NYC Art

I read yesterday that Iz the Wiz is dead. That is to say, Michael Martin, subway graffiti artist, has died.

I must admit that part of me misses the graffiti-covered subways of my youth. But growing up in New York City in the 1980s I hated graffiti. Back then I read Ayn Rand and thought Reagan was a great president -- I was ignorant in so many ways -- and I dreamed of standing at one end of the subway platform with a firehose filled with black paint, turning it on as the train pulled into the station. I'd be a superhero, the Slasher, as in "Yo, you slashed my tag," which is what you'd get yelled at you when you were caught crossing out some other graffitied name.

A friend of mine is a driver for New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority -- they don't call them motormen any more -- and from what he's told me, the removal of graffiti from the city's subways has been an extensive and ongoing process. Back when I was commuting to school some of the lines had been cleared of their external graffiti, leaving the interior to be covered with a dense network of twisting, crawling jet black lines making up the overlapped names and sentiments of a generation of teenagers; I assumed some engineer had come up with a graffiti-proof external coating and the paint just didn't stick any more. Then the scribbling disappeared from the inside, too, but then the old subway cars with their oily beige paint also disappeared, so, again, I assumed some kind of technological progress in the fight against illicit mark-making.

But no: It turns out that the anti-graffiti crusade is much more involved and far-ranging than that. My friend tells me he has to inspect every train car before he pulls out of the yard at the start of his run; any bit of graffiti found anywhere and that car is immediately pulled off the line and sent to be cleaned. At the end of every run, too, my friend has to go from car to car getting everyone off the train. Apparently in the good old days graffiti artists would hide on the train until it was pulled into the yard, giving them free and easy access to every train in the system. (Or anyway the ones parked in that particular yard; MTA has yards all over the city.) Every driver is issued a handle which they plug in to actually run the train; some drivers are fond of banging the handle next to the heads of anyone sleeping away at the end of the line. Then the final defense against subway graffiti is security cameras in every yard, so even if someone gets past the driver's inspection, or hops a fence or something, they get caught before they can even get the cap off their spraycan. Those places are locked down like a bank.

The New York Times obituary for Martin compares him and his fellow graffitists to the artists of 15th-century Florence. Of course the main difference between Leonardo, Donatello, and Brunelleschi and graffitists is the former created lasting works; and not just art that can still be seen, but art that is worth seeing. The graffiti artists never really did more than decorate otherwise drab train cars. They elevated the utilitarian to the status of entertainment, maybe -- maybe not quite that high -- but when some of them translated their work onto panels to be hung on walls, the result was disappointing at best.

The final analysis, then, is that graffiti is a dead end, both for its artists, very few of whom ever escaped -- is Basquiat an exception? Or did he fail to escape? And was he a "real" graffiti artist anyway? -- and for the art world. These days the art world remains enchanted with the idea of graffiti, but the actuality is a place like 5 Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin', a wonderland where graffiti is legal and everything is so relaxed and artistic and free, man, that last April a stairway collapsed, nearly killing artist Nicole Gagne. Maybe the owner was out spraybombing an overpass when he should've been getting the building inspected.

A little more than twenty years ago, near the tail end of my tenure in high school or maybe my early days of college, I read a book by Robert T. Bakker called The Dinosaur Heresies. It's basically only slightly deeper than a popular science book in laying out its argument, which is, essentially, that the dinosaurs probably never went entirely extinct but are actually still all around us in the form of birds. Even more egregious: All the dinosaur exhibits you'd ever seen were put together incorrectly. Paleontologists were ignoring the evidence and nailing dinosaur bone fossils together as if they were building lizards and not birds.

The book was fantastically compelling, filled with tons of evidence, extrapolation, illustrations, and anecdotes. And Bakker rhymes with rocker: Bob Bakker writes like the rock star of scientists. Altogether a great book.

After reading it I was determined to get to the Museum of Natural History to see what they'd done wrong. Armed with my new knowledge of dinosauria, I was going to check out the exhibits and laugh at the deluded constructs of an earlier age. Ha ha!

When I finally made some time to get there, I found much to my surprise that the museum's dinosaur exhibits had been closed for renovation. Not the smallest part of which was, incidentally, rebuilding all the displays and skeletons to conform to Bakker's theories. Everyone, apparently, realized he was right, and they'd been wrong, and were quickly moving to fix things. Even the American Museum of Natural History, whose iconic dinosaur skeletons had stayed pretty much the same for generations of New York City schoolchildren, were remade in the image of the new vision.

Almost overnight, heresy had become orthodoxy. Nearly a hundred years of thinking was overthrown in barely an instant.

When I think about the current state of the art world, remembering the Dinosaur Heresies gives me hope.

The economic downturn -- a phrase which has its own macro on most pundit keyboards these days -- has caused many people to predict a new era of creativity as Darwinian pressures on businesses and individuals force innovation in the struggle to survive. With art galleries closing left and right, and the remaining dealers feeling the squeeze, creative means of making money are cropping up in the art world.

