NYC Art

Into the Woods

2008-07-02T11:33:00.001-04:00

The invitations have been coming on strong lately for some reason. The summer is supposed to be the art world's off season, but suddenly everyone's found my e-mail address; maybe it's because of all the group shows, which means more artists, which means more people trying to get obscure bloggers to write about them. I've tried to keep up with the invitations but I missed a couple of shows, alas. Then again, one of them was from a photographer, and he said he liked my blog, which leads me to believe he's never read it, because anyone who's read my blog knows how I feel about photography. On the other hand, his photos were of naked women, so maybe he does read my blog.

Not only are there invitations coming in but I'm also finding shows to go to. This time, I picked Elisabeth Condon because she commented on Stephanie's blog and her work looked interesting online. Her paintings are part of a group show, Into the Woods, at the Arsenal in Central Park. Elisabeth didn't publicize her show or ask anyone to go; I just followed along from her comment to find her site, was intrigued, and decided to go.

Elisabeth Condon, Woods, 2007, oil and acrylic on linen, 24x24 inches

Unfortunately I found Elisabeth's works, at least the ones in this show, disappointing. It looks like she starts with a wonderfully abstract background, all full of spreading paint and swirls and drips and pours, which she then takes as inspiration to draw over. The trouble is her draftsmanship isn't that great. The physical action of the paint underneath her drawings is much, much stronger and more exciting than he more labored, obvious work above it. An unrelated series of paintings on her Website is titled "Seuss Dynasty," but Elisabeth lacks the lightness of touch of either Ted Geisel or Chinese porcelain. Reduced down to a JPEG, or maybe glanced at from across the room, her overpaintings appear deft enough, but standing right in front I found them clumsy.

Kurt Lightner, Settle, 2007, acrylic, collage on panel, 55.5x72 inches

Only a few other works jumped out at me in this show. There were a couple of really great brass eagles, but they weren't part of the show, just part of the old Arsenal building. Kurt Lightner's paintings caught me eye; they're not as good as I want them to be, and they play around the same ground as Elisabeth's, but they come together better. Kurt apparently paints on Mylar and collages the pieces together, and then paints over them. The effect is good and his sense of composition is pretty good.

The best work in the show, however, belongs to Kim Krans. I couldn't find a Website for her or any images online of the works in this show, which is a shame, because it's really excellent. If I just list her materials here, you might be horrified -- ink, gouache, spray paint, glitter, fur and glue on paper -- but she puts all of it together beautifully. In fact these three small works are mostly gouache on black paper, where the paint contrasting with the ground is meant to evoke the bark of a tree stump. The other ingredients are just, we might say, supporting players. Each piece is small, maybe 11 by 14 inches, maybe 14 by 18 -- I'm not a great judge of size -- but lyrical in its abstraction from reality. Each one isn't so much abstract, actually, as distilled; the essence of tree stump, with all the years of treeness, and all the sense of decay and renewal wrapped up in that. While all the other pieces in the show seemed to be there because they incidentally involved trees -- the show is called Into the Woods, after all -- only Kim's pieces really address the idea of trees, the importance of trees, and the impermanence of those seemingly most permanent of plants.

I wanted to talk to Elisabeth, to let her know I'd come to her show, and to Kim, to whisper that I liked her paintings best, but none of the women handing out drinks could tell me who was who, or even where the bathroom was. I didn't feel up to introducing myself to random people, so instead I left, and in honor of Central Park and the trees, took the long walk along 59th Street back to the bus station.

Ling Chang

2008-06-26T14:37:00.002-04:00

I love Ling Chang. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, and probably soon. I can't explain it. It probably can't be explained. Certainly I don't know her well enough to say something like that, but there I am, saying it. And it means this won't be an unbiased review of her show.

Of course none of my reviews are unbiased. I don't think unbiased reviews really exist. But in Ling's case it's going to be more unbiased than usual, I guess. I've noticed something interesting about me, though: People I like make art I like, and if I like the art, I like the artist. And the relationship is proportional: The more I like the artist, the more I like their art, and if I really don't like the art, whew, I can't stand the person who made it. This has even been tested sort of independently: There have been people I've met and sort of liked, then saw their art and didn't think it was very good; and then, as I got to know them, I found I didn't really like them at all. And then there are people like Tracy Helgeson, who I totally and unreservedly love, whose art I didn't really get to see for a long time, and when I did, it turned out I love it just as much as I love her.

There are a lot of possible explanations for this. Maybe I'm just incapable of separating my opinion of art from my opinions of people, and I fool myself into liking the art of people I like. Maybe there's some connection between the kind of art one makes and the kind of person one is. Maybe I'm an idiot.

I tend to think it's a combination of these.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that I love Ling and so you have to think of that while you read this. Also, because we swapped e-mail while she was working on the pieces in the show, I have an idea of what she was getting at and what she wanted to include but couldn't because she didn't get everything done in time.

Ling Chang, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, installation view, 2008.

Ling's show is called The Curious Lore of Precious Stones and it's at Realform Project Space in Williamsburg, as of this writing, for the next few days. Realform Project Space, it turns out, is a storefront window, one of those old-fashioned walk-in glass boxes, fronting a hallway with a number of hip, groovy stores opening off of it. This was my first trip to Williamsburg, I'm pretty sure, and I can see what people like about it now that the actual artists have moved out and the wealthy would-be bohemians have moved in. Ling wryly noted that the average age on North Fifth Street outside was about 25. The whole place is overrun with tits and tattoos.

The show consists of a fanciful collection of rocks of all kinds. Strange crystalline amalgamations rub shoulders with delicate fans of minerals. Polyhedra loll around spiky stars. Colored layers ripple off into dark crevices. And everything is arranged almost as you'd see it in a museum exhibit or maybe a New Age crystal shop. But if you look more closely, you see that the stones aren't ones you've seen before. In fact -- they're not even stones. They're...something else.

It turns out the entire show is made of Crayola Model Magic, a light, airy foam-like modeling material, in some cases painted, other times left white. Ling really likes this stuff. I think it helps her to get her ideas across without being so fussy; Model Magic can't really be molded in extreme detail, so it's something of an impressionist medium. And the impression is excellent. Ling's faux finishes are good enough to hold up under anything but the most careful scrutiny. Encased in Realform's glass cube, it's easy to mistake the show for an actual sales display.

Ling Chang, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, installation view, 2008.

I asked Ling why she made things that were so realistic. I didn't mean to ask what was the point of doing something realistic, exactly. It was more like, what was her motivation to make fake rocks that look so much like real ones? I meant the question in a positive way -- "What's on your mind?" -- and not in a negative way -- "Why did you waste your time?" I think Ling took it as the latter, though, when she answered, "I guess when I was making them, I didn't think they were all that realistic. In fact I was worried that they'd look way too childish and crude."

Ling Chang, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, installation view, 2008.

They don't. In the short time of the opening a number of people -- some of whom just wandered in off the street -- asked Ling about the piece and were surprised to find that the stones were entirely imaginary and hand-made. The book -- the only real item on the shelves -- being swallowed up by the Model Magic is a clue, but not one most viewers picked up on, apparently.

My lovely wife Dawn, her new earrings, and me. Also, a lot of sweat from summer in New York.

My wife Dawn and I went to the opening together, which isn't normal for us, but then she doesn't usually know the artists I'm going to see. Dawn had met Ling when we were both at the School of Visual Arts and I think Dawn likes Ling almost as much as I do, so we went the extra step of getting someone to watch the kids while we trucked out to Brooklyn. While I was talking artspeak with some of the other people hanging around -- Lucy Gans and Les Fletcher, and David Gibson, the curator of Realform -- Dawn wandered off into the hip, groovy interior of the space and came back with a pair of earrings. Talk about your weird nights: My wife coming to an opening with me? And buying jewelry? If Dawn had told me she was leaving me for Jesse L. Martin I'd have been less surprised.

I know this review is going up late and thus really close to the closing of Ling's show, but you could do so much worse than rush out to Williamsburg to see this. The coffee shop just to the left of Realform makes really good frappuccino, too. Just in case you don't love Ling as much as I do.

