NYC Art

Spur of the moment I decided to see what was happening Thursday night. And I saw that Tomma Abts was having an opening at David Zwirner and I thought, what the hey, that looks interesting. So out I went.

For once I wasn't disappointed. Tomma was worth the trip. The only thing slightly dispiriting was she hadn't filled the gallery the way Chris Ofili did for his last show there; I was expecting to see a thousand or so of Tomma's paintings and instead got a small handful. In fact, even for the couple of rooms of Zwirner's sprawling labyrinth she took up, most of the walls were empty: Some walls had no work on them, some had only one, and a couple had two. At first I got the feeling that she'd expected -- or been ordered -- to have a lot more work, but then I found that the paintings really needed that room to breathe a bit. (Most of the other rooms in the gallery are given over to large photographs of stuff so staggeringly uninteresting I didn't even stroll through most of it.)

Tomma's sense of color keeps these from wandering off into the land of Op Art. There's certainly an element of Op to these, with trompe l'oeil shadows, occasional shadings, and spinning, twisting stripes which almost become dizzying. But Tomma keeps everything firmly in hand with a finely tuned sense of subdued color: No garish blasts of red or yellow here, merely warm variations of muted blue-greens, brick reds, greenish yellows, ochrey greys. Every so often she tosses in a brief shot of pure cadmium orange or saturated ultramarine, but her underuse of such powerful pigments allows them to retain their surprise value and intensity.

Her work is not the most deeply felt of all time and it might not blow you away. But in its small scale and lack of bombast it's seductive. I recommend you step back about ten feet to take them in; I find they work much better at a distance than up close -- give them some room to expand in your vision.

I liked Tomma's paintings enough to want to talk to her, which can be hard thing to do at these large openings, but I really thought it was worth it. I asked one of the gallerinas to point Tomma out to me, but she couldn't; she told me the artist was wearing a tan trenchcoat. When I went looking for that I found no one in the gallery was wearing any kind of trenchcoat, much less a tan one. No luck. Turns out she was there after all, but since I didn't know what she looks like, I didn't talk to her.

That was all I'd gone in to see and with that done I had no particular plan, so I worked my way up Tenth Avenue, checking down the streets to see if there were any likely looking crowds. That's how you find openings in Chelsea: There's always a crowd on the street outside, smoking, trying to let people out or in, drinking (when the cops aren't busting people), giving double-cheek kisses and asking about other openings. I didn't see anything inviting so I ambled towards 25th Street just to see what was happening on my favorite block. That's when I happened across Mark Kostabi peering in the door of Jim Kempner Fine Art trying to see who-knows-what in the shrouded darkness of the closed gallery. I called out to him and he started like I'd caught him playing with himself, then pleasantly waited for me to re-introduce myself and explain where we'd met before. He seemed to recognize me eventually and we made some small talk, then he invited me to be in the audience for the next taping of his TV show Title This. Hopefully I'll make it.

As if to prove that his work is easy and pointless, Stephen even painted the back wall of the gallery, using tape and latex paint this time. The result was indistinguishable from his work on canvas and about as exciting as a set for a variety TV show in 1976.

And now, dear reader, I must admit to something. I did something completely calculated. I saw, as I came in to the gallery, good old Jerry Saltz talking to a small group of people. I wanted to say hello to him but his conversation, and the ring of people he was part of, didn't invite interruption. So instead of just easing on by and going home, I went across the street, meandered through 511 West 25th for a bit, then came back to a show I was already bored by the first time just to see if Jerry's conversation was over. Lucky for me it wound down just as I came back in and I was able to accost him. I re-introduced myself and asked if he remembered me from SVA a couple of years ago.

"I did but now I think I'm forgetting."

"You said I was a visionary," I began, but as it was coming out, he turned to a woman he'd been talking to and said to her, "Chris is an excellent painter," or something to that effect.

We talked a bit more and then he gave us the peace sign and left. Now, I have no idea if he remembered my work correctly. I'm sure he was sincere, but I imagine he might have mixed me up with someone else, some better painter. Or some painter he thinks is better. Or whatever. But still, this made me happy. No so much because he's the Great Jerry Saltz or anything, but because I like him and respect him personally, and I appreciate his opinions.