Unfortunately some of the creativity is geared towards wringing even more money from artists, not gallery customers. Lyons Wier Gallery -- until recently Lyons Wier-Ortt, and when we find out what happened to Anna Ortt, we'll let you know -- Lyons Wier, for example, announced recently something owner Michael is calling "Art Bazaar", where artists can pay him $20 to sit in his gallery all weekend in front of six feet's worth of their stuff. I thought this sounded like a pretty cool deal until I realized that he's just sucking money from his (potential) work force, kind of like McDonald's charging their fry cooks for the privilege of selling their wares.

Meanwhile Ceres Gallery -- which has always struck me as a questionable space -- is bringing "back by popular demand" their Exposure "show" where artists can basically rent out a tiny part of Ceres for a week at a time between November and December for only -- only! -- $250.

And then there's Smack Mellon which is using traditional oil painters as fundraising workhorses paying a pathetic $125 per half-hour per painting, which is a less than a professional portrait painter would make for simply taking a client's call.

Smack Mellon is something of a special case since it's not a for-profit gallery, and Ceres is some sort of non-profit co-operative kind of thing; to Lyons Wier and other galleries like them we could say that, rather than creatively finding ways of exploiting artists they should perhaps simply be doing their jobs of selling better. That is, after all, how real businesses go about raising cash: By trying to sell more stuff. Smack Mellon and Ceres aren't forgiven, though; as organizations ostensibly founded for improving the lives of artists, they should be getting their funding from elsewhere, not living off the backs of those they claim to be helping. The Second Great Depression is no excuse for eating your own young.

[Links and discussion from Stephanie Jackson, Sharon Butler, and Joanne Mattera.]

Julie Evans, that fantastic artist -- I think she's my current favorite, but you know me, I change all the time -- Julie wrote to me (and everyone else on her mailing list) to let me know she had a couple of pieces in the group summer show at McKenzie Fine Art (until, good lord, August 7, 2009). I therefore made it a point to be in Chelsea for the opening on June 18.

22 artists on the walls and a good crowd: That's Valerie's place. As I went around I saw a few artists I've reviewed in the past -- Eric Heist, Ken Weaver, Julie Allen. There were a number of artists I didn't know, too. Rather than run down the list of everyone in the show, I'm going to note the works that struck me as especially interesting.

Julie Evans' work is, of course, the standout. I find, doing my usual research for writing this up, that I've seen one of the pieces before, but this one I've pictured here is new to me, I think. Hard to say with abstracts, and anyway Julie's been working in this sort of series, all similar, for a couple of years. What I liked especially about this one is the sinuous olive green line snaking its way around the spreading watercolor. She has such a sure touch that it looks as if it went down in one stroke, with edges ever so slightly sfumato, merging perfectly with the surface. Nothing she does looks painted on; it all looks organically related, whether carefully planned or allowed to run its own random course. This is the level of abstract mastery that can only come from many years of practice and experimentation, and yet it all floats so lightly there, as if it just happened.

More organic and less controlled -- more loose -- is the work of Karen Margolis. Her two small paintings (or drawings, whichever -- they straddle that line) are lovely little cloudbursts of subtle pastel color and fiddly detail, working up from tiny circles to larger ones in a cellular kaleidoscope. Smoky, cloudy, evocative, over fibrous, translucent abaca paper, altogether each painting flowers into a pleasant space.

It wouldn't be a trip to McKenzie Fine Art without some unclassifiable object presenting itself. This time there are two from Jim Dingilian. It looks like he burns a candle inside a bottle, coating the sides with soot. Then he somehow scratches into the soot to create a drawing around the inside of the glass. The result is intriguing. I can't tell how I feel about it as art. Certainly it makes a conversation piece and a curiosity, and maybe that's good enough.

The rest of the show didn't strike me as strongly as the three artists I mentioned here, but I do think the show as a whole is worth seeing.

Across the street from there is Lennon, Weinberg showing Cindy Workman's the women. (yes, the period is part of the title). Beware of shows with their own punctuation, especially if they have their own ideas about capitalization. Instead of being titled that way, they should just be called "Pretentious" and left at that. Truth in advertising, don't you know. (An aside: It says something, to me anyway, when a gallery can come up with a highfalutin title for a show like "the women." but doesn't have an employee smart enough to know how to spell Plexiglas in the work descriptions. To say nothing of including the damned frame in the media.)

And, oh, is Cindy Workman's show pretentious. Here are Cindy's own words from the gallery verbiage: "These composite images invite the viewer to perceive many roles at once. While addressing the complexity of today’s female self they invite the observer to process and examine this new model, continuing art's long tradition of shifting universal perceptions and prevailing standards." Inviting, addressing, continuing, shifting, prevailing. How wonderfully droll, considering her paintings all consist of heavy-handed juxtapositions of portrayals of women: Big boobs plus Pebbles Flintstone! Porn plus '50s-style commercial illustration! Young girl plus naked woman plus mathematical diagrams! A blowjob superimposed with a child's drawing! Lipstick lesbians and, um, the Lone Ranger!

Strip out the verbiage, ignore the ham-fisted social commentary and approach the paintings as visual objects: They're okay. They're mildly interesting to the eye. Cindy combines bold, simple compositions with solid color schemes; they're not boring. It's just unoriginal Pop, basically harmless fooling around coupled to good decorative sense. Hip wallpaper for the new bourgeoisie; thought-provoking transgression for those whose intellection involves deciding from which local cafe to buy overpriced coffee and whose idea of revolution is crossing when the sign says DONT WALK.

