Archive for the 'Art' Category

Free admission I mean, to the Summer of Love exhibit, the blend of late 60’s music, art, and literature that’s on display now through September 16 at the Whitney Museum.  Admission is usually $15 dollars for uncoolkids but if you hit up the Whitney between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Friday nights, you’re just asked to give a donation. 

The exhibit occupies the third and second floors of the museum and its suggested you begin on the third and work your way down.  There we were greeted with a brief written explanation of the collection, which names San Francisco, New York, and London as the centers of the counterculture era.  The first artwork on display is an array of old concert posters from the Fillmores East and West.  The friend who joined me at the museum works in the music industry and is also involved in a film right now about the life of Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, so he was alot more knowledgable about the “Bill Graham presents” collection.  Apparently these posters were given away for free at the end of the shows and now are worth some money. 

The San Francisco section of the exhibit was a spectrum of colors coating political agendas, with a few key phrases thrown in for good hippie measure, like “Plant a flower child” and “Turn on, tune in”.  There were pictures from protests hanging next to photos of colorful Victorian homes (some call them “painted ladies”).  Also shown were Jefferson Airplane albums, multiple portraits of Jimi Hendrix, an homage to Janis Joplin, the advent issue of Rolling Stone. 

It was also rich in anti-war parephernalia, beginning with the large haunting oil painting of a Vietnamese woman being raped by “white boy soldiers”, and working its way towards flower children flashing peace on rally posters.  It was a fitting representation of the dichotomy of carefree appearances and underlying anxieties - a motto of peace mixed with the irony of the fervor of protest.  One of the rally posters asked: “Haven’t we learned from our past mistakes?”

On the lighter side, if you’re into nudity, because who isn’t, you should spend a little extra time checking out the San Francisco displays.  There are as many naked bodies in the artwork as there are dandelions.  There’s even an orgy film, complete with headphones and a “Warning!  Sexually Explicit Content!” placard.

The New York section focused primarily on Woodstock, with several great photos from Bethel, NY, back when the Boomers looked suspiciously…like us today.  There were several Exploding Plastic Inevitable albums produced by Andy Warhol on display (the museum is also showing Warhol films in the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film and Video Gallery; check the Whitney schedule online).  The literature of the era included pulp about psychedelia and guides to tripping out, as well as off-beat papers like the East Village other, the cover of which chronicled poet Allen Ginsberg’s arrest for possession of pot.

The London section featured photographs of a very young Mick Jagger with his full lips and lineless face, and his most notable leading ladies like Marianne Faithful and his ex-wife Bianca; Keith Richards with cocain