Having thus made use of Stephen Westfall and Lennon, Weinberg for my own nefarious purposes, I slunk back out into the night and home.

Labels: Jerry Saltz, Mark Kostabi, Stephen Westfall, Tomma Abts

# posted by Chris Rywalt @ 10/31/2008 09:29:00 PM 4 comments

You know what they say: Man makes plans and the MTA laughs. I wanted to leave my studio and hit three openings, one in Williamsburg and two in Manhattan. Instead I made it to one, had a beer, got lost on the subway again, and went home. The trouble was, as usual, getting across subway lines; going from Gowanus to Williamsburg just isn't a trip the subway is designed to make. So I either had to go all the way into Manhattan on the F and swap to the J back into Brooklyn, or I could try the G train and get off at Broadway and take what looks like a short walk on the map but turns out to be quite a hike following along under the J's el through a very entertaining neighborhood I've never been in before.

Therefore I won't be able to tell you about the openings at Winkleman or Lyons Wier-Ortt. I can only talk about Nicole Stager's show at Marisa Sage's Like the Spice.

Nicole Stager makes photograms. That is, she shines light on photo paper. I've seen some artists working with photograms and Nicole is definitely the best. I should note, though, that I haven't seen a lot of photograms, and what I have seen I didn't think were very good. Photograms don't strike me as a fantastically deep medium. But Nicole definitely works with what I see as their best qualities, namely beautifully saturated colors and whimsical touches from the items exposed to the paper.

The pieces I found less successful are less colorful, with medium values and vague hues. For example the signature piece of the show, which is about as uninteresting as photograms get. Nicole said almost everyone claimed it as their favorite, so clearly I'm a little strange.

I asked Nicole if she knew what color she was going to get before she developed the paper; keep in mind, these are photo negatives (even though they're not transparent) so the color is reversed from whatever light she used to make the exposure. She said that she usually has a good idea, but every so often one surprises her. The 'grams she pointed out as being surprising were, to me, the weakest of the show in terms of color -- kind of mottly and showing their photographic grain, like an overly enlarged picture. I much preferred the dense, almost palpable colors of some of her other work. So it seems to me the more Nicole knows what she's doing, the better she is. Which isn't surprising, really.

Labels: Brian LaRossa, Marisa Sage, Nicole Stager

# posted by Chris Rywalt @ 10/23/2008 04:42:00 PM 0 comments

Drop by if you can: Saturday, October 18, 2008, 112 Second Avenue, Brooklyn, NY.

# posted by Chris Rywalt @ 10/13/2008 06:05:00 PM 0 comments

I hadn't planned on going out for a gallery slog. I planned to go to one or two shows, maybe, then pick up some art supplies and head for my Brooklyn studio. Instead, because of my wandering eye and my inability to find my way around Manhattan south of 14th Street, I ended up walking across half of the island like a stunad and never making it to Brooklyn. It was a great day for a walking tour of downtown New York City, a lovely, wet, gray fall day. At one point the water came down in a dense mist moving sideways. Did you know New York gets more rain than Seattle, London, or Glasgow? It does.

I knew things were going badly when I'd carefully typed up all the addresses I wanted to hit in a nice Word document which I promptly forgot open on my PC without printing as I left the house. Luckily I had an earlier printout of a list of shows I wanted to see in my bag so I was able to find my first stop -- first because it was easiest -- and see Jason Bryant's show at Raandesk Gallery of Art.

First things first: Raandesk isn't a gallery. It's some walls around a group of interconnected spaces which are being used for other things, including desks rented out to people who, I suppose, need desks and a room to put them in. This makes it a little hard to see the work because you have to lean over desks, or squeeze between them and the wall, or surreptitiously glance around the people sitting at them, in order to see the paintings.

But this only underscores the most important question raised by Jason's work: Is this trip really necessary? That is, do we really need another artist painstakingly copying advertising images using the techniques of advertising to tell us...what? That there is advertising? That advertising images are really nice? That cropping ads strategically gives us different ads? The better Jason's technique gets the more I find myself asking why bother -- why should he bother painting these, and why should we bother looking.