Personal and Critical Crisis

2008-05-02T09:58:00.000-04:00

I'm having something of a personal crisis here. Just like last year, this crisis rather unfortunately coincides with the high point of the New York art scene, so when I should be out at openings as often as possible, and writing up a storm, instead I find I have a stack -- a stack, I tell you! -- of cards from shows I've been to but haven't written about, a blank calendar for all of April -- I haven't been to a show in months -- and an empty blog.

I'm not really part of the art world, except maybe as the most peripheral of spectators, but I do have one thing in common with most of the people in the art world: I have a day job. A lot of them don't talk about it because talking about it makes them look less successful -- if you can afford your Chelsea rent because you're, I don't know, a network technician or a real estate broker or something, and not because you're actually selling any art, then potential customers are going to take you a lot less seriously. I assume. So you simply don't let anyone know you've got a day job and you pretend you're staying in business because you're savvy and tenacious. This is called "keeping up appearances."

But I'll admit it to you because we're such good friends: I have a day job. Technically I retired from being a computer programmer two and a half years ago, but here I'm using "retired" in a very specific way: Two and a half years ago I officially told my wife and any business acquaintances who happened to be within earshot that I was no longer actively looking for work. However, I left myself the loophole: If work came looking for me, I wouldn't necessarily turn it away. I figured it was a safe bet, since who would actually want me working for them?

Well, for some reason, work did find me and has continued to find me. Not a lot of work, mind you -- I'm still making less than I was before I retired -- but enough work to keep me occupied here and there and prevent me from having nothing to do. Enough work to seriously cut into my art time, anyway. I'd turn it down if I could, but I'm incapable of saying no to anyone, and at one point work arrived when we had precisely 81 cents in the bank, so there you go.

It's not all about the work, though. There's something bothering me, something nagging at me. I'm filled with doubts. I can't tell if my art's any good, I can't tell if it's worth pursuing, I feel terrible about everything. Life sucks.

Recently Eric Gelber, commenting on a post on Ed's blog quoted Harold Rosenberg, one of the most influential art critics of the 20th century, and I realized I'd read nothing this guy wrote. I haven't read any Clement Greenberg, either. They're on my list. Something about the quotes struck me, though, so I ran right out to the library and took out Art on the Edge and The De-Definition of Art and started reading. I finished the former and am about halfway through the latter; what's blown me away about these books is good old Harry is writing things I could've written myself. In fact at one point he even does write something I wrote myself (although I'd be hard pressed to tell you where). Only these essays are from one entire lifetime ago -- mine. Most of these were published before my third birthday.

What bothers me most about this is it tells me the art world is standing still. Dead still. It hasn't changed in forty years. It's still playing out the same dumbshow from the late 1960s. Rosenberg writes about all the problems and they're in full flower then: The collapse of visual art into word-based philosophy; the collusions of the dealer-collector-curator complex; the ridiculous auctions and their distortion of the art world; the phony posing of the avant-garde; the shift towards art degrees and a professional class of artists playing out the old clichés. It's all in place already before my life even begins.

This isn't a crisis. It's so far beyond crisis I don't even know what to call it.

Cathleen Cueto and Long Time No See!

2008-02-18T21:59:00.005-05:00

I am a bad person. I've said it before but I don't remember if I've said it here; anyway, there it is. I'm a bad person. I'm a lousy husband, an incompetent father, an unworthy son, a faithless friend, a mediocre artist and at best a middling writer. And, worst of all, I haven't posted a word here in, according to Technorati, 84 days.

For this I have reasons but not excuses. A lot's come up in the last 76 days including a drop into the deepest crevasse of despair and the intrusion into my life of a PC capable of running Crysis along with a copy of Crysis, which enjoyable waste of time has eaten a fair amount of my life so far. In fact I'm seeing the game when I close my eyes, which is a good sign of having played it way too much.

In the meantime I've gone to a few art events and totally failed to write about them. What can I say? I've let you down. I'm a bad person. I can't make it up to you -- I can't make it up to anyone, ever, that's part of being a bad person -- but I can try and make amends like the friends of Bill W. say. Let's start now.

The first event I didn't get around to telling you about was the group show Another Last Year held by Ad Nauseam Lyceum. I was invited by Cathleen Cueto, with whom I became friends at the School of Visual Arts. I hope she didn't invite me because she hoped I'd bring lots of visitors to the show, because it's over now and you can't see it. Hell, I barely saw it, because the opening was so crowded it was almost impossible to see the art. I've never been asked to move over so someone could see something behind me at any show, but it happened here.

From what I could see it was a groovy show. Cathleen had a single elbow in it. She had made a cast of her own elbow and from that a plaster sculpture which she set on a square mirror atop a waist-high plinth. The elbow was bent and only showed from a few inches up her arm, so if you looked at it quickly you might think it was a knee or something more private, but an elbow it was.

Aside from Cathleen's, I only got a good look at a couple of other pieces. Due to the show's being nearly completely undocumented online, I can't figure out who made them or what they were. I'm pretty sure Brent Birnbaum had a really excitingly colorful wall/ceiling hanging thing with beads and sequins and gewgaws all over it. I wanted to get a better look at it but didn't. Matt Broach had a neat-looking animation up, something dark and landscapey going by a car window, maybe. Hard to tell. And there was another video whose creator I wanted to talk to, because they'd made a video of one painting being painted, followed by another painted on top, followed by another, over and over, until the canvas is painted white and the loop begins again. All this was projected onto white canvas, so it was like a moving painting, and it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Mystery of Picasso. And I think I met Brent's girlfriend, who has a tattoo of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting covering her upper arm, which is very cool.

I'd only gone for Cathleen and her elbow and would've left pretty quickly but then a bunch of other people I knew from SVA showed up and we stood around talking and I realized I was an idiot for not inviting them to the opening of the Blogger Show. If you'll permit me to name-drop, I met up with Steve DeFrank, Josh Harris and his girlfriend Cameron, Marcos Chin and his boyfriend Mikee, and Pooneh Maghazehe. I'd forgotten how much I love all these people -- is it love if you can forget it? -- and I plan to keep closer in touch with them from now on.

Next up: An art movie!

November 16, 2007

2007-11-26T16:04:00.000-05:00

I like being invited places. I'm still unknown enough as an art critic -- I'm still an amateur and all -- that I get excited when someone goes to the trouble to invite me to their show and I always try to go. It doesn't always work out, but I do always try. Jerry, Roberta, Peter, Charlie, I'm sure they get buried by so many invitations they just drop them right in the trash (certainly they've never shown up for anything I've invited them to), but hardly anyone asks me anywhere.

I think this is because I don't actually exist for other people unless I'm physically in the same room with them. As soon as I leave the room, I'm convinced, people forget I exist -- I vanish from their minds just as I vanish from their sight. I have no sticking power. That's what I think.

But contradicting that I was invited to Brooklyn to the Like the Spice Gallery by its director, Marisa Sage. Apparently David Gibson of Realform suggested that she invite me. Which I found really strange because I don't personally know David Gibson, meaning that for him, at least, I seem to exist even though I'm not in the same room with him. Cognitive dissonance!

So despite the fact that I rarely go to Brooklyn for any purpose, I slated Like the Spice for a visit. Also -- and this is important -- my wife's started working late on Thursdays so I was looking for an opening on another weeknight, and Like the Spice's opening was on a Friday. Thus Jason Bryant's show fit pefectly.

Jason Bryant, 2007.

Jason's show immediately presents itself as smooth. The paintings are smooth, the content is smooth, all the textures are smooth. Dirt, grit, brushstrokes, hairs, all hint of texture has been removed to the best of the artist's abilities. Even the subjects together form a smooth, regular series: People, from the bottom of their noses to just below their chests, over and over. Because everything is so uniform, so unvaried, the details that stand out are -- probably not purposely -- the aberrations. A few of the paintings show lapses of technique -- misformed lips, maybe, or an oddly rendered passage of flesh -- which are slight but glaring in this context. And the smaller oval black and white works -- listed as colored pencil but I'm certain I saw some gouache or ink in there -- are really striking because they are the least polished, most lively pieces. And Jason's handling of his media in them is much more assured than in the larger oil works, which struck me as somewhat immature.