But maybe this summer is the time for yawnprop, propaganda that puts viewers to sleep with the laziness of its oft-repeated slogans. That would explain why Cindy's lamely obvious feminism slipped into a ground-floor gallery at the same time that Cedric Smith's lamely obvious explorations of blacks in early 20th century America showed up at Dillon Gallery.

Like Cindy, Cedric has a thing for Pop, but unlike her, he's not interested in creating a shiny, plastic, antiseptic surface; instead, like a painter of stage flats, he'd rather throw up some faux finishes to fashion trompe l'oeil antique signs. This gives the gallery the feel of an upscale Houlihan's or T.G.I. Friday's with its vintage advertising hanging around. Only the necessary art world twist differentiates these: Cedric has interposed old photos of black people into signage where they would not have been welcome originally. So we have an ad for the New York Times with a black newsboy, farm produce come-ons with cherubic black babies, and even part of an ad for Coca-Cola with a black child dressed as a jockey on a rocking horse.

Certainly Cedric is skilled in the technique department: I had to get up close to the work to see it was not, in fact, weathered, painted wood. He sure can turn canvas into old planking with the best of them. But the illusion aside, these just aren't very interesting in any way. Their only reason for existing is the conceptual underpinning, and frankly, it's so obvious and weak I can't imagine caring. Yes, black people drank Coke but weren't shown in ads. Yes, there were circuses with all-colored troupes. And? I don't believe it's a worthwhile goal for art to make viewers think, but if that's going to be your goal, you ought to at least make them really think. Or save everyone some trouble and just make one sign reading, "YOU KNOW WHAT'S BAD? RACISM!"

Anyway, I was only joking about the summer; it's not the season for yawnprop, it's the season for group shows. Although some group shows are more coherent than others. Sometimes a group show really just looks like a dealer emptying their closets. Such is the case with Low Blow: And Other Species of Confusion at Stux Gallery. Even the title lets you know there's no real connection between these works, aside from Stefan Stux still having them cluttering up his back room.

Which is not necessarily meant to insult to the art on display. Even the most doggedly random show can consist of good art. But, sadly, not this one. Most of the art in the show is dopey (Tom Sanford), weird (Benji Whalen), or both (Don Porcella). The front of the gallery is taken up by an installation that qualifies as dopey, weird, ugly, and incompetent all at once: Kristen Schiele's Burn for My Love, a pile of poorly made dollhouse-sized junk -- decorated with bits cut from magazines or photos or something -- and a wall-sized abomination possessed of not a single redeeming quality.

I usually respect Stefan's choices even if I don't actually like them; usually I can see how someone might like the art he shows, even if that someone isn't me. Not this time.

Two pieces did catch my eye in a good way, though. First was Ashley Hope, whose work I had yet to see. I'd been hoping to find some one day since seeing her work online in Jack Tilton's "School Days" show. This particular work shows her sure hand with gouache: It's not an easy medium to work in, and yet somehow she manages to work up a really large piece and keep the tones perfectly smooth across a relatively vast expanse of paper. It's remarkable. Her pigments glow, her composition is excellent, and, well, as a whole it's just mildly disturbing. Very nice.

I also liked -- but didn't totally love -- Aaron Johnson's work. It's ridiculously energetic, practically vibrating off the...whatever it's made out of. The media description says "polyester knit mesh" but that doesn't really communicate how alien the material of this piece is: Some of it looks like animation cels laid over canvas, some of it looks like acrylic paint, some of it looks like plastic. The layers don't all lay quite flat, or they don't seem to. Even up close I was kind of baffled by the whole thing. And the content, as you can see, combines Chinese and maybe some southeast Asian and Indian motifs into a phantasmagorical scene of sex and violence with a dash of Dalí. The beast doesn't quite hang together -- something just doesn't click overall -- but there are things about it I like, and certainly I've never seen anything similar.

I should probably also mention Barnaby Whitfield's pastel which is technically magnificent but which is otherwise so horrendously hideous, wacky, and nauseating I can't even bear to think about it for too long. On the plus side, it contains penises.

Finally, on my way home I saw an open door and went in. I was rewarded for my efforts with some of the most unappealing paintings I've seen in a long time, all under the name Judy Glantzman. Betty Cuningham, alas, is showing three years of Judy's work in The White Paintings, 1999-2001. Imagine for a moment that Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon's love child suffered from epilepsy and some evil nurse stuck a paintbrush in their hand at the start of each seizure. Those paintings would be about half as vile as the ones I accidentally saw.

Also, Judy has drawings up. They're bad, too.

Interestingly, while performing my usual due diligence on this review, I found I unfavorably reviewed Judy's work almost exactly three years ago. What I saw then -- which was newer than the work in this show -- was so completely different I didn't even realize it was from the same painter. Those paintings were significantly less terrible. Still very bad, though. At this rate Judy will become only the world's third worst artist in approximately 3.5 eons. Watch your back, Marlene Dumas!