For myself, I didn't bother long. One sweep around the room, wiggle my eyebrows at the receptionist, and I'm off. Off to call my wife to get me the address of my next stop, which was so far away, I figured I might as well make a few other stops as I went.

New York City's subway system is truly second to none; it's huge, easy to use, and very convenient -- unless you're trying to go certain ways. Trying to get diagonally across Manhattan, for example, is an exercise in frustration, unless you want to follow Broadway. And trying to get anywhere in Chelsea is impossible because the trains don't go over that far.

Since my next stop, then, was on 20th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, I figured I might as well trudge crosstown from Raandesk to the far end of 27th Street, to where the mighty Hudson nearly laps at your toes, to see what was happening at my old favorites Winkleman and Schroeder Romero.

Ed wasn't in but Murat was so, rather than actually look at the installation of Yevgeniy Fiks' Adopt Lenin I chatted with him. Murat is far more interesting than any old work of art anyhow. We discussed everyday things -- the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and that's true for women, too -- and Murat made excuses for why Ed's too busy to respond to my e-mail messages.

So I narrowly dodged Lenin and crept into Schroeder Romero just to see what was happening. There was a group of students there whose teacher was talking to Lisa and Sara Jo so I thought I had a chance to get out before I was noticed, but Lisa called out to me before I could get to the door. Not that I don't like talking to her -- far from it, I love her -- but I feel bad that I don't like what they show in their gallery.

"Another show right up your alley, eh?" Lisa chuckled at me.

"I've been thinking," I said, "of just never mentioning Winkleman or your gallery ever again, just because I feel so bad always saying terrible things about you guys."

"Come on, Chris, we like you because you're honest."

On my way out I very coolly tripped over the motorcycle sculpture and almost broke my neck. That'd be why they put the guardrail around it, because otherwise I'd have stomped through Marsha's blue neon tubing like a postmodern Godzilla.

I said my good-byes and exited, aimed southward. Then on the corner of 23rd Street I bumped into Ed Winkleman himself, hurrying to his gallery to be busy some more. It wasn't a good day for running into people on the street -- did I mention it was raining? -- but Ed paused long enough to have a short conversation. I told him I'd just come from his gallery and Schroeder Romero.

"Another show right up your alley, eh?"

Indeed. We parted as friends and I continued south down Eleventh Avenue until I passed something that made me draw up short. It takes a fair bit to get noticed in Chelsea below 23rd Street; apparently the ghosts of Haring and Basquiat together don't possess enough presence to impress on everyone that graffiti art is dead, the 1980s are long gone, and no one's going to get discovered by scribbling on the walls any more. So to stand out amidst all the clamoring sunbursts, peeling wheatpaste doodles, slap-on stickers, and exhortations of awesomeness and street cred requires something truly special.

In this case it was a perfectly flat, blank, white wall -- like you'd find inside any gallery -- with a doorway.

I backpedaled and stood in front. Inside the door was another expanse of white wall with the legend "Midori Harima" below the word NEGATIVESCAPE. I walked inside and around into the room....

...and I'd hate to ruin it for you. Go for yourself. But if you can't, or don't mind having the surprise drained out of it -- well, it's not that great or anything, but -- okay. After the sunlight on the white walls inside you can't see anything except, floating a few feet in front of you, a ghostly merry-go-round. It hangs there, vaguely alive, pale. Unmoving but somehow waiting. Waiting for you. Waiting for you to unwisely move towards it....

It's profoundly creepy.

Tentatively I tried to walk around it, keeping my distance, only to bump into a heavy black curtain. After a little bit my eyes adjusted and I could see the space was just a medium-sized room with a high, New York industrial ceiling and black curtains covering the walls. The merry-go-round is a forced-perspective sculpture in white plaster, or something similar, with a shadowed, negative version of itself being projected on it from just inside the door. Basically it's not much different from the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World, where they project singing faces onto blank sculpted heads, making what looks like living statues. But in this case, of course, you're on Eleventh Avenue -- at a place called Honey Space -- and not in an amusement park. And you're expecting an art exhibit, not a haunted house ride. The net result is it's a lot more freaky.

Bumping into random crap like that is one of the things I love most in life.