I see echoes in his paintings, too, of both Eric White and James Rieck. Maybe not coincidentally the gallery has a Rieck in the basement. What Jason shares with James is a coolness, a distance from their subjects; also their processes are similar. Both start with tiny JPEGs they've found on the Web, making their final paintings partly photo-based and partly filled in by imagination -- they're realistic extrapolations. And both are interested in closely cropped images of people. James is more accomplished technically but Jason is clearly capable of working his way up there, if he keeps practicing.

A good question is whether or not he should. We have realists aplenty, especially vaguely ironic realists. Do we really need another one? I'd rather see Jason embrace the mistakes, the aberrations, and take the smoothness out of his style. I'd rather see him, instead, work with texture. Maybe make a mess. Play some more. I think there's playfulness in there -- you don't paint an Andy Warhol Rolling Stones jacket without some sense of fun -- but it's stymied by an over-literal reliance on smoothness and the boundaries of the chosen composition. If Jason can break out, make a connection with his subjects, maybe, and have some fun, his work could be, I think, really extraordinary.

Anna Druzcz, 2007.

Any gallery looking to move product has a back room where they keep other work they're interested in selling. In the case of Like the Spice, their back room is their basement. Down there, in addition to the Rieck painting, I found a few works by one Anna Druzcz, and she blew me away.

I've gone on record any number of times claiming to dislike photography, or anyway saying I don't consider it art. I still don't. But Anna works within the realm of photography in a way I find really fantastic. Her works are hung inside welded steel frames and appear to be printed on metal themselves. In fact Marisa assured me they're C-prints made with a suspension with a high silver content, so they look like they're emulsions laid down on steel. The prints are made from digital composites of photos into poetic, phantasmagoric works of surprising power. In a sense these are just photo collages; but Anna has put the images through her own unique eye and created images that hang together as shattered wholes -- as if a landscape has been smashed and the pieces put back together and then photographed. Unlike most photographs, which tell us about the world, or which clearly relate to our world in some way, Anna's works create their own world.

Upstairs the regular old world continued on. Marisa and her assistant kept the music going, playing Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson. I talked with Jason for a few minutes and buttonholed Marisa for a while. I told her that sage isn't a spice, it's an herb, which a lot of people tell her, she said; she also noted that Like the Herb doesn't sound very good. She invited me to some more events in Brooklyn, trying to sell me on coming out there more often. It just might work.

Unless, of course, I don't actually exist.

The Blogger Show: Opening

2007-11-06T15:26:00.000-05:00

What can I say about the opening of the Blogger Show? As Stephanie said to me a few days before, it was an awful lot of trouble to go to just to hang a bunch of useless objects on a wall and throw a party about it. But it was a good party! Or anyway what I consider a good party, which is probably boring as all hell for almost everybody. Basically it amounted to meeting a bunch of people who, by the selection criteria of the show -- artists who write, or writers who art, or however you want to express it -- are more expressive, articulate, and conversational than most. Which made it perfect for me: I could finally meet some people I'd only known online; I could introduce people to each other who had never met; and I could stand around and listen to myself talk for three hours.

I would list all the people I saw there but it'd pretty much be the list of participants, so you might just as well go read that. Instead I'll tell you about my disappointments at the people who didn't show up. I wish Charlie Finch had been there. I hoped Jerry Saltz would show, although I didn't expect him (I personally sent him a hand-painted postcard inviting him); and I really thought Ed Winkleman would be there. Another disappointment was seeing Christopher Reiger there but not getting to talk to him. Somehow by the time I remembered I wanted to snag him, I couldn't find him.

The opening was packed but almost entirely by people who were in the show or somehow related to them, like my wife (who you can see sitting Sphinxlike next to the door in the opening shot of James Kalm's video) or Tracy's husband Doug. Very few people wandered in off the street, with the striking exception of the woman in the paint-stained bathrobe. Oh, and Mark.

Mark was standing outside the gallery when I got back from getting some air.

"I'm Mark," he said, extending a hand.

I shook it and asked, "Which one?" I assumed he was one of the Marks in the show.

"Just Mark."

"Do you have a last name?"

"Yes, I do. Are you going to tell me your name?"

"I'm Chris. Chris Rywalt."

"I'm Mark [some name I'd never heard and can't remember]."

Aha. Not Marc Snyder or Mark Creegan, then. That explains his cagey attitude.

Mark was very interested in people's clothes, although he claimed to be a freelance journalist. Nancy Baker came up and introduced herself to him and he complimented her coat.

"Cashmere," she said.

"I'm a terrible dresser," I interjected. "Maybe I should have you dress me."

"Burlington Coat Factory, baby!" Nancy enthused.

Mark pointed at her with a flourish. "Two hundred dollars!"

"Exactly! One ninety-nine!"

"And I bet it was originally five hundred!"

"I wouldn't know."

Meanwhile Mark was rubbing my shirt fabric between his fingers. "This shirt is very nice," he said.

Luckily we were interrupted -- conversations at art openings rarely end properly, they just get suspended indefinitely -- and Mark moved on to discuss other people's clothing.

Danny Scheffer was at the opening. He blew me away by being the only really honest and thoughtful person that I spoke with. Under my painting he leaned in and said to me, "So what made you choose this piece? Because you know it's not your strongest work."

Which it isn't, I suppose. But given the pieces I had to choose from -- this was a small works show and my best work recently has been large -- this one struck me as a good representative. Also, it's a sentimental favorite, since it's based on a drawing I like so much I've drawn it three or four times.

The opening was over very quickly, or felt that way. Afterward a number of us repaired to Two Boots for pizza, generously paid for by Tracy. If I'd known beforehand she was buying, I'd've suggested sushi.

I'm the Next Charlie Finch

2007-11-06T10:39:00.000-05:00

When other people read what Charlie Finch wrote about art bloggers they were very happy to express outrage -- our own controversy, compared to which a tempest in a teapot is an extinction-level event. But I steadfastly refused to say anything bad about Charlie because I could see how easy it is for an art writer to end up in a perpetually defensive, angry, sarcastic crouch. I've only been writing for two years or so to an audience of about fifteen people and already I've had a couple of people angry at me in a way I consider unreasonable.

I didn't start writing this blog to be nasty to people. I wrote it, and I continue to write it, for one main purpose, and that is to keep myself going to see art. It's easy to walk by a work of art and dismiss it; it's much harder to stop and explain what you don't like about it. Developing and expanding your opinions is a journey of self-discovery, of exploring yourself. And that's what this blog is all about: It's me, exploring myself. I knew if I started writing it and gained an audience -- an audience of six or even an entirely imaginary one -- then I'd keep writing it, which would keep me on my journey. Otherwise it'd be too easy to stop. I set myself an assignment, in other words. And part of that assignment was -- is -- that I'd be as honest, open, and truthful as I possibly could. I'd write down what I truly felt and thought without editing it and without trying to water it down. I'd be true to myself.

I knew, if anyone noticed me, that I'd probably make some people angry. As long as I was being true to myself I didn't mind. Curiously, though, the people I've heard from have not been the people I've reviewed badly; they've been people I thought I was friendly with. Not to exaggerate: I didn't think we were friends, but I thought, when I'd met them, that we'd gotten along and enjoyed each other's company for a bit.

I've been of the opinion, for a while now, that everyone speaks their own language. Any linguist will tell you that every language has a number of dialects, some of them mutually unintelligible. For example, early in 2007 it was officially recognized that Venetians speak their own language distinct from Italian. What I think, similarly, is that every individual speaks their own dialect. Whenever you meet someone new, then, both of you need to learn each other's language. You may both appear to be speaking English, but you're actually speaking two different versions of English, and it can take a little while before you can really communicate. Until that happens you may misunderstand each other because one word may mean two different things in your dialects, or a turn of phrase might have wildly different interpretations.