Part of being a good art world journalist is having your ear to the ground to pick up on important news as it happens. Which is just one reason why I'm not a journalist, let alone a good one. My back hurts when I try to get my ear that low. Nevertheless, I do hear things, and I heard today that Becky Smith has announced that she's closing her Bellwether Gallery.

My first thought was to get on my blog and gloat because I'd never seen anything even remotely decent at Bellwether and Becky was standoffish in e-mail to me the one time I wrote to her. But then I thought that schadenfreude does not become me; I shouldn't be happy to hear of someone else's misfortune that way. It's not right.

Then I read Becky's closing statement as quoted at the Awl:

I always tried to have a distinct voice and point of view, represent as many women as possible, curate from my values and not my taste and get behind artists whose brilliance and concepts were apparent in their craft.

And I realized I couldn't let it go. I can only hope that everyone who curates from their values and not their taste goes the way of Bellwether. Artists whose concepts are apparent in their craft? May they all get jobs driving street sweepers.

By the way, I finally saw Chantal Joffe's show at Cheim & Read.

She sucks.

Does this look like a space for publicity? No it does not. But I'm going to go ahead and pass some on anyway because I couldn't resist.

I love getting weird e-mail. I don't get enough. Most of the time it's nothing all that interesting, but today I received a message from one Cody Pallo trumpeting the opening of his latest online venture. He's written to me once before, announcing something called Thought Showers, which seemed kind of okay but not terribly exciting. Who the heck is John Zorn anyhow?

Cody's latest is called Utopian Key. I urge you to hie thee hence because it really is one of the most beautiful site designs I've ever seen. It's probably resource-intensive, so only go if your computer's all buff and stuff. Usually I don't approve of Flash and, I don't know, QuickTime and whatever else, because I consider that stuff to be a burden on the real World Wide Web. But here it's just too damned lovely to complain about.

It reminds me of Joseph Squier's Urban Diary, a wonderful little art experiment from 1995. That was the kind of thing that showed how good the Web could really be, but its elegance and poetry have, to my mind, never been topped.

In this case Utopian Key is selling stuff, which is okay, I guess. The stuff being sold seems neat enough.

Not too long ago I noted that John Perreault is a chucklehead. I said I'd probably stop reading his blog soon. I haven't stopped yet, though, and today's entry taught me something interesting.

As a rule I don't try to research an artist before I go see their show. If I see some of their work online, that's okay. But I want to see art without any distractions. I don't want to know anything personal about the artist. I don't even want to know their gender. I want to know nothing. I like the idea of approaching art entirely openly.

It's not always possible. I can't see Picasso's work without knowing it's Picasso. I can't see Matisse's work anew. Recently in the comments on another post Tim asked me what I'd think about my own work if I saw it in a show (his guess was I'd hate it) -- this is a variant of the same problem. You can't really see art entirely freshly if you know anything about the artist. The more you know, the harder it is to be totally, visually honest.

I went to see Yayoi Kusama in a perfect frame of mind, then. I had absolutely no idea who she was. I had very little idea when I wrote my review, too, aside from her gender, which I had to figure out just to get the pronouns right. (As a writer, I've decided it's within my style guidelines to use "they" as an indefinite singular pronoun, as in "Joyce Kilmer is a bad poet, they write lousy verses", either to hide the gender or because I don't know it. (Joyce is a guy, by the way. Turnpike rest stop named after him. Wrote poetry about trees.) But it's an inelegant construction and not considered proper English by all editors.)

That admission, that I knew nothing about Yayoi, might be ammunition for those who think I'm a complete moron. That's fine. As I said, though, I like knowing nothing about an artist, because then I can be as honest and clear-eyed as possible about their art.

Today I read John Perreault on Yayoi and was quite surprised to learn that she is not, as I expected, under thirty years old. The mental image I'd formed of her through the show was that she was 25, a goofy Japanese kid. It turns out she's actually 80 years old and has OCD. Apparently she's been making much the same art since the days when she was fooling around with Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd.

I find this really interesting. I know you can't work backwards -- you can't look at someone's art and tell what kind of person they are (at least, I can't) -- and yet I'm still surprised when I'm reminded.

When last I left you I was standing at the locked doors of Cheim & Read contemplating the words of the Batman as quoted to me by comic artist Mike Cavallaro. I didn't just stop there at the doors; I did what I usually do when in Chelsea, which is go from opening to opening, seeing what I can see. You may recall from that essay of mine that I listed the ways in which I end up seeing bad art; you may further recall that the most common way is for me to wander from show to show. And you might wonder, then, that I'd ever wander through Chelsea, since that's when I see most of the worst art I'll ever see.

The answer is simple: I believe firmly in serendipity. More on that later.

The first opening I attended was one I aimed for. I'd seen the show listed on Chelsea Art Galleries and the itty bitty JPEG caught my eye. Here was an artist fooling around with the superhero comic book idiom. I asked a bunch of the actual real live comic artists in my studio's building if they wanted to come, but they all had paying work to do. Funny thing about comic artists: They work. Really hard. Fine artists just fuck around all day but comic artists, man, they put in the hours.