Of course it's easy to bump into random crap when you get lost going around the corner like I do. There's a reason my family lived on an island for over twenty years -- as long as you don't go over a bridge, through a tunnel, or on a boat, you can be sure you're not too far lost. So it shouldn't be too surprising that I turned down 21st Street instead of 20th and ended up pacing back and forth in front of Manhattan Mini-Storage wondering where my next destination had gotten to. Are you sure, darling wife, it's 529? Because I can't find that building number.... Let me get a Coke from the Mini-Storage vending machine for sustenance as I pace a few more times....

But then my eye was drawn to Casey Kaplan where someone named Nathan Carter was showing something called "RADIO TRANSMISSION CONTRAPTIONS." In I went to find a collection of works put together by someone who'd spent altogether too much time in the Joan Miró and Alexander Calder wing of the nearest museum.

In fact I was so enamored of this that I wanted very much to talk with the director in charge of this exhibition. I approached one of the two gallerinas and asked if I could talk to the gallerist in charge.

"You mean Casey Kaplan?" she asked.

There are actually people with the gallery name in the gallery? Weird! "I guess so," I allowed.

"What do you want to talk about? The art?"

"Well, yes."

"Is there anything I can help you with? Any questions I can answer?"

"No, I mean, I just want to talk to whoever put the show together. You know, about the art." I mean, I wanted to say, Casey is most likely through the door right behind you, listening to everything we're saying, and couldn't I just say hello or something?

"Let me see."

Curiously, the other gallerina then got off the phone and went back into the office. She came back out followed by a small dark-haired woman. I got the impression that Casey Kaplan was male, but one never knows.

"Can I help you?" the woman asked.

"I'm Chris Rywalt," I said. Nothing happened. This is the part, I wanted to say, where you tell me your name. Leaving me no choice but to say the kind of clichéd thing I hate saying. "And you are...?"

"I'm Chana," she said, pronouncing it like "Shawna," which is the same name as Reilly's lady friend whose name I didn't want to write out because I didn't know how to spell it. Small world!

"Yes, okay, well, I wanted to talk about the art here."

"Do you have any questions?"

"Well, no, not...you know, I just wanted to...I mean, this show is just so unabashedly retro, so old-fashioned, and you don't see this kind of thing in Chelsea that often, and I...just wondered...you know...how...why someone would put on a show like this. Because. I mean, I like it, it's just...."

It's just that I sound like a mental case.

"Well, Nathan Carter has worked closely with our gallery for many years," she said as if she were reading it off a nearby card. "And this was a direction he chose to take."

"Right. Okay. Well, I just...it's good. That's good. I...."

The conversation wandered off, entirely out of my control, petered out in a few small gasps, then died on the floor. Why Casey didn't want to talk to me him/herself I don't know.

Feeling thoroughly stupid by now I managed to find my way out of the gallery and around the corner. As I did so I passed Yvon Lambert. I paused. Should I turn around and go in? Do I need to? Is it worth the effort? Unsure, uncertain, I wobbly backtracked and stood in awe before the majesty that is

ANDRES SERRANO'S SHIT

So I have nothing against Andres. And I knew what to expect from these images because I'd seen some of them online. I hadn't meant to see the show, but of course one keeps on top of these things anyway, and so here it was.

What I wasn't prepared for, though, was the sheer size of the photos. Each one has been enlarged to slightly over seven feet high. Considering the subject of each photo is maybe a few inches high, this is a factor of at least twelve we're looking at. This is some HUGE SHIT.

And shit it is. Surely Andres is courting all manner of easy reviews of his work, and given the titles of his photos he must know it, because each one is named after a standard use of the word "shit" in English: Holy Shit, Bull Shit, Dog Shit, Heroic Shit, Good Shit, Bad Shit. And so on. It's sophomoric, if junior high has a sophomore year; the whole exercise reminds me of something I'd have done in seventh grade, some kind of dictionary of shit. Speaking of which, there's a long-winded (but very funny) online joke listing the basic tenets of the world's religions as applied to shit ("Confucianism: Confucius say, 'Shit happens'").