The closer your dialects are when you meet, the easier it is to communicate. People with whom you "hit it off," then, are just people speaking dialects very similar to your own. People who "rub you the wrong way" or who "make a bad first impression" are people whose dialects differ so much from your own that clear communication is difficult.

People who speak different languages meet and manage well together all the time, partly because, I think, when your languages are obviously different you both understand that neither of you understand. The trouble comes, not in misunderstanding people, but in being certain that you did, in fact, understand someone. The trouble comes when you talk to someone and you think you're speaking the same language when you're not.

So I've been contacted by a couple of people who I completely misunderstood. I thought we were friendly but we were not. I thought things were going well but they were not. I thought the things I'd written were acceptable but they were not.

It's easy to extrapolate from this to imagine what it might be like if I had a large number of readers and this was my job. I can easily see myself becoming very cranky and doing nothing but sending out screed after screed attacking everyone. Because how many times can you go out there being open and honest and truthful and friendly when what you get back is anger and unhappiness?

And I admit I'm sensitive about these things. If an artist was angry with me for a bad review, I can understand that. We're speaking the same language as far as that goes. But when someone is upset about something I consider trivial or amusing or friendly, that I take badly. I can dish it out and I can take it, but I don't deal well with ambushes from people I thought I liked.

I'm not sure that anything's going to change around here -- I'm still going to be as open, honest, and truthful as I can be. I'm not sure I know how to be any other way. I'm not saying here I've never lied, cheated, or stolen -- I have -- but I'm not good at those things, they're not in my nature, and I don't want to be that way. I want to continue to be open. And so I will be.

And if that turns me, eventually, into Charlie Finch, so be it.

The Blogger Show: Hanging

2007-11-01T21:45:00.000-04:00

Today my wife Dawn and I helped in the early stages of hanging the Blogger Show at Agni Gallery. We got the kids off to school and drove through Manhattan over to Brooklyn to Stephanie's place, carried about forty boxes down from her fourth-floor apartment, loaded them into our minivan and her SUV, then carted it all back to Manhattan to the gallery. During this trip I learned that a) I should always, always, always bring clear directions, even if I've been there more than once before and think I know where I'm going, because driving aimlessly around Red Hook (the completely incorrect area of Brooklyn) while thinking I know where I am isn't a good use of time; and b) that E. Houston Street splits to become Houston Street and E. 2nd Street, which, amazingly enough, was exactly where we needed to be. As a lifelong resident of New York City and environs you'd think I'd know this already, but I'm pretty much entirely ignorant below 14th Street until you get to the Staten Island Ferry.

At the gallery we were met by John Morris and Agni Zotis, John being the driving force behind the show and Agni being kind enough to loan us her space for it. Agni finished moving her stuff around while we unloaded everything.

We were worried that, considering this is a small works show, the boxes seemed awfully big. We hoped they were simply over-packed, which mostly they were. After we'd cleared away some space we began taking boxes apart.

"It's like Christmas!" Stephanie enthused, although it was only like Christmas if instead of really cool toys when you opened your gifts you got incomprehensible, obtuse objects. Which, come to think of it, is just like my Christmas in those years when no one could figure out what to get me.

Lucky for us only one artwork arrived with slivers of glass in the box. Note to any artist sending framed works through the mail: Use Plexiglas. The artwork wasn't harmed but figuring out what to do with the glass pieces was entertaining, since the gallery doesn't have much of a trash can. (I ended up taking them home with me.)

While we were unpacking, Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon arrived to deliver their pieces. Shortly after that some guy started filming us from outside the door, then came in to greetings from John. The cameraman turned out to be James Kalm. With the camera rolling he asked me and Stephanie for a quote regarding Charlie Finch, which we gave; James found our statements unexciting and noninflammatory, which seemed to disappoint him, but he stayed to help unpack boxes and reframe the work from the glass debacle while he told us many, many times that he'd been at this for 25 years.

While unpacking I found out something curious. I didn't check the names on the boxes before I began, but every time I was impressed with a good packing job, the piece turned out to be from someone I knew, liked, and respected. Every time the packing job was bizarre, confusing, or just covered with a ton of pointless tape, I had no idea who the artist was -- I hadn't met them, don't read their blog, have no contact with them. So for example I opened this one box from which the painting slid effortlessly and flawlessly, and I exclaimed, "Now this is some great packing!" only to find, as I removed the bubble wrap, that it was from Nancy Baker.

And now to let you in on a little secret. The absolute best part of helping to hang an art show:

YOU GET TO TOUCH THE ART.

This is so awesome I can't even express it. Dawn had laid a box on the table and called to me, "Hey, isn't this some guy you know?"

"Who is it?"

"J.T. somebody."

"J.T.!"

J.T. Kirkland, Woven, 2005, aromatic cedar, 9.25x13.25x1.5 inches

She had unwrapped J.T. Kirkland's contribution to our show. Dawn handed me the piece, which is pretty small -- it's a small works show! -- a little smaller than ten by fourteen inches.

"I'm holding a J.T. Kirkland piece," I said, amazed. I brought it close to my nose to smell it. Aromatic cedar. "Smell this." I held it out to Stephanie.

She closed her eyes and leaned forward to take a large breath. "Reminds me of my gerbil," she said dreamily.

I held it out to Dawn. "Smell this."

"No."

"Come on, smell it."

"No!"

"Smell it!"

"NO!"

"Smell it?"

"Fine," she surrendered, and gave it a perfunctory sniff.

Dawn, as she never tires of telling me, is not an art person.

"I smelled a Pollock once," added James.

"That sounds cool. What'd it smell like?"

"Musty."

A little while later I was opening another well-packed box, following the directions carefully written on the sides, and as I removed the painting from its protective wrapping I saw...it was Tracy Helgeson's. The very first painting I'd ever seen by her -- I'd only seen JPEGs before. And here I was holding it in my hands.

Tracy Helgeson, Out in Front, 2007, oil on panel, 16x20 inches

Oh, oh god, Tracy -- I almost cried. Chills ran up and down my back. My arms broke out in goosebumps. Oh, Tracy, I had no idea. No wonder you're one of the few artists I've met who's really selling. The JPEGs just don't -- compared to your paintings, the JPEGs are nothing. Like looking at a photo of a violin compared to listening to a virtuoso play one. I just -- my god, Tracy. A barn, and some trees, and how could it be so fantastic, so deep? I'm tearing up again.

And I got to hold it. Move it around. Bring it close and then hold it away. What a privilege! What a rare gift!

Nancy Baker, Backstroke, 2007, oil on wood panel, 15x25 inches

Shortly after that I unwrapped Nancy's treasure. It was especially wonderful to hold because I'd seen her work in a show on a wall where I couldn't change the lighting or squint really close at it or check out the texture (not that I ran my hands over it or anything -- I angled it to see how the light hit it). Dawn was suitably impressed by it, too.

Steven LaRose, 09/24/07 a, 2007, vinyl acrylic on wood panel

And a little while later found me holding Steve LaRose's contribution. Funny, I didn't expect it to be on a panel. (I know some of my surprise seems silly since you can read sizes and materials in the descriptions, but I didn't really look over the Website for the show that carefully, so most of the pieces were new to me.)

Once we had everything out, we began to lay them out leaning against the walls, whereupon Stephanie began to work her magic, which mostly seemed to involve pacing back and forth and muttering. Dawn and I found we had nothing much to do while John kept up a steady patter of what can only be described as Johnspeak, seemingly random musings between long stretches of almost inaudible humming. Stephanie finally began putting things on the wall in a preliminary way and John and I applied ourselves to figuring out how to mount some of the pieces; most notably two unframed works on paper. Ordinarily these kinds of things are pinned to the wall -- one even had pinholes in it -- but the walls of this gallery are made of some rock-hard plaster into which pins cannot be pushed. Our final solution -- which John suggested -- was to drill 1/16-inch holes and put archival cloth tape over them, then pin through the tape. This seemed to work very well, although I had to operate the drill (which was mine) because apparently John is under orders from Susan Constanse not to touch power tools.