Which is why it's somewhat galling to see a fine artist borrow so shamelessly from comics and manage so little with it. All right, maybe I'm being overly obstreporous here. Certainly Gosha Ostretsov is no Roy Lichtenstein, and I mean that as a compliment. I ran images from his show, Coolville at Claire Oliver (through June 27, 2009), past my comic artist friends and none of them could pick out specific images he'd copied; the general agreement was Gosha had, at least, spent plenty of time looking at John Buscema and John Romita's work. I still couldn't shake the feeling that Gosha's figures were directly stolen, and that wherever he modified them he screwed them up; and yet I have no proof, the way we have with Lichtenstein. As Mike said to me, though, "There's so much work out there by Romita and his contemporaries that it's almost impossible to keep every Spider-Man cityscape in your head." The same could've been said, in spades, about Lichtenstein and the originals from which he stole; but someone worked it out.

I'll say this for Gosha: His room-filling installation looks fun. Although he stole from comics, and clearly expected viewers to make the connection to comics, he failed to put together a coherent sequential story; instead he's made more of a collage of comic book moments, with villains and damsels in distress (usually nude), along with quintessential 1960s cityscapes and crowd scenes. Filling the walls and ceiling it all makes for a vivid and vibrant pop culture experience. You can tell it's fine art, though, because nothing really makes sense, and Gosha is clearly using some set of personal hermetic symbols it's up to us to puzzle out. If we care, which we don't.

One thing that made me think he'd copied his figures was the handling of the nipples, of all things. Buscema and Romita and other artists working at the same time weren't big on showing nipples -- as a rule nudity wasn't allowed, although they bent the rules plenty on Roy Thomas and Buscema's Savage Sword of Conan -- and when Gosha draws nipples, each one looks as solid and chewy as a big old gumdrop. My suspicion is this is because Gosha had to fall back on his own inferior draftsmanship. Although I suppose he could be attempting a statement on the objectification of women in the comics medium.

But probably not.

Gosha further artifies the show by standing a bunch of funny-headed mannequins around the place, some with cans of spray paint. My guess is they're supposed to be the bad guys in his personal universe, and since they're wearing suits, I'd have to say they're representative of the agents of conformity or something equally profound. I imagine Gosha thinks he defeated them by finally getting a show in a ground-floor Chelsea gallery (to say nothing of a spot in the Venice Biennale). But the joke's on him: He's more of an agent of conformity in the art world than any guy in a suit and tie.

I'm not sure where I went after that; I was more aimless than usual this Thursday, and I'm pretty sure I went back and forth over the same area more than once. It was a lovely late afternoon for walking in circles. The sun doesn't set until after eight this time of year, so there was plenty of light and time to enjoy New York City's short springtime.

In fact my travels took me past what is probably the strangest activity I've seen on the streets of New York in all my 38 years in the city. I think I've seen some weird shit but it's probably not a patch on the weirdness that most people see; somehow New York stays resolutely normal when I'm around. But that Thursday I walked by a very short, nearly dwarfish woman, wearing only a g-string, painted green, climbing on some construction scaffolding. I cannot recall ever seeing anyone actively naked on the street in the city; of course I don't go to the parades in the Village or Coney Island. This wasn't a parade, however, or even a performance. From what I could gather, some photographer was doing a shoot. A weird shoot.

In addition to the green woman there was a woman painted gold and, later, a completely hot pink one. As I walked by I could smell the airbrush paint. It reminded me of summers doing t-shirts. I took some photos just so I could prove this really happened; I couldn't take too many because I honestly felt bad enough for the models. I figure, to take the kind of job where you're nude on a city street, you're either very brave or very desperate; and since I couldn't tell which, I didn't want to make them feel worse if it was the latter. Also, I thought the professional photographer who was paying for their time might be unhappy to find me to essentially stealing his work over his shoulder.

But I had my camera with me, you see, and the urge to pretend to be a photojournalist was too much.

From here I'd ordinarily continue in the order I walked, except I can't piece my trip together. I'll just go through the pile of postcards and hand-outs in the order I like them, starting with the worst. How's that?

Actually, let's start with the one I can't remember at all. I specifically remember stopping at an opening at John Connelly Presents. I clearly remember looking for a postcard or something and not finding one, and finally settling for a JCP business card. "I'll take this," I told myself, "to remember I was here, and then I'll remember the artwork." Plan failed. I remember taking the card, I have the card here, and I have no idea what I saw there. Nothing on the gallery Website rings a bell. Everything on there had closed by last Thursday; nothing new is listed until June 5. Did they rent the gallery out for something else? Playing vanity gallery to make ends meet? I have no idea.

So much for my not taking notes. I guess I should've taken a picture. Oh well. To make up for it, I'll show you a photo of this guy. I hadn't noticed him before. His cousin lives around the corner on Eleventh Avenue and is much more obvious. This guy's kind of hidden. (Some searching leads me to believe these are the work of French street artist Space Invader, though I can't find these invaders on his site.)

Back to actual art shows. The worst of the bunch -- although it's hard to nail just one down for the honor -- was Mark Flood's Chelsea Whores at Zach Feuer (until July 10, 2009). I mentioned Zach in a previous essay here, picking on him for firing a whole bunch of his artists. All I can say now, my mouth agape: Zach fired painters in favor of this crap?

