NYC Art

I've been privileged -- blessed, really -- to know some amazing, brilliant people. Most of them seem to be musicians, which is kind of funny because I have exactly zero musical ability myself. But they fall into all kinds of categories: Writers, chefs, singers, painters, sculptors, movie producers, engineers. People who not only have a talent, but worked hard to develop it. As my old music director Professor William F. Ondrick liked to say, "There's no substitute for the work, not even genius."

Danny certainly is one of the most remarkable people in this remarkable group of people I've been lucky enough to know. He is one of the best, most talented, most incredible people I've ever met. And I don't even know his last name. (You might have seen him around making comments under the name Danonymous.)

Danny is the most relentlessly positive, childlike adult I can imagine. He's so intent on always looking on the bright side it's almost aggressive. I know he's had a difficult time, personally, recently; I won't get into it because I don't want to make the private public, but I can say if I'd gone through what he has, this blog and all of my e-mail correspondence would be filled with nothing but whiny, puling self-pity. Hell, this blog and my e-mail are filled with that anyway and I haven't had half the troubles Dan has. And yet the closest I've heard him come to complaining is one sentence: "Well, it's been a rough year."

He also has a surprising capacity for leaving me wanting more. Today I can get on the Web and find more information than I ever wanted on almost any subject. If an artist interests me, I can often find a vast landslide of images of their work along with analysis, reviews, and complaints that they make too much or not enough money. In the midst of this information overload, Danny has somehow managed to keep a low profile. He's too busy out working in the real world to mess around too much online. He's too busy sticking his work up on real walls to concern himself with a Website.

Is he successful? By his definition, yes. He sets himself clear goals and he aims for them. They do not involve such vague endpoints as "I'll have a Website and drum up traffic by posting on my blog." They're more along the lines of "I'll put up 30 pieces in one year. Each piece must be good and each one must stay up at least two weeks."

So if you're in Brooklyn, and you know where to look, you may just get enough of Danny. Otherwise, you won't.

Since I met Danny at Stephanie Lee Jackson's party last year I'd been meaning to get together with him. He's asked me more than once to visit his "studio," which is usually whatever building or wall he's working on at the time. He's asked me to come to his installation in Coney Island, a rare case of his actually being asked to put something up. And finally he's invited me to his place to see where the magic happens. But somehow I kept failing to follow through, until finally I found some time and Stephanie found some time and Dan planned to be around and it all came together.

At long last, then, we were able to visit Danny at his current residence. He's living in a basement room -- not even a full apartment. He shares the bathroom and kitchen with several other residents. Into this tiny room Danny has squeezed a small library, a PC, a bed, a workbench, and numerous shelves filled with wonders -- more than most people can manage in an entire house.

Entering his room I immediately thought of Alexander Calder. Calder made a lot of neat little toys in addition to his mobiles and stabiles, and one of the sad things about his body of work is seeing it encased in glass where it can never be touched or played with. Being in Danny's room is like seeing Calder's work -- only you're allowed to play with it. In fact Danny encourages playing with it, and will play with it himself if you give him half a chance.

Dan is aware of the Calder connection; he says he remembers when he was starting to make objects he opened a book on Calder, looked at the first page, and immediately closed it. He knew he wouldn't be able to go on if he read more. He spent a few years studiously avoiding learning anything about Calder, although now, of course, he's familiar with his work. Dan's earlier work -- which I didn't get photos of -- is much more Calderish, all wires and little mechanisms for moving. As he's moved into paper, though, he's moved away from Calder's drawing with wire.

Danny's larger works -- the outdoor ones -- are made of metal, bent and cut and glued to the wall or stood up. His smaller works are made of 300-pound watercolor paper and wire. He used to color the paper more; these days the most he'll do is paint a small piece black, or put in a dot here and there. Each of the things he makes is interactive in some way, whether it changes as you move around it or you move it around yourself. Recently he's become quite interested in shadows and how they change as the light moves.

Here's an example of interactivity: This piece is called, I think, Party People. It's a number of heads made of painted, folded paper, mounted loosely on little pieces of wire, which are then mounted on a block of wood. If you shake the block, the heads all whisper together, like that sound you hear when you first walk into a party.

Another piece involves two paper pigeons. You can turn a wire underneath the folded paper platform and watch as one amorous pigeon chases the other around. Or in another one (on the left in the next photo), Ben Franklin orates while waving his hands around.

His pieces are whimsical without being too cute; ultimately, under most of them, there's a sharp edge, something that makes you feel it's not all fun and games. His figures, for example, often seem to be tormented, yelling or screaming. Some wear chains or have heavy wheels hung around their necks. Sometimes they seem to be twisted in agony or fighting against the wind or reaching in supplication. The figures are surprisingly human despite being very minimal.

As a "door prize" Danny gave Stephanie and me one figure each and I immediately had mine curl up into a ball. It perfectly radiated exactly how I felt when I was depressed. I brought it home and gave it to my son to play with and he stretched it out into an expansive running pose. My daughter got ahold of it later and put it through classical ballet positions while giving it orders: "Pay attention to your position!"

Danny was, of course, delighted to hear my kids were playing with his art. Many artists will take a stand against the preciousness of art objects by making something ugly or rotten, or something that will disintegrate gracelessly. Danny makes the same point but with style and beauty.

It really is impossible to convey the sense of exhilaration and possibility I get from knowing Danny. The three of us had planned to take a drive and visit some of his outdoor pieces but ended up talking so much we barely made it outside for a short walk to my car to get some of my paintings I'd brought. I think I wore Stephanie and Danny out; they were nearly asleep on the bed (I was sitting in the only chair) by the time we called it a night. The feeling that I'm seeing something big and wonderful happen is one I've felt so rarely; it makes me feel 17 years old again, back when the world was wide open and anything could happen and the future was boundless.

Labels: Danonymous, Stephanie Lee Jackson

# posted by Chris Rywalt @ 3/28/2007 01:30:00 PM 10 comments

After my recap of the salon, I heard from both Stephanie and Danonymous hisownself regarding images of his work. I say work, but it's really play, and you can see that. Not to make light of the effort involved -- play can be hard work, but it's not really work, is it? I've been watching my kids play and it reminded me of when I used to play with Star Wars figures and my friend Brian Kavanaugh from down the street, and I remembered that we almost always spent more time setting up to play than actually playing. But setting up was still playing!

So Stephanie posted a number of photos and messages from Dan on her blog, which I will duly list here in chronological order, because I'm obsessive like that:
Raindrops on the Freeway Wall
Letter from Anonymous D
The Foot Bridge
Immaculate Conception
Evolution
Snails

Dan also sent me some photos of what he's doing right now -- he calls whatever building he's working on his "studio," both in conversation and over e-mail, as in "My studio is 150 feet wide! What a great space!" -- which I'll keep to myself for now, both because they're small (if you squint you can just make out what Dan's putting up) and because I don't want anyone catching him while he's up on a ladder in broad daylight in the middle of the fourth most populous city in the country sticking up shiny pieces of metal. Okay, so it sounds absurd. But still.

I'm starting to think that Danonymous' nom de plume is going to become increasingly inaccurate, as more people post notes on his work and the clues come together. Pretty soon he'll be profiled in the New York Times and he'll have to change his name to Dafamous. Or Dinfamous, if you work for the NYDOT.

Well, Dan, buddy, if you need bail, feel free to call me. I don't have any money but I'll bake a file into a cake.

Labels: Danonymous

# posted by Chris Rywalt @ 7/11/2006 03:11:00 PM 1 comments

Stephanie Lee Jackson may just be a mind reader. I say this because I was thinking -- musing, really -- that it would really good to hold a salon of some kind. Salon here being a snooty term meaning "bunch of people sitting around bullshitting." The fact is, since my roommates moved out -- a woefully short time ago, considering the overlap with marriage and children -- I haven't had nearly enough sitting around bullshitting in my life. So I was thinking it'd be a good idea to get some people together, some of the people I've met in the New York art field, to eat some food and talk about whatever came up.

No sooner than I had mused this -- lamenting, too, that my good friend the executive chef has a restaurant in Philadelphia, which is too far to scam free food for a party -- than Stephanie decided to invite people over to her place for dinner. And she even called it a salon. You can hear the proper French pronunciation, can't you? SALawwwh. Great!

Thus it was I rescinded my visitation policy on New York's lesser boroughs (which was strictly "only under pain of death") and drove the treacherous few miles from my place to Stephanie's in its thoroughly ungentrified section of Brooklyn. The party I found there was small but perfectly suited to the apartment; one more guest and someone might have had to balance on the windowsill. Or anyway I might have had to give up the comfy chair I fell into after climbing the stairs.

I ended up spending much more time than I expected getting to know Dan, who goes by Danonymous when he comments on blogs; Oriane Stender, who coincidentally has a piece at Schroeder Romero at the moment; Hiroko, Stephanie's downstairs neighbor; and Stephanie herself. Dan was the real surprise: His online persona is somewhat fractured and off-kilter, a bit peculiar; but in real life he's so articulate, well-spoken, and thoughtful that you can set aside the fact that he spends a lot of his time climbing ladders to put up his anonymous sculptural works on ignored or abandoned buildings. I wish I could find his work online -- I want to show it to you. As it was, we could only see a little of what he's given Stephanie, and it's absolutely charming, with overtones of Alexander Calder. At one point he had Stephanie fetch him some paper and scissors so he could demonstrate how he discovered the detritus from cutting out faces could be made into more faces, and as a result I now own a Dan original, pictured here.

Dan really was entertaining. For one thing -- well, I've met a fair number of artists in my time. And most artists are just regular people, even successful artists, like Inka Essenhigh or Mark Kostabi. They're just people who talk to you very normally. But there are some artists who talk to you as if you're deficient in some way, as if they are ARTISTS and you're just some average person. Which annoys me, because, while I've been reluctant to claim I'm an artist, one thing I certainly am not is average. Who is? But most artists, as I said, are just people, capable of carrying on regular conversations. Dan, however, is that rare artist: Dan is an artist who talked to me as if I was an artist. He really made me feel like what I'm doing is worthwhile.

I also had some time, sitting in the comfy chair, to admire Stephanie's work. If you visit her page of paintings, you have an idea of what it's like walking up the stairs into her apartment, since she's storing her paintings by hanging them on all the walls in the vicinity. It's standard for me to note that you can't judge a painting by a reproduction, but it's especially true of Stephanie's paintings. Online they look okay, kind of not bad, a little sticky and thick. But in person, they do cast a spell. The colors are much more vibrant and alive and what looks heavy and gluey is actually lighter and more like icing on a cake. "Blue City" was hanging right across from me until I switched seats and it really drew me in; it felt Christian, somehow, even though I know it wasn't intended as such and I'm not usually fond of Christianity. It feels like the promise of Christianity, just warm and good and electric.

Between Dan's talking and cutting of paper, and Stephanie's paintings, and the general enthusiasm of Hiroko, I woke up early today feeling like I needed to get some art done. I found some paint I'd mixed up yesterday was still wet enough to work and I found a use for it.

Labels: Danonymous, Oriane Stender, Stephanie Lee Jackson

# posted by Chris Rywalt @ 7/11/2006 01:33:00 AM 9 comments