Everything seemed well under control when Dawn and I left -- kids, you know, they get out of school eventually. I'm expecting the opening on Saturday night to be a lot of fun.

October 25, 2007

2007-10-27T13:57:00.000-04:00

This is shaping up to be a good year in Chelsea. I've been on this beat for two years now and the second was worse than the first, but this, the beginning of my third year, is going really well so far. Joe Giannasio, Chris Ofili, Daniel Rozin, Steve Ellis -- there's been a lot of good, maybe even great, work showing in New York's art scene. Last night was another night of excellent shows.

I arrived at PPOW at about 6:30 expecting to meet Stephanie, who ended up getting stuck in traffic. That gave me a good while to sit with the sculptures of Judy Fox. I'd already seen one of her works at Why the Nude?, where her sculpture of Krishna almost turned me gay with its beautiful depiction of the male nude. This show is much more female.

Judy Fox, Snow White, 2007, terra cotta and casein, 8.5x58x25 inches

The largest sculpture in Snow White and the Seven Sins is Snow White herself, a life-sized if small young woman lying in state on top of a glass case. She's completely nude but for her long braided hair reaching to her knees. She is surrounded by seven amorphous critters on the floor, each one a jumble of flowing forms suggesting, with varying degrees of concreteness, sexual body parts, like breasts, nipples, vulvas, lips, tongues, buttocks, and so on. All eight sculptures have been lovingly detailed and painted in lifelike fleshy tones, including purples and oranges and reds for the invitingly touchable Sins.

Judy Fox, Lust, 2007, terra cotta and casein, 8x26x15 inches

None of these sculptures could be mistaken for anything alive -- Snow White's eyelashes are one solid piece, painted, and her pubic hair is flat paint -- but somehow they all possess a curious feeling of life, as if they might start moving at any moment. Standing against the wall -- there's a lot of room around the tableaux -- I found each sculpture catching my eye in the way that, say, a woman with a low-cut dress might, or a sculptress with a knee-length skirt lightly clinging to her derriere might. I really feel -- and I try to capture this in my own art, in my own way -- that humans are pre-programmed with a library of visual cues -- small combinations of curves and lines, subtle movements of catenaries -- which catch attention more readily than others, which signal the human brain to stop and pay attention because here's something sexy or dangerous or tasty. And Judy's sculptures all have those curves and lines.

I spoke to her a bit. I led off with my anecdote about her Krishna, almost verbatim as I'd written it, and she asked me, "Do you have a blog?" She went on to tell me that the model for that sculpture, who lives in India, had been e-mailed a copy of my review and he forwarded it on to her crowing about how beautiful he was and how he'd almost made me gay. "I guess this installation will turn you back the other way," she joked.

I did find myself strangely -- or perhaps not so strangely -- drawn to Snow White's pudendal cleft, although I couldn't look at it too long without feeling like I was inappropriately ogling an actual person, even though I was pretending to study the delicate brushwork of her pubic hair. Judy told me she's never been a painter; but she could be, she could be. And if she was to become a painter, she'd be a Northern European Renaissance painter, she confided in me. She believes art is about clarification.

Standing against the wall I found myself overwhelmed by sexual feelings. I don't know if it was the art or the people at the show or just my general mood at the time, but suddenly I was awash in a craving for sex, any sex at all -- if anyone had come on to me at that point, male or female, old or young, fat or thin -- anyone -- I would've run off with them right there in search of a dark closet or deserted office.

(It's just as well no one propositioned me, though, since as it was, earlier, I couldn't find the restroom I needed for much less exciting activities. I ended up going out of the building and into a show halfway down the block, then covering most of the distance back inside that building before I finally found the bathroom.)

But back to Snow White and the Seven Sins: In the end, I found the use of the Seven Deadly Sins unnecessary to the piece. In fact I feel they're a distraction. The Seven Deadlies were really kind of arbitrary -- the number seven was chosen by medieval scholars for its mystical significance (is there really that big a difference between sloth and gluttony? Envy and greed?) -- and form a too-easily grasped handle on the piece. I think it might even discourage really engaging with each "dwarf" as made by Judy. The pieces set up resonances both tactile and visual without the added layer of the titles to make them sluggish.

Judy told me the piece is an exploration of the Freudian unconscious; I think the piece certainly explores eroticism and sex in a very earthy way. I think it's telling, too, that Snow White is above her glass casket, exposed and revealed -- altogether it's very sexy and voyeuristic, like a fantasy of having a blindfolded and bound partner to whom you can do anything, anything at all. And the dwarfs all rally around, each one looking to me like a living embodiment of Freud's polymorphous perversity, getting off using every available body part.

Stephanie finally got to the gallery and by then I was no longer horny, which is good because it saved us an embarrassing scene of her smacking me with her hat. After she spent some quality time with Judy's work we moved on to Yossi Milo to see Oskar Korsár's No Wind Can Blow Us Down.

Oskar Korsár, More Than 70 Percent of the Earth is a Mirror, 2007, ink on paper

Oskar's show consists of a number of large works in pen and ink. After looking at one for a few moments, Stephanie stated, "These don't remind me of children's book illustrations as much as what it felt like when I was twelve." And I can see that: The heroine -- she strikes me as a heroine, anyway -- of Oskar's drawings looks how I imagine Stephanie looked when she was twelve or maybe fourteen. She appears in each of the eleven or twelve drawings -- there's that number again! -- in various states of undress -- topless, without panties, totally dressed, wearing glasses -- and various states of repose. The setting changes from her bedroom to a forest and back again until I started to feel like she was in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, the room metamorphosing into woods piece by piece, her bed becoming a tent, her houseplants becoming trees. The feeling is reinforced by Oskar's relentless crosshatching and the obvious sensitivity of his drawing. Oskar uses a number of pop culture references, too, which ordinarily irritate me beyond measure, but which are handled here so gracefully and with such tact -- without irony, as Stephanie noted -- that they feel like they simply belong to the girl's world and aren't tacked on as some kind of stupid commentary. It takes a lot for me to accept a Beavis & Butt-head t-shirt in a work of art, but Oskar pulls it off effortlessly.

Although the drawings might seem, at first glance, to be simplistic and maybe crude, I was charmed by their gravity and love. I felt awkward looking at this young, nude pre-adolescent -- as awkward as she herself would feel in that in-between body.

The whole effect is heightened by Oskar's wabi sabi approach to his materials. Each large drawing -- the Website doesn't have dimensions, but I'd estimate about 20 by 30 inches -- is made up of multiple pieces of overlapping paper, some of which are pasted on to cover previous false starts on the drawing, some of which show other drawings on the other side. The paper itself looks well-handled and a little old, like it was rustling around a box in an attic for a few years before being used. Oskar's inking is nowhere near as neat and regular as Sendak's despite the resemblance; and old Maurice would never send out an illustration where he'd obviously dripped ink in big blots.

Rarely have I ever felt so warmly protective towards drawings.

Gail Gregg, Location 819, 2005, encaustic on cardboard, 17x17 inches

We followed that up with Luise Ross Gallery where Gail Gregg was showing her recent paintings. I feel almost that paintings should be in quotes for this show; while certainly there is paint involved in each of Gail's objects, they're not what I would strictly call paintings. She takes things -- in this show, mostly what appear to be cardboard packing materials -- and covers them with encaustic. This isn't exactly obvious at first, but once I saw the four-cup carriers I usually hand back to the drive-thru cashier so they don't kick around my car for a month I saw packaging everywhere.

Gail gets an interesting texture with the encaustics but after a very short time I felt her paintings were rather shallow: "Look! If you flatten out this box, it looks like a Mayan design! Or a stylized woman! Or something else!"

Stephanie, for her part, said she'd buy one in particular if she had the money. Gail's prices are very high, though, as we saw when I was somewhat unceremoniously handed a price list by a woman I assume was Luise Ross.