Mark's actual show is hard describe because it's one of those where the artist can claim to have intended anything you might say about it. Just look at the title: It's clearly a criticism of the very world it inhabits. Since I myself was in that world when viewing it, I am part of that it criticizes. Therefore I've been effectively neutralized!

Only not really. Because the show is part of the world it's criticizing and no amount of posing on Mark's part lets him wriggle off the barbed hook that easily. You want to criticize? Then let's see some actual criticism. But no, what we get here is a threadbare variation on the anti-pose pose -- maybe it's self-consciously posing anti-pose posing as an anti-pose? Whatever it is, it's dumb as all hell. Is it funny when the gallery hand-out calls Mark "the least important German artist of the post-Word War II period"? No. Does the self-deprecating note of phrases like "conventionally provocative and predictably controversial" help? No. The fact you know it's lousy art, Mark, is not itself a critique of anything except your poor self-judgment. Your mangled photos and spray-painted signs bear witness to nothing so much as your witlessness and your complete lack of talent or originality, and saying as much in your press release isn't part of the joke, it's just pathetic and stupid.

Zach, Mark: Please stop wasting everyone's time and just burn your gallery and everything in it to the ground. Take the insurance money and move to Boca Raton, sit on the beach, smirk to yourselves, and leave us out of it.

So much for junk from the Painting Is Still Dead school. Alas, the Painting Is Still Alive school doesn't always throw up a decent alternative: Witness Kim Dorland's Super! Natural! at Freight + Volume (until June 25, 2009).

It's almost impossible for me to imagine worse painting than Kim's gloppy, disordered, inept messes. It would actually be an insult to Feeblism to call her a Feeble painter; most Feeblists, at least, don't appear to have tried all that hard. Kim's thrown down so many colors in such profusion, amidst such graceless compositions, with no quality of touch -- it simply boggles the eye. And no getting away with "that's what I intended" here: It's clear there's zero intention behind these beyond getting the paint from here to there. The entire show lacks a single redeeming moment. If I found that Kim is a blind quadriplegic who paints with a brush stuck in her ear, I'd still be surprised she could turn out such terrible paintings.

Now the worst is behind us. What's next isn't great, either, but at least it wouldn't make one weep for humanity.

I've ended up in Brenda Taylor's gallery the last couple of times I was in 511 West 25th; I'm not sure why I didn't write about what I saw there. Maybe because the gallery Website isn't current. I don't know. I remember liking what I've seen there in the past.

I found myself there again this time for Jamie Clyde's Bloodletting and Paid in Plastic -- "Two bodies of work, one night only" crowed the postcard I took with me. One night only, meaning you can't see it. Just as well, really. Jamie's got some "sexy" photos of mannequins, which I suppose is some kind of statement on the standard black & white nude photos with which our world is surfeited; and then he's got some photos of people in suits with added surrealist touches which I guess says something about the business world. Feel free to visit Jamie's Website to see the photos, but if you fall asleep and smack your head into the keyboard, well, I warned you.

Equally yawneriffic but completely different, we have Violet Hopkins' Afraid He Might Be Mistaken for a Centaur at Foxy Production (until July 24, 2009). The title is the most interesting thing about the show; the rest I experienced as the visual equivalent of "blah blah blah". It wasn't until I read the gallery verbiage -- at home -- that I learned the main thrust of the show is ignorant contempt for one's intellectual superiors.

My impressions on the walk through the show: Here we have a bunch of watery, faded-looking watercolors clearly based on photos. It's cheap photorealism, the subjects are uninteresting, and altogether no connection between the images can be discerned. Maybe it's some kind of time capsule or something, with images chosen by the artist with no real point. A couple walking, someone holding a toad, a seashell, a guy measuring an alligator's tail. One quick circuit around the room and I had no interest in going back a second time -- there's nothing visually interesting here, nothing remotely absorbing, nothing worth the paper it's painted on.

However, reading the gallery verbiage explains it all. Violet has taken images from the 1977 Voyager spacecrafts' Golden Records. I urge you to go and read NASA's page on the Voyager missons: It's a fascinating account of one of mankind's greatest accomplishments, truly one of our most amazing achievements. I am humbled to think of what humans are capable of when we really put our minds to it. If there's anything that gives me hope for humanity, that makes me think we have a chance of ever overcoming our darker impulses and finally making life wonderful for every person on this planet of ours, it's a project like the Voyager mission.

Think about it: Human beings designed, built, and deployed a spacecraft. We sent it out on a course to pass by Jupiter and Saturn, 500 million miles away and more, collect data and send it back. And not only did both Voyager probes complete their initial mission, they both turned out to be so well-designed that they've continued to operate, continued to send back data, and had their missions extended from five years to thirty years. The enormous difficulties involved in this enterprise, the mathematics and engineering, the decisions to be made, the sheer knowledge of the working universe required -- I can't even begin to comprehend the magnitude of this undertaking. It makes the most ambitious dreams of science fiction look like Lincoln Logs. Because the Voyager mission actually happened. Hell, it's still happening.