I must admit some of the photos made me queasy. I wonder if I'd have felt that way if I didn't know what the subject was; I think so. Sometimes you can just tell shit. Also, the gallery kind of had this odor vaguely reminiscent of poop, as if some of the photos, being so gigantuan, actually gave off an aroma of the subject. Then again maybe someone just changed a diaper in the room. Who knows?

In any case, the photos themselves are intensely uninteresting. Doodie has different textures. Wow. Flies sometimes land on it. Really. Andres likes bright lights behind his subjects. Exciting.

Piss Christ is off in a smaller room, by the way. In person it looks, well, exactly like it does online, only with so much glare from the gallery windows it's hard to see. Way to go, blue chip gallery!

I exited past the goofy knot of students ogling the turds and bravely refrained from asking the gallerina if I could the bathroom. I didn't have to go number two anyhow. Just outside, on the wall of Yvon Lambert, a sign prominently declares: NO DUMPING. And now I need a blood transfusion; I think I overdosed on irony.

But guess what? I finally made it around the corner and onto 20th Street whereon one can find 529 West 20th Street, specifically the fourth floor, specifically Denise Bibro Fine Art, which is what we all came here for! For the woodpeckershrooms, as my wife so delicately called them when she texted me the address? No, for Nancy Baker's Duck and Cover Drill!

Can you hear the "but" coming?

But I'm a little disappointed in these paintings. Not a lot. Just a little. They have many very good points: Nancy's sense of color is fantastic. Her compositions are excellent. Her subjects and her juxtapositions are weird. Her choice of source material is impeccable.

Here it comes again: But. But her inscrutable hermeticism makes it hard for me to love these paintings. In her earlier show her work was full of things going on, and somehow that helped carry them along; these paintings are more focused, with fewer figures and situations, and in a way that makes them more confusing, because when there are only four or five subjects in a painting, you expect them to make some kind of sense together. But here we have a parrot eating a worm being worshiped by some south Asian beauties who are ignoring the medieval knights fighting -- over them? -- on the shore. The ladies are lovely and the parrots are lively and the knights are knightly and they go together how?

Also I get the feeling these works were either rushed or Nancy's at the limit of her abilities as a painter. There are altogether too many passages that aren't quite right, aren't a hundred percent. That may be intentional or it may be she's hurrying too much. Or maybe she's just loosening up. Which could eventually be really good. But here in these works, it doesn't seem fitting.

With those criticisms laid out, then, I should say that Nancy still puts on a good show. I love the way her smoothly smoky cloudscapes surround the hard-edged figures in front of them, the way she moves between a flavor of academic realism, medieval Boschism, and paint-by-numbers. Her high-contrast patterns laid over painterly backgrounds are beautiful. She's not using quite as much kitsch as she was -- which I consider a good thing -- although Casper the Friendly Ghost and the Poky Little Puppy put in appearances. Gotta love the Poky Little Puppy!

I spent a goodly amount of time alone with Nancy's paintings, going back and forth between them. They're really lovely. After a while, though, I had to move on. For the sake of completeness I went into Denise Bibro's main gallery where I found the work of Boyce Cummings, Christopher Reiger, and Amy Ross. I've been meaning to see Chris' work, and to get him to come gallery-hopping with me, and somehow have failed at either. Until now, when I sort of accidentally wandered into his show -- I'd forgotten about it in my rush to get to Nancy. Boyce I'd reviewed before although I honestly couldn't remember a thing about his work. And Amy Ross I knew nothing about.

As I was picking up my postcard to go, someone called out to me, asking if I was Chris Rywalt. No use denying it -- I am. It turns out Oly Lambert, an online acquaintance, works at Denise Bibro. We talked a bit and she introduced me to Denise Bibro herself. Take that, Casey Kaplan!

Downstairs from Denise is Hasted Hunt and they're showing the very big (although not Serrano-sized) photos of Michael Thompson. Well, not of Michael himself -- he took the photos, I mean. Apparently he took them in the service of several ad campaigns because that's exactly what they look like, up to and including Kate Moss topless. Because what the world really needs is another photo of Kate Moss' tits. Note I have not included any images for your delectation.

Having thus exhausted Chelsea for the day, I turned my weary feet cross-downtown. Because I wanted to get to -- well, by then I was so tired