"I'll make you one," I told Stephanie, which led to a brief discussion of how one of our criteria for art quality is whether or not we feel we could make it ourselves. If we think we could, we don't like it as much. Maybe that's mean, maybe it's delusional, but it's how we feel.

Shawn Dulaney, Listening, 2007, acrylic on linen over panel, 56x44 inches

I chose our next and last stop -- Sears-Peyton -- entirely because I know Stephanie likes texture in her paintings and Shawn Dulaney's paintings look like they have texture to spare. And in real life they do, and on top of that they have something Stephanie calls "presence," which is as good a term as any for saying that you actually feel something when you look at them, unlike most of the stuff you see.

Shawn paints in a comforting kind of Abstract Expressionist style, and really there are plenty of painters doing similar goobery work (Stephanie calls it "painterly"). But Shawn's has a presence whereas most don't and that makes all the difference. Where I might have walked on by saying blah, for her work I paused and just absorbed them.

All in all it was an excellent night in Chelsea. Admittedly I've left out a couple of exceedingly mediocre things we saw, but, really, why ruin it? Any night including Judy Fox is a win.

Adult Draw, Justin Faunce, Diana Al Hadid

2007-10-27T13:48:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start off with the last thing I did on Friday night just to get it out of the way. The main reason I was in Chelsea on October 19, 2007 was to attend Adult Drawing, billed as "not your typical figure drawing session." I haven't been to too many drawing sessions, myself, but I'm pretty sure this one was, in fact, atypical. I went in with approximately no expectations, although since the ad copy promised "adult film stars" as models, I thought perhaps there'd be more vulvas. (Most artists models are adept at being completely unclothed while keeping their vulvas hidden away.) Beyond that, I really had no idea what it'd be like.

It turned out to be absolutely dreadful. I didn't think the models would be professional artists models, but I did think someone would at least tell them to hold still. We started out with "pin-up superstar" Angela Ryan. And let me tell you that I was surprised to find that someone who could look so good in photos could so totally lack any charisma while posing live. It didn't help that the "stage" was made of two layers of foam into which half her body was submerged when she lay down.

After she went through a couple of face-forward, aggressively uninteresting poses, Angela retired and was replaced by a group of four models. All of them were very attractive, I have to say, but they seemed awfully young for adult film stars. If it wasn't for all their tattoos I'd have thought a couple of them were about fifteen. The models went unnamed at the time -- apparently only Angela rates top billing -- but further research indicates that one of the other models was Roxy from Suicide Girls' skankier younger sister Burning Angel. (I'd try to find some more names and details for you but these sites are decidedly NSFW and I'm right now I'm at W. That's okay: Just imagine a large group of mostly deeply damaged young women with incredibly dopey Gothish noms de nu like Apathy or Medusa and you've got it.)

Age, innocence, piercings and tattoos aside, the four models were just unable to manage an interesting pose. Which is just as well since they couldn't hold poses, either. And I don't mean that they moved a little, or shifted their balance; I mean they were having conversations and blowing kisses at the artists. We would've been better off going to the strip club downstairs where the dancers probably hold still longer.

After the foursome ran through a few tableaux of increasing pointlessness they went off to take a break while Angela returned with another model in the full Bettie Page bustier-garters-fishnet ensemble and riding crop. She stood unsteadily over Angela, who was on all fours, while I tried desperately to find something, anything worth drawing in that position. I ended up sketching another artist, a fantastically tall woman who held much more still than the models and was much better-looking anyway.

While I was trying to get something down on paper I was plagued by the dim lighting -- the place was lit like a go-go bar -- and the incessant flashes from the half-dozen or so photographers who were scuttling around. One of them nearly used my head for a tripod. So trying to see went like "squint squint squint BLIND! squint squint..."

Shortly after the DJ put on Depeche Mode -- "Words are very unnecessary," I'm with ya -- I decided it was time to go. I'd been there an hour.

I honestly didn't think anyone could make six hot naked women boring, but somehow they managed it. If you'd told me Thursday night that I'd regret paying ten bucks to look at topless women, I'd have laughed at you.

(To be fair: I posted pretty much the above review on the mailing list where I heard about the event, and Alex Zoppa, creator and organizer, wrote back to say that I'd completely missed the point -- it's supposed to be an art party, not a class at the Art Students League. And he graciously offered to let me in to the next Adult Drawing for free.)

Lucky for me and my drawing I spent Saturday at Dorian and Liana's with Theresa as our model. More about that on Probable Working Sequence.

Back to Friday: My wonderful evening began with meeting Stephanie at Leo Koenig where she had wandered before I arrived. Clearly that was a mistake because we had Justin Faunce's Pictophilia inflicted on us; in particular Justin has his name attached to one of the absolute worst paintings I've seen. At all. Ever. Luckily for you there's no image online, but let me describe it and be thankful I took this bullet for you: Imagine that hoary old Che Guevara t-shirt design enlarged to about four feet square. Instead of Che's face, Michael Jackson. With skulls for the pupils of his eyes.

This is so bad it moves beyond badness and into some realm of extreme horribleness previously unknown to human beings. Even the online thesaurus runs out of epithets for describing this level of atrociousness. It's so awful, I actually laughed.

But that's in the back room. In the front room is yet another Leo-Koenig-creamed-his-pants giant wall painting. I don't understand Leo's penchant for gigantic canvases. Is bigger better? More important? More serious? More...more? I can't imagine his thought process. Maybe art buyers pay by the square foot like one does for carpet.

Clearly this monster took Justin a long time to paint. It's hyperdetailed with tons of little bits crammed into every inch of the canvas. It looks to me like Justin must have had friskets laser-cut, or made silkscreens, because I can't imagine anyone doing all this by hand; so it looks like a lot of laser-cut friskets filled in with flat colors -- there's nary a blend to be seen. It's a humongous silkscreen with a hundred screens.

All to create a really really big mess of worthlessness. There's stuff everywhere, repeated at different sizes and mirrored: Bulldozers! The Google logo! The Space Needle! And, uh, loads of other things! All of which doesn't lead to sensory overload so much as a distinct air of Who Gives a Fuck? Justin doesn't seem to give a fuck, and no one else at the opening did, either; hell, the gallery verbiage manages to get off "signs and things signified" in the first line, proving that even someone being paid to give a fuck couldn't manage it. And neither could I.

Diana Al Hadid, Record of a Mortal Universe, 2007, mixed media, 128x138x106 inches

We wobbled out into the night on unsteady legs -- Stephanie was a wine or two down and my medication's been acting up -- and wound up at Perry Rubenstein looking at Diana Al Hadid's Record of a Mortal Universe. Stephanie rather liked it, except for a goodly number of drywall screws sticking out at various points, which she felt showed shoddy workmanship. Personally, I found they spoke to me: They said, "This is where my cordless screwdriver started running out of battery charge."

The piece consists of a stairway of sorts over the remains of a set of organ pedals, all with various columns and curlicues around made of painted and otherwise goobered up corrugated cardboard. Under it all is the "record," a big blobby puddle of black stuff, with a curving horn growing out of it like a diseased Victrola. About the best I can say is that the piece is undeniably there. It's clear that someone made something. Why, none can say.

That just about wrapped up the evening. I went to a couple of other things but nothing I feel like writing about just now. I was eager, anyway, to get to the Adult Draw. Ha ha on me.

Check It Out

2007-10-14T08:08:00.000-04:00

Hey, this show looks pretty good!

Joseph Giannasio

2007-10-04T16:08:00.000-04:00

I've stated before, in multiple places and multiple times, that I don't approve of installation art or conceptual art. I say "I don't approve," with its overtones of patrician regard and aloof moralizing, very particularly to make it clear that I know I'm being obtuse and retrograde in my thinking. Also to make it easy for anyone who wants to disagree with me, since it's clear I'm a pompous prick.