Knowing that the spacecraft would continue on their journey long after their mission was done -- that's Newton's first law of motion for ya -- the scientists and engineers at NASA thought it'd be a good idea to freight the crafts with some information, just in case some life form exists beyond our solar system and happens to find them. Not a bad idea. A rather hopeful one, I think. You might even say idealistic. So they hired Carl Sagan to head a committee to put together a collection of information from Earth: sounds, pictures, and so on. And they put it all together in a way that's as universal as they could make it, so that whatever kind of life form found the information, they could decode it and make some kind of sense of it. So they could get an idea of what we were like.

That compendium of information is called the Golden Record. Because, of course, gold is one of the most stable of all elements and thus well-suited for a permanent record.

The idea that human beings are capable of completing a project as awe-inspiringly large as this -- I don't have to hide my feelings. It almost brings me to tears.

So along comes Violet Hopkins, a know-nothing emptyhead with a flimsy little MFA from California, who probably couldn't tell Isaac Newton from Fig Newton, to point her finger and laugh at this effort. The press release effuses, "she explores the limitation of possibilities inherent in fixing an image to a concept." It's a shame Violet wasn't on the committee at NASA so she could point out this brilliant postmodern observation to them. They were clearly all so ignorant, thinking an image could represent what it actually shows. I hope, if the Record ever is found by an extraterrestrial, that they take into account "the complex layers of appropriation and change that the images have undergone over time". Layers of appropriation? What does that even mean?

The press release even goes so far as to drop this gem: "The purpose of the inscriptions is illusive: only the original producers would be able to read its symbols; an alien would certainly be stumped." Of course, it took a naif to notice what the greatest minds humanity has ever produced couldn't possibly have grasped, that their carefully designed and thoroughly researched graphics could never hope to be understood by an alien. Or, at least, by a 35-year-old nitwit transplanted from Texas. Just a brief note for Ms. Hopkins: Just because it doesn't make any sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. This is especially true if you're an ignoramus, which, apparently, you are.

My bile rises just reading the title of the piece I've reproduced here. Violet, darling, why don't you try doing something actually challenging for once, instead of incompetently copying the work of your betters, before you go casting aspersions on the evidence of their efforts? Difficult and pointless to scale this needle indeed. Better difficult and pointless than easy, brain-dead, and pointless, like your show. Give me a mountain climber any day over a worthless so-called artist proferring her stupidity as fine art. Do the world a favor, honey: Go back to Texas, find a hole with a gila monster, crawl on in, and never come out again.

All right, okay, enough with the negativity. Let's talk about some good shows.

I haven't been down West 27th Street in a long time; I haven't felt the need. I'm glad I made the trip, though, because I found Frank Magnotta's Grand Optimist at Derek Eller (until June 27, 2009).

Frank's work crept up on me. The first drawing in the show, Life Drawing, struck me as too twee by half, and not particularly well-drafted. I therefore cast an eye with slight jaundice over the rest of the show. But as I walked around once, twice, then a third time, I realized that Frank's drawings are in fact fantastic. I was pulled in by his obvious obsessive technique -- each piece is huge for a pencil drawing, some four feet wide, and carefully and subtly shaded -- but then I was captivated by Frank's playful invention and profusion of detail. In terms of subject matter, the work lives where Pop and Surrealism rub up against each other; yet somehow Frank's approach elevates each piece above both categories. In lesser hands this could devolve into kitsch or cheap collage, but Frank's insane pencilling holds it all together.

What are we to make of a piece like Century 21 where an infinite recession of Virgin Marys marches down into nothingness in front of a phantasmagoric profusion of corporate logos, dripping, festooned with moss, bristling with gun barrels and tendrils -- is that dollar sign electrified or growing a root network? -- and finally oozing a belly-up whale out of a giant digital digit?

The only question I have is, does Frank plan these drawings or just start at one corner and work his way to the other? Either way, he's a madman genius.

One last show. Remember earlier in the essay I said I firmly believe in serendipity? This is why. Following my feet I wound up walking along West 23rd thinking only to head back to the subway. I don't usually take 23rd because it's crowded and noisy and not, usually, especially interesting. But this time as I walked something on a building across the way caught my eye.

It was a sculpture of a man leaping out of a window. It's one of those reverse sculpts -- where the shape is concave instead of convex, curving inward and away from the viewer instead of outward and toward. You might have learned at a science museum that this creates a neat optical illusion such that the object appears to track your eyes as you move around it. It's very groovy. I was fascinated enough to take a couple of pictures. There I go, pretending to be a photojournalist again.

It turns out this is Falling Man by Craig Kraft Studio. But I didn't know that. All I knew is I wanted to know what the heck it was and why it was there. So I crossed the street and found the Cell Theatre which, it just so happened, was hosting an art opening in the lobby. It was Trio showing work by Alison Ives, Abby Rieser, and Shelley Rotner (until June 2, 2009).

Shelley's photos are the most noticeable things in the lobby; but on further inspection they're just photos, and you know how I feel about photos. Nothing very exciting. Alison's work likewise didn't inspire me; I think she had some photos up, also.

But Abby's work....

