about terror far more real than that imagined by hysterical post-9/11 SubTalk warnings
[altered poster sighted on the C train this afternoon]
Category: NYC
morning glory thorns
untitled (razor wire) 2006
These morning glories, seen on a fence in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, on a late afternoon earlier this month, seemed totally indifferent to the manufactured thorns installed at the top.
this is not a gay film not a a gay film a gay film
I was shocked I was
I went to a presentation by the artists and book signing at Aperture on Thursday night, and this is one of many duplicate posters I found clipped up and down parking signs and light posts along West 27th Street when I left to go home. This particular block is all about commercial businesses and galleries during the day and straight clubs late at night.
The sexy bills are part of a marketing blitz for “A Guide To Recogizing Your Saints” which, regardless of its merits or demerits, is apparently not actually a “gay film”.
the American Airlines homo scare: even worse than reported
UPDATE ON THE AMERICAN AIRLINES INCIDENT:
the airline’s straights-only security rules don’t fly
I have now heard from our friend David Leisner, who was quoted in the The New Yorker story I wrote about on Thursday evening. David was one half of the couple which witnessed the threats delivered to two other passengers seated in front of them, a homosexual couple, by (successively) the flight attendent, the purser and the captain of an American Airlines flight en route from Paris to New York. Both he and his partner Ralph Jackson were quoted in the magazine, but David has added some perspective and one damning fact which makes the airline’s confrontation even more outrageous than initially reported.
David writes, in part:
You can assure anyone that questions the degree of affection these guys were showing that it was very innocent – hand-holding, resting one’s head on the other’s shoulder and repeated kissing (but not French kissing!). Nothing disturbing about it at all, unless it had been a straight couple :-).
Also, the New Yorker writer got the punchline wrong: what the captain said to one of the couple was that he would divert the plane not if the arguing continued, but if he heard any more reports of such behavior (kissing). [my italics – JAW] It made an increasingly weird situation even more surreal and disturbing.
[image from pedalcarzone]
the old Vinegar Hill
untitled (asphalt siding) 2006
I’m pretty fond of the siding this nineteenth-century house in Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill aquired some time in the next.
the antidote to 9/11 24/7
I wasn’t going to say anything more today about the fifth installment of our annual orgy of mourning and revenge, the anniversary of September 11. But things just got out of hand once we walked into Pierogi this evening and now I can’t help myself.
For some this sacred holiday was all about a service held around a small temporary wading pool installed downtown at the bottom of a very big hole (by now the flower-filled tank of water has probably been drained and its parts tossed into some recycling bin), but some of us decided we had to be around other, more thoughtful New Yorkers on the evening of the day which just won’t shut up, the drubbing from which most of our countrymen seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.
Barry and I decided to go to Brooklyn, and specifically Williamsburg, always a reasonable choice in stressful times.
Tonight Pierogi Williamsburg threw an opening party for “Matt Marello and Matt Freedman, Five Years After” and it would have been a smash even without the presence of most of Brooklyn and Downtown Manhattan’s art world working aristocracy and creative yeomanry. Matt Marello was in Gallery 1. From the press release:
Matt Marello’s “1968/2001” is an extensive multimedia presentation based on the phenomenon of apophenia [the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, according to the press release]. A few years ago, while digesting the events of 9/11, Marello began to notice an odd synchronicity between the destruction of the World Trade Center and Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” His further explorations led him into a strange and murky world, linking together such diverse elements as the moon, apes, 9/11, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the historically pivotal years 1968 and 2001.
Matt Morello Lenticulars: Ground Zero/Planet of the Apes/Apollo 8 Astronauts/Escape from the Planet of the Apes 2006
2 Lenticular prints 20″ x 63″ [large detail of installation]
Matt Morello Bone (WTC)/Plane (2001: Space Odyssey) 2006 large format ink-jet print 60″ x 158″ [large detail of installation]
Matt Freedman’s “Twin Twin II” in Gallery 2 was a wonderfully silly and welcome magical antidote to the baneful effects of our self-inflicted twenty-first century affliction: 9/11 24/7. From the artist:
I kept coming around to the notion that the images of the towers were sort of recurring waking dreams, and that collecting them should be a continuing process of perception and manipulation. What I keep looking for in all the material I am using is something uncanny–either in the found objects themselves, or in the nature of the interventions I make–that leaves a lingering sense of unresolved discomfort in the mind of the viewer. The overriding and consciously dumb idea behind the work is that whatever else the towers are, they are definitely not gone from our lives, and they never will be. (Freedman, 2006)
Thumbnails of only a very few of the twinned objects seen tonight in Freedman’s ongoing project:
Presto! Exorcism complete.