But if I don't approve of installation art, I am also a sucker for reverse psychology. Basically I enjoy proving people wrong whenever possible -- it's something of a hobby of mine, in fact. So when Joe Giannasio wrote on Ed Winkleman's blog (which blog I've had a lot of time to read and comment on thanks to my current (and thankfully temporary) non-job in Cubicle America) that he had trouble getting people to the apartments where he installs his installation art -- one critic, he claims, said "I don't go to shows that aren't in public spaces" -- when Joe said he couldn't get people to his openings, I had to prove him wrong and show up. Even if I don't usually like installation art.

I do, however, love New York and its buildings. I grew up in a hundred-year-old house in a historic neighborhood in the city, although really all neighborhoods in the city are historic in some sense. I'm currently living in a house built in 1928 and I have a thing for the architectural peculiarities of that time, like really nice woodwork. My father is a handy guy and when I was young I'd watch him repair or replace something all the time, marveling at the innards of this or that antique appliance or dusty niche of the basement. I still have this part of me which insists on attempting to be handy myself even though I'm about as dextrous with tools as a half-crushed ladybug. For example, a few years back I invested many hours in stripping seventy years of paint from the wood around my bathroom window, exposing some beautiful American chestnut and the pencil marks of the craftsman who built it three generations earlier. Then I went and half-stripped one of the windows in my daughter's bedroom and there I stopped. I'm going to finish it up any day now. Any day.

And Joe Giannasio's work is about the layers of construction in the rooms in which we live and work. What he does is peel back -- partly, literally -- the layers between the inhabitants of the room and the structure of the room itself. I could invent something metaphorical here and relate this to all sorts of things -- uncovering hidden layers of meaning in the structure of daily life and so forth -- but I don't think it's fair to the work, which is ultimately straightforward: Here, Joe is saying, this is what it's made of. Check it out.

Joseph Giannasio, 9-11 CPN Project, "Infinite Knot", 2007. Photo courtesy the artist.

Talking with Joe I found that his work -- his current mode of exploration, I guess you could call it -- came directly from curiosity. Curiosity and the School of Visual Arts MFA studios (where I spent June of 2007 myself). The studios there are, as you might expect, coated in layers upon layers of paint and crud, and while there, Joe said, he got the idea of scraping down through the layers to see what was underneath. Then he found that he could roll up the paint because it came up in such large pieces. Altogether this led to his two ideas of, first, cutting down into the floor, and second, rolling the floor up like a rolltop desk.

Joseph Giannasio, 9-11 CPN Project, "36 Boards" in progress, 2007, detail. Photo courtesy the artist.

When I arrived I realized why Joe doesn't get anyone to see his work; he hadn't even put his name on his doorbell. My first guess rang someone who thankfully wasn't home; my next guess got Joe. I was early, and he was late, and thus he let me in to watch as he finished the piece. It looked pretty much like it does in this photo here: The ceiling was gone, revealing the joists and subfloor of the apartment above; the plaster had been stripped almost entirely away to reveal two walls of brick and two walls of lathe and studs; and the hardwood floor was gone, leaving the subfloor and nails. (The first photo above shows an earlier version of the same room with the hardwood floor rolled back; it was entirely removed when I got there.)

Joseph Giannasio, 9-11 CPN Project, "36 Boards", 2007. Photo courtesy the artist.

Joe cut down through the subfloor along two joists. Then he glued down burlap to hold the slats in place and peeled them back, rolling as he went. Meanwhile his friend Raphael filmed the process. We talked as Joe worked and sweated. Under the subfloor we could see the underside of the ceiling lathe from one apartment down.

As he worked more visitors arrived, including Stephanie. Then Joe finished, cleaned up some of the more egregious dust and dirt, and allowed everyone in to stand around inside the work.

Then an amazing thing happened. The piece became interactive. We all began to talk -- something nearly impossible at most noisy Chelsea openings -- and discuss the exposed details. One person noticed that the rusty ironwork poking through the brick was the support for the fire escape outside the window. We all speculated on why the brick was black on the side facing us (tar for waterproofing was our best guess). We talked about the history of New York City and the neighborhoods we'd seen change. Joe and his friend Vince spoke in shocked tones about how different Central Park North was even in the few years Joe had lived there; I myself was surprised because the area was one of the triumvirate of fabled Bad Neighborhoods of my youth -- Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the South Bronx. Another visitor told me how even the South Bronx is being gentrified, which is a little like hearing that Disney's opened a new park in Antarctica. And speaking of Disney, we lamented the loss of Times Square to Disneyfication. Then, emboldened by her consumption of one lukewarm can of Budweiser, Stephanie did a balance beam routine on the exposed joist, but didn't do any flips despite our encouragement.

9-11 CPN Project, "36 Boards" with visitors. Stephanie is third from the left, with her boyfriend Moby Dick behind her, followed by the artist's friend Vince. I'm unclear on who everyone else is, but they were all fun to talk to. (Joe wrote to me to tell me: "The other people in the photo are starting left Larry, Steve, and the far right, Ben.") Photo courtesy the artist.

I won't talk about the intent of the piece or of the artist; I'm not sure he has one. In fact I'm constantly amazed at how few artists I meet actually have any kind of intent. Usually, it seems, the intent is dreamed up ex post facto to explain the existence of the work; the work itself, more often than not, it seems to me, flows from the artist's interest in a material or process and their seeing what they can do with it. In other words, art comes, not from ideas, but from play -- and the ideas come after. So I won't talk about Joe's intent, but I can talk about the effect: His piece brought together, for a short time, a small group of people into a mini-community. For a brief time, in Joe's space, we were all doing the same thing. Mostly drinking and trying not to step on any exposed nails, but also reminiscing and exploring the space. His piece wasn't something that stood alone, it was a springboard to a wider and more interesting experience.

I don't know how, exactly, one could import that into a place like Chelsea. I'm not sure it'd even be possible to make work in a gallery or museum. And I'm not really sure what Joe did was much different from simply arranging a small gathering. I feel like maybe I'm shortchanging his artwork by reducing it to the background for a cocktail party.

And yet it was one of the better art experiences I've had. And that's not something to be taken lightly. I doubt that many pieces I've seen could even sustain as much conversation as this one did; and certainly the environment in which they'd be viewed isn't exactly conducive to it.

Stephanie, almost every time I see her, says, just before we part, "Well, I had a nice time." She usually sounds mildly surprised, as if she expected time with me would be unpleasant, or anyway boring. She said it this time and I, for once, really agreed wholeheartedly: Joe's show was a nice time and I was surprised by it.

Chris Ofili, Gerald Slota, Julie Heffernan

2007-09-21T13:24:00.001-04:00

You've heard of Chris Ofili. He had his own artworld controversy a few years back -- not as big as the Mapplethorpe Affair or the Serrano Flap, but big enough. He's the guy who used elephant dung and porn in a painting he titled The Holy Virgin Mary, prompting Rudy Giuliani (who had not yet been canonized as the patron saint of Ground Zero) to make an idiot out of himself even more than usual. You remember.

Honestly, that was not why I put Chris' latest show on my list of openings for last night. Neither was it my affection for David Zwirner. And it wasn't my innate respect for anyone named Chris. No; quite simply, it was that, while browsing through the list of openings at Chelsea Art Galleries, the tiny little digital image next to the show caught my eye.

Aside from that, I was totally prepared to not give a crap about the show. I was expecting -- not being familiar at all with Chris Ofili or his background -- to see some Afrocentric exhibition, all Black is Beautiful and anti-European and so on and so forth, all that stuff we expect the culturati to embrace in these enlightened times. You know, like Kara Walker.

Chris Ofili, Annunciation, 2006, bronze, 87 x 39 x 45 inches

Instead I walked in and began to walk around Annunciation, where a curvy polished bronze polymorphous woman is having sex with -- literally merging with -- a dark bearded potbellied rough-surfaced bearded man. And partway around I found I had goosebumps. There was something here.

Chris Ofili, Belmont Guru, 2006, graphite on paper, 29.92 x 22.56 inches

I moved over to stand in front of Belmont Guru and I thought, "Am I crazy, or is this guy a real artist?" A couple more pieces in and I wanted to run around the crowded room yelling "Oh my God, it's a REAL ARTIST!"