At first glance Abby's sculptures may look like a thousand other found art assemblages you've seen. But they're not. In person, they immediately reach out to your heart. They are soaked in wistful nostalgia, the sense of life's passing, the brief moments of love and happiness with which we're all blessed from time to time. They have an ache and an inner smile, a wisdom and a beauty. Completely devoid of irony or detachment they touch something deep inside you.

Abby Rieser's works are absolutely lovely.

I really wanted to tell her so while I was there. I paced around looking for anyone who looked authoritative enough to tell me who she was, but I couldn't find anyone. There were enough people around -- even in the theater's lovely little urban back yard -- but no one who seemed like an owner or person in charge or otherwise botherable with dopey questions like the one I had. I left without finding Abby.

What I wanted to say to her was this: You're doing something very special here. It looks easy but it's not. Hundreds of artists attempt this kind of thing, taking old bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam of people's lives, and putting them together in supposedly evocative ways. Almost all of them fail. Almost all of them somehow manage to make objects less than the sum of their parts; what I'm saying is, if you found, say, a piece of wood or a spigot knob on the curb or in the gutter all by itself, it would likely be a more interesting and entertaining object just like that than after being incorporated into one of those found art sculptures. But you, Abby: You have a gift. You've done something magical and, like all great artists, you've made it look easy. But it's not easy, not at all.

Abby, please keep making these.

And that, friends in art, is why I wander. I suffer through the fools and knaves, agonize through the Mark Floods and the Kim Dorlands, fall unconscious at the Jamie Clydes, froth at the mouth over the Violet Hopkins; I go through all of that because out there, sometimes, when I'm very lucky, I find Abby Rieser.

And then it's all okay.

John Perreault is a chucklehead. His blog, Artopia, has been in my blog list for a little while now, because I've found him entertainingly dopey; but I don't expect he'll last very long in my list because one day I'll realize I haven't read anything from him in months and might as well delete him.

But today Franklin commented on something John wrote; or, more specifically, on something John quoted from artist Gustav Metzger. It seems some anonymous artist somewhere is calling for a three-year art strike -- artists unite and stop selling your work! I suppose that would be great if only most artists were actually selling their work. Personally I'd be out exactly fifty bucks if I'd been on strike for the past three years.

Looking back, though, on Gustav Metzger's proposed art strike years -- 1977 through 1980 -- I wish we could retroactively strike them. Think of all the Richard Prince we would've been saved from! Or maybe if we had suspended the 1980s entirely: No Koons, no Turner Prizes. Early '90s: No Currin! No Hirst!

Damn, this is sounding better and better!

I'm actually not sure I should waste time discussing John and his obvious chuckleheadedness -- he writes like a an acid casualty, with the kind of elderly faux profundity that makes me wonder what he's done of any merit -- and yet, since John asks what is at risk, should artists actually go on strike, which they in no way ever will, and goes on point by point, I have an urge to go through them one at a time.

"So what is at risk?" asks John, and continues:

One: It is not certain that the public will really miss contemporary art. I think it's absolutely certain that the public will totally fail to miss contemporary art. If a single person outside the few who wander into Chelsea or Williamsburg on Thursday nights even notices that contemporary art isn't being shown, I'm certain they'll think no more about it. Contemporary art is that completely disconnected from the lives of non-art world people.

Two: It is not certain that artists will really miss making art. As many artists there are who whine that it's what they must do, what their deep souls compel them to do, that they absolutely have to create or die -- that's how many artists I believe are full of shit. The same urges to "create" "art" can just as easily be employed in compulsive masturbation and doodling on napkins.

Three: It is not certain that the collapse of the art system will result in the demise of the collector and the collector mentality; tulip bulbs or light bulbs or clown noses may become the next new collectible. Unlike today, where only fine contemporary art is collected. Whole industries are not built upon collecting, say, ceramic Christmas villages. And thank god for that because lord knows that kind of world wouldn't be worth living in.

Four: It is not certain that "artists" will find other things to do to keep themselves out of trouble. Sexual shenanigans, alcohol abuse, and dangerous drug use could escalate. On the other hand, service at Starbucks will be faster, what with all the new baristas.

Five: It is not certain that preparators, receptionists, art-handlers, framers, and all the cooks and waiters working in nearby restaurants and lunchrooms will ever again find gainful employment. I'm guessing the gallerinas will be hit most hard by the artist strike; who else but the art galleries would hire so many slim-hipped gamines?

Six: It is equally uncertain that critics, curators, and the like will be able to find other ways of making a living. It is certain that parents will no longer think of art as a safe career for their clean-cut spawn and will therefore force them to go to law school or study engineering. This reminds me of a quote from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. He wrote once that when young people ask if they should go into cartooning, he advises them to become dry cleaners instead. Because he doesn't need the cartooning competition, but he'd love to pay less for his dry cleaning. Also: Does anyone actually think of art as a safe career?

I'd like to think that John is writing in a satirical vein. But nothing I've read from him so far leads me to believe he's capable of that level of subtlety. I can't imagine that he honestly believes anyone will strike; but I also can't imagine that he doesn't think it would be a good thing if they did. I can certainly state, however, that three years without John Perrault's art writing would be an unequivocal good.