harley-Davidson, roaring along, and that this photography was so miraculous that you could somehow contain that power in the negative. Unlike this guy who would go around the corner and die, or run out of gas, that the thing that you contained would be for all time. . . .
I had the power to use all of these buildings and preserve them for the future. And if anybody wanted to experience [the] Lower Manhattan that had stood there for 150 years, they would have to come to my photographs! Which would be washed and preserved and in the New York Public Library. . . .
. . . .
I understood that the way to deliver photography as news was to do books. That’s what I think the news should be: an individual’s statement about how he sees reality. Or as Ferlinghetti says, “The dog trots freely in the street and sees reality. . . . ”
The book’s about architecture. This country’s committing architectural suicide. It’s doing it right now, this moment. Not 37, 38 years ago. This is nothing, what they did down here: The 60 acres is nothing. We’re destroying 6 billion acres of America, and we’re doing it right now. We’re doing it because you can get a mortgage for 5 percent.
Anybody can do anything anywhere.

We can’t expect a city to remain the same forever, but we never needed any of the “improvements” for which these neighborhoods were sacrificed, and don’t even mention the aesthetic crimes committed.
Danny Lyon is an artist and a poet.

[image from Gay City News, courtesy of the Edwyn Houk Gallery]