Because Chris Ofili's work is AWESOME.

And the show goes on forever. I lost count of the rooms, but the David Zwirner Gallery just keeps on keeping on, room after room, small ones, big ones, and each one containing marvels. More bronze statues, more drawings, pencil, ink -- then another room of monumental paintings, then a tiny room of incredibly delicate pen and ink...it just never ends.

Part of me didn't want it to end. I wanted to see more drawings, more paintings, more work that resonated with me. I stopped next to Stephanie and as we both stood there looking at one painting I showed her my goosebumps. "Good," she said, "You've made a connection!"

And I had. The drawings really reminded me of...of my own drawings. And my drawings often remind people of....

P.J. O'Rourke once wrote something wryly amusing about Jesse Jackson and his use of rhetoric. He wrote that the foremost critic of Western Civilization is also the last practitioner of one of its highest arts. Something similar could be said for Chris Ofili, although he's no critic: For all his African influences, Ofili is a Modernist through and through.

I only just finished Patrick O'Brian's dense, riveting biography of Picasso, which, combined with following along on Dr. Enrique Mallen's On-line Picasso Project, put me in the perfect position to realize that Chris' paintings are just Cubism; that Chris is simply plowing the same fields as those crusty old white European males we're not supposed to revere any more. Chris is like Matisse with an African palette instead of a Mediterranean one; dark blues and olive greens instead of bright reds and primary yellows.

In a way it felt unfair. Jerry Saltz once warned me against being too Modernist and here was unabashed Modernism, and not just in small doses: Here was room after room of Modernism, in the middle of Chelsea at the start of the 21st century! Is he allowed to do this because he's Afro-Caribbean -- even though he was born in Manchester and attended the Royal College of Art?

But you know what? My feeling of unfairness evaporated almost as soon as it arrived, because the work is just that damned good. It may be old-fashioned, but Modernism works, damn it all. It works. And Chris is a master.

Chris Ofili, Iscariot Blues, 2007, oil on linen, 110 5/8 x 76 3/4 inches

Stephanie and I stood in awe of Iscariot Blues, a symphony of indigo, shades barely visible against one another, all of it so dark it wavers in and out of focus, like shadows at night. A guitarist on a porch, then suddenly, out of the gloaming, you see the silhouette of a hanged man, his cock swinging between his legs....

Chris Ofili, Christmas Eve (footsteps), 2007, oil on linen, 110 5/8 x 76 3/4 inches

Or I looked at Christmas Eve (footsteps) and watched, amazed, as the woman ducked her head down and then tipped it up to kiss her partner, back and forth, as if Chris could somehow make dried oil paint actually move.

I didn't read the titles while I was there so I missed all the Christian symbolizing going on, but it's unnecessary, because you feel the basis of the stories in the images: A man arises, his erection pulsing. A woman sits tailor-style, her breasts and curves multiplying. A man and woman embrace amidst the cosmos; he presses his manhood against her belly. It's all sex and God and redemption, all wonder and wondrousness, all flowing line and beautiful surface.

Not every piece in the show is a masterpiece, but enough are close enough to make this show one of the absolute best I've ever seen anywhere. After so many nights of mediocre art -- hell, of nights where mediocre art would be a blessing -- it's fantastic to be reminded of why I do this. It's because sometimes you do find the real thing. And it's on display at David Zwirner until November 3, 2007.

Now go!

Still here? Okay, I'll tell you what else I saw.

Gerald Slota, Untitled (Shoe Kite), 2005, unique gelatin silver print, 10x8 inches

I met up with Stephanie at Hasted Hunt, where I was yet again seeing Gerald Slota and his latest show. I've briefly written before about his show; I can only say it again, pretty much. I want to be really enthusiastic about Gerald's work and say it's great, because I like him, but I honestly have no idea what to think about it. It just slides off my brain. I don't think I have the right background to really appreciate the damaged photos or get any kind of a handle on them. I find them vaguely creepy, mildly disturbing, but not much more. That's about ten times more than I usually get out of a photo, but it's still not much, I'm afraid.

While there Stephanie and I talked with Joe Sabatino, a sculptor who lives near Gerald in Paterson, New Jersey, and a woman he introduced us to but whose name I can't quite remember because I'm an idiot. Katherine? Anyway, Joe and I talked about his work, and about how difficult it is to get a good idea of what it's like from the photos on his Website.

"What medium do you use?" asked Stephanie.

Joe replied, "Pig intestine filled with concrete."

There was a moment of silence while we all tried not to say "Ew."

I promised to drop by Joe's studio some time to see (and smell) his work, and then Stephanie and I were off to our next stop, which I discussed above. On our way there we bumped into Kirsten Magnani and Marcos Chin, which was pretty great. Of course I realized that, if even I knew people who were going to the Ofili show, then it was going to be mobbed. And sure enough it was. Even Inka Essenhigh was there, although I didn't say hello because every time I do she looks at me like she's afraid I might eat her.

Keith Haring, Dog, Multiple sculpture, screenprint in red on black painted plywood 1986 50-1/8 x 34-1/2 inches

Finally I reluctantly left Zwirner with Stephanie and we wandered over, heading for PPOW, but pausing in between to check out what I decided should be called the Dead Pop Show at DJT Fine Art: Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Stephanie had never seen a Basquiat in person, so she finally discovered what I'd known, which is that it's Pop, meaning it reproduces perfectly, which is pretty much the problem. But I find Keith Haring entirely irresistable -- his work is just so relentlessly positive, so unstoppably happy, so infectious, I can't help but like it.

Marlene Dumas, KLAUS KINSKI MEETS ENSOR, ANDY WARHOL MEETS HIS MAKER, 2002, watercolor on paper, 18.11x18.11 inches

Alice Neel, NATURA MORTE, 1964-65, Oil on canvas, 31 x 45 inches

We also got sidetracked into Cheim & Read's show, which was one of those dreadful "high-concept" kind of shows where someone, I guess, needs to clean out some storage space or something. Tonight's theme was the skeleton, so we were treated to everything from a Picasso litho to a Damien Hirst of uncommon, even for him, stupidity involving two plastic drug store skeletons hanging right in the middle of the room where people were trying to walk, talk, drink, and text their friends with messages reading "I M HERE WERE R U". Standouts, though, were Marlene Dumas happily decomposing (literally) Andy Warhol and Alice Neel just basically being a really good painter.

Julie Heffernan, Self Portrait as Not Dead Yet, 2007, oil on canvas, 68 1/2 x 60 inches

At long last we mounted the steep stairs to PPOW to see Julie Heffernan's latest show, Booty. After walking around a bit I said to Stephanie, "Old Master technique and topless women. So how come I'm not excited?"

"Yeah, what's wrong with you?" she shot back.

But that pretty much summed it up. Two years ago I'd have been blown away by this show, but last night I was just unimpressed. Julie's a good painter, an excellent painter, with technique to spare. But that's all there is. I asked Stephanie if she liked the work.

"I think I do," she allowed, "but I'm not sure I understand it."

What's not to understand? A nauseous, naked Uma Thurman stands half-buried in dead animals. How much clearer can Julie's theme be?

Actually, I think Julie's theme is more obvious than that. I think she's aiming to create ART. Not regular old art, that is, but ART, something a well-to-do person can buy which is very definitely A PAINTING. Whatever else you might say about these, they're certainly PAINTINGS. No question. They're big, they're made of paint, and they don't make sense. They must be ART! No one will walk into your well-appointed home and say, "My kid could paint that!" No one will squint at it with puzzlement and say "You paid how much for this?" No: This is so unequivocally ART everyone will simply accept it and your good taste for buying it.

In other words: This is a couple of paintings from Sears for people who shop on Fifth Avenue.

Well, they can't all be winners. Stephanie and I at least got to stop in to see Daniel Rozin's show (which I raved about last time) and that Chris Ofili show -- did I mention it was great? I think I might've. Those two alone made the trip -- and many more like it -- worthwhile.