polished Gehry
The old Chelsea confronts the new: The faded remainder of a painted twentieth-century advertising sign for a popular auto body polish faces the sparkling highlights of a nearly-completed Frank Gehry building on the West Side Highway. The top of the painted brick facade of the Anton Kern Gallery fills the bottom of the picture frame.
clowns commuting to Brooklyn
rushing the turnstiles
happy together
favorite hunky clown
just ordinary commuters
DIY nose jobs
but hard to miss
I knew pretty much what to expect. I was told a horde of clowns would be descending onto a subway platform in Union Square at 5 o’clock this afternoon where they would squeeze into the L train heading into Williamsburg. I thought, “clowns”! How wonderful! And then I saw the pictures of pie fights on the website, and I thought of traditional scenes of eratic behavior, sadism including lots of let’s-pretend violence and the the cutting-up-little-babies illusions. Real clowns don’t come conveniently packaged for innocent amusement, and they never did. But that’s precisely the secret of their universal and historic appeal. I went with this particular, merely mildly-scary bunch only to the Bedford Street stop and then a few blocks further down the street.
They were on their way to the Brick Theater, where the NY Clown Theatre Festival will be headquartered for the next three weeks. If New York is lucky these clowns won’t confine themselves to the building at 575 Metropolitan Avenue.
We’re told this is New York’s first clown festival in twenty years. That probably goes a long way toward explaining why some things have been so messed up around here in the last couple of decades: Some folks need a little constructive provocation to stay in line, and New Yorkers could certainly use a regular extra-strength antidote for the common humbug.
But I’ll own up to my own cowardice this evening: I never believed the baby stuff, but I’m still afraid of pie fights.
brick wannabes on 9th Avenue
(nice try, but I wasn’t fooled for a moment)
The Bronx takes off
David Schillinglaw Box Fresh, Get up your antenna and Hell Bent, all 2006, all mixed media on paper and all 17″ x 11″ [installation view]
Graham Gillmore Cattle Bruisers and Ships paint on paper, 36″ x 24″ and See if I Care ink on paper 36″ x 24″ [installation view]
Robin Footitt Boston MA 2006 acrylic collage on paper 11.5″ x 7.5″ [installation view]
John Wells Untitled
Support your Local!
Now that I may have gotten the attention of some Brits I have to explain that my exhortation is not about patronizing your neighborhood tavern (and definitely not about sheriffs) I’m talking about encouraging local galleries, wherever they may be located, and wherever an art public may actually be located. The continuing pressures of the real estate market on an island city are forcing many of our smaller, more adventureous gallerists to move further and further from the heart of Manhattan, and now even away from the more central areas of Brooklyn. Of course those same pressures had already forced the artists themselves, and many of the curators who love their work, into boroughs which up to now have seen very little traffic from the art-curious, wherever these folk may live and work.
Over the last few years, The Bronx, and specifically the neighborhood located just across the Harlem River (and easily accessed) from Manhattan has become the site of one of these emerging, increasingly significant arts communities. Right now there are a handfull of galleries in the area around Bruckner Boulevard and a line running roughly in a trajectory above 2nd Avenue. They are definitely worth a visit, and there’s even a comfortable tavern to reward your initiative.
The images above these paragraphs are from a group show of works on paper at Hagan Saint Philip. The complete list of the artists represented are Gene deBartolo, Robin Footitt, Graham Gillmore, Tim McDonnell, Sophia Nilsson, Wanda Ortiz, Joe Ovelman, Max Razdow, David Shillinglaw, John Wells.
Before Barry and I ended up at Bruckner’s last Saturday we visited Haven Arts, where we are definitely looking forward to this show. We also got a preview of the show at Ironworks while it was still being hung for an opening that night. The images below are a hint of what you can expect from “Comics and Sequentials.” Some of the other artists in the show are Juan Doe, Emily Blair, Wanda Ortiz, and Nathan Schreiber, but I don’t have a complete list.
Some of these spaces either do not yet have a web site or else what there is may be little more than a domain. One of the things about this South Bronx phenomenon is the relatively casual or bootstrap nature of the operation of these galleries, but this is no gauge of their earnestness or their worth. In spite of the problems a small budget may create for gallerists, curators and artists, the fact that their structures are sometimes fairly skeletal just makes me more interested in getting up there more often, since the work can be very good – and I’ll probably see much of it there first.
Nate Anspaugh [view of detail of installation]
Kevin Golden Solo [installation view]