Matthew Benedict The Children’s Hall 2002-2005 diptych: plastic weaponry, chicken wire, brocade trim, enamel and latex paint on 2 wood panels overall 84″ x 98″ x 5″ [installation view]
No, this isn’t something you’ll find in an armorial hall or the basement recereation room of that weird guy down the street who never talks to anyone, this is an art installation composed of plastic toys freely available and in fact actively hawked to children everywhere in America.
Think about it.
The Children’s Hall [detail]
I missed Matthew Benedict’s recent show at Alexander and Bonin, but I saw this exciting piece on an upper floor yesterday. I’ve been haunted by the informed imagery of the artist’s paintings for years, and Benedict’s sculptures continue to provoke the mind and the eye.
Category: Culture
“Minets À Polis” at Cohan and Leslie
Rob Fisher‘s Twofold (flooring, wood, pipe and plaster) in the foreground, Chris Larson’s C-prints Barn Razor No. 1 and Barn Razor No. 2 on the wall
Minneapolis artists taking Minneapolis apart and sometimes putting it back together. Great job!
The work being shown at Cohan and Leslie is by Fisher, Larson, Alec Soth, Aaron Spangler, Todd Norsten and David Rathman.
“Atomica” at ESSO and Lombard-Freid
Sarah Ciraci Bikini 2005 wall drawing with black light sensitive paint, variable dimensions [installation view]
ESSO Gallery and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts have collaborated on an exhibition entitled, “ATOMICA: Making the Invisible Visible.” This one is not for the faint of heart. On the 60th anniversary of the nuclear age, since we have accepted the idea of using its horrors as an an appropriate political instrument, that’s unfortunately the way it has to be.
the group at Plus Ultra
Jeff Hand Liz (on Box) 2003 faux fur on board 10″ x 8″ x 3.5″ [installation view of a three-dimensional piece]
Plus Ultra‘s summer group show absolutely refuses to succumb to the languor of the season by offering lighter fare, and the work manages to survive an assault of light and heat which can easily frustrate less survigrous work.
I’m being a bit dishonest in illustrating this post with a Jeff Hand piece which is not included in the show itself, the larger and equally wonderful Parasol (after Goya). But I saw Liz in the rear of the gallery and it got to me in spite of my relative indifference to the icon represented by the icon. I thought it needed more exposure (I mean the faux-fur one).
I managed to get a few snaps of pieces which actually are in the show, and while I’m including them below this text they certainly do not represent the limits of its fascinations. The complete catalog includes Nancy Baker, Leslie Brack, Amanda Church, Jennifer Dalton, Nicholas Gaffney, Kate Gilmore, Joe Fig, Rosemarie Fiore, Jeff Hand, Christopher Johnson, Alois Kronschläger, Thomas Lendvai, Max-Carlos Martinez, Analia Segal, and Andy Yoder.
Oh yes, the title of this great tease of an exhibition is “The expression of elemental passions… (or, damn everything but the circus), so there’s the summer part after all.
Joe Fig Joe Namuth’s Pollock #8 2004-2005 polymer clay, plexiglass, wood, oil, enamyl and acrylic paints 12.5″ x 12.5″ x 12″
Leslie Brack L.B. 2003 oil on panel 19″ x 22.5″
Christopher Johnson Oriental Sauna / Warren, Ohio 2005 oil on linen 20″ x 16″
the New Museum, especially Paper Rad and Matt Barton
Paper Rad and Matt Barton extreme animalz: the movie: part 1 2005 video and mixed media* [detail of installation]
And they don’t just sit there. Those neglected and somewhat disfigured creatures really move out when approached by visitors: Dancing fools, all of them.
The New Museum was host to the opening of two new shows this evening: Aernout Mik’s extraordinary video installation, Refraction and an installation of internet-based art by Rhizome ArtBase 101.
Internet-based art is difficult enough to display in a traditional setting even without the additional complication of dealing with people partying while crowded into a limited physical space, so tonight’s museum opening was not the ideal time to approach most of the work.
But there was one exception. Paper Rad‘s piece stood out probably only partly because this wonderful collaborative didn’t stick to an electronic screen in assemblying their contribution: It’s brilliant all the way through. In any event, the section of wall assigned to extreme animalz was definitely the place to watch. Because of the crush of bodies, the plug had to be pulled on the fantastic animation of these dozens of creatures. Since their movement would normally be triggered by the presence of a passing body, tonight the animals had to be guaranteed occasional respites; they were regularly set off briefly by their keeper, Jacob Ciocci, and each time it happened the entire room went nuts.
The museum press release helps us to understand the inspiration which united the discarded physical with the abandoned pixeled in this work:
Projects described as DIRT STYLE appropriate graphic detritus from the Web in gestures that both celebrate and satirize digital pop culture. In extreme animalz: the movie: part 1 (2005) by U.S.-based collective Paper Rad and Pittsburgh-based artist Matt Barton gif files of animals, sourced through Google’s Image Search, are woven into a digital tapestry that is mirrored by a surrounding cluster of mechanized stuffed animals.
The artists in the Rhizome show included John F. Simon, Cory Archangel, MTAA (M. River and T. Whid Art Associates), 0100101110101101.org, Marisa Olson and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, to name only a few and with no particular weight assignments. I couldn’t find a complete list to include here, so I have to go largely by memory of the names connected to some of the images I saw tonight.
MTAA 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate) 2004 web site with flash
* the editor’s description
[lower image from mteww.com]
“don’t walk/walk” with a great shirt
Not much is ever left unembellished, or unremarked, in Williamsburg.
This one is thanks to Barry’s sharp eye.
Madame Jumel continues to entertain
view of the eastern end of Sylvan Terrace through a window of the octagon drawing room inside the Morris-Jumel Mansion
George Washington slept there.
A 1765 wooden American Paladian villa sitting in upper Manhattan on a rise which originally commanded both the Harlem Valley to the east, the Hudson River to the west and New York City some ten miles south, the Morris-Jumel Mansion (actually a country summer home) still offers its considerable pleasures to visitors. Today that means both the community immediately surrounding it and a much larger world beyond; two hundred years ago it regularly meant most of the founders of our republic.
Barry and I visited the house which for most of the nineteenth century belonged to the amazing Madame Eliza Bowen Jumel both out of curiosity about the place and for the attraction of an interesting program of eighteenth and nineteenth century English and German art song presented in the kind of space for which it was composed. It was a concert which could well have been enjoyed by this woman’s own guests in that same room over 150 years ago.
On Saturday afternoon we sat in the drawing room below Washington’s quarters, listening to songs in English by Haydn and some of his more obscure contemporaries. After an intermission we returned for two lieder cycles by a similarly-neglected Franz Lachner. Birds sang and could easily be seen playing in the trees outside the open windows decorated with red silk hangings.
The performance by the wonderful tenor Rufus Müller and Donsok Shin, his accompanist at the fortepiano, was artistry of the highest order, and would have been an enormous sensual pleasure even without the extraordinary peace and beauty of the venue. Some three dozen guests seated themselves in the octagon drawing room of Madame Jumel’s chateau, the walls covered in a painted Chinese wallpaper of flowers and birds on a deep blue ground. We sat in a magic pagoda cooled by large beech and horse chestnut trees standing in what remains of an estate which once covered 130 acres across the width of the island.
After the performance we joined the museum hosts and the two artists for refreshments upstairs in the large central hall which runs behind the front balcony. A huge portrait of the redoubtable dowager Madame Jumel was very much a part of our company.
These intelligently-programmed concerts are scheduled regularly by Music at Morris-Jumel, and we’re on the mailing list. Because of its delightfully small scale however, it’s hard to imagine how this wonderful series of chamber music performances will survive in this city of mammon. I hope I’m wrong.
NOTE: I can’t let this story go without lamenting that no one has yet written a satisfactory biography of the remarkable woman who became Madame Eliza Jumel. I wasn’t even able to find an adequate account to link to for the purpose of this post, but the National Park service offers a tease:
The stately two-story Morris-Jumel mansion, built in 1765 in a Georgian style modified to suit a country setting, was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Jumel in 1810. Though Stephen Jumel was a former Caribbean plantation owner and successful wine merchant, it was the colorful and controversial Madam Eliza Jumel who became the talk of New York City society. Eliza Jumel’s life typified the limited options of ambitious young women born into poverty in late 18th-century America. Forced into prostitution early in life as a means of survival, Eliza’s fortune turned after meeting and marrying Stephen Jumel in 1804. The prejudices of society against those with such a background forbade any acceptance of Mrs. Jumel. Wealth permitted travel, however, and the Jumels sailed to France in 1815. There, Eliza found social acceptance, mingling with aristocrats while adopting openly Bonapartist sympathies. Such convictions, voiced soon after Napoleon’s exile, proved too controversial for the new French government, and in 1816 Louis XVIII ordered Mrs. Jumel to leave France. Eliza returned to the mansion, but her marriage was soon in decline over Stephen’s discovery of her early life and the dwindling Jumel fortune. While Stephen remained in France, Eliza sold business holdings and kept the profits, pursuing social acceptance through wealth while leaving Stephen penniless and hastening his death. Fourteen months later Eliza, then 58, married 77 year-old, former Vice-President Aaron Burr. The marriage was marked by Burr’s misuse of the Jumel fortune and the two were formally divorced on September 14, 1836, the day of Burr’s death. Jumel spent the rest of her life in the mansion, dying here in 1865 at the age of 90.
a grand two-story portico protects a small second story balcony at the front of the house
the octagonal drawing room and an upstairs chamber and cabinets is almost a separate garden folly, as it is attached to the rear of the house only at the short plane of one of its narrow ends.
Mark Andreas and Bryan Zimmerman at Dam, Stuhltrager
Mark Andreas Seed Spreader hand-welded and forded steel 6′ x 6′ x 9′ [installation view away from gallery]
Williamsburg’s Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery usually manages to do things differently, whether it’s in the choice of art shown, a wonderfully low-key style of exhibition, regular mailings of really imaginative show announcements, or, most recently, an outreach project of art images posted around the city. All of this is accompanied by a shocking indifference to normal gallery pricing standards, and the infectious, but surprisingly rare, good humor and enthusiasm for art shown by the two principals, Cris and Leah.
The current shows are particularly interesting, even if they are both damnably difficult to show in photographs alone.
Mark Andreas’s Seed Spreader sculpture is almost the size of the gallery’s main space, which would be problem enough, but properly experienced the work is spectacularly kinetic (I could hardly believe Leah Stuhltrager’s account of its performance during the opening reception, and I understand there will be one more such event). Beyond that the piece might easily be described as approximately the size of the world on which it is a commentary. Hard to photograph. This is conceptual art made very material. Or, . . . the other way.
Excerpts from the gallery press release:
In Andreas� mighty sculpture, SEED SPREADER, hundreds of pounds of welded and forged steel are unpredictably triggered into frenzied motion by the decomposition of a single twig. The towering �Seed Spreader�, weighing in at over 400lbs, is wound and activated to jump up in the air, spin three foot blades and shoot Scott’s Pure Premium High Performance Grass Seeds which will grow in the gallery.
�SEED SPREADER conceptually speaks to the lack of control consumers have over food production and physically mimics techniques employed by media and politicians to draw in an audience by the use of fear and intimidation.� -M. Andreas
Bryan Zimmerman “Shadow Box Collages and Drawings” (each sold individually) [installation view]
Bryan Zimmerman‘s show, “17-Year Cicadas,” may have both a superficial and a conceptual relationship to that of Andreas, but it’s developed in a very quiet place, in a very quiet manner. His drawings, hand-colored photographs and photographic collages are shown in the rear of the gallery, where it is too dark for a camera which prefers available light. For more sensitive human eyes however this is not an impediment.
Many of the works are very small. All of them are fascinating and some are absolutely breathtaking. The subtleties of his images and his hand, especially while accompanied by a gorgeous ambient music loop (written and performed by Laura Ortman), are best understood in the gallery and not in this post. His subject is a world we have all created through the destruction of one we had found. Zimmerman shows it to us as a world we can hardly begin to understand.
Again, from the press release:
Hand-colored composite photographs collaged with animal inhabitants, insect forms, gestural architectural renderings, decorated taxidermic specimen, and small reliefs that employ feathers, fur, and fly-tying techniques comprise Bryan Zimmerman�s narrative landscapes in �17-Year Cicadas�. Evocative of cicadas that spend 17 subterrestrial years as nymphs, Zimmerman�s photographic collages evolve over several years and emerge from dark, impoverished America humming stories. Zimmerman�s �17 Year Cicadas�, immortalizes the epic tale latent in overlooked gritty rural clumps, �urban-pastoral� rambles, and remote wilderness areas. His imagery of abandoned places pieces together the remnants of the site�s imposed Hominidae history after people have packed themselves up and moved on. The locations pictured are humanized but also human-less.
The resulting landscape tableaux offer, in the artist�s words, �pictures of wilderness and human desire happening in the same place.�
[image at top from Dam, Stuhltrager]
Joyce Pensato at Sarah Bowen
one of Joyce Pensato’s Felix drawings at Sarah Bowen, 2005, charcoal on paper
How often can the same artist’s work take your breath away? Joyce Pensato does it for me every time. Yesterday the scene was Sarah Bowen‘s current show, “Medium Rare: Works on Paper.” See Barry’s post for our favorite image, but I’m including here a couple of details from various pieces to help document her genius.
(could be a magnification of any number of “great master” works)
(multiple staples evidence a serious energy not easily shut down)
North 3rd Street last night
Untitled and pretty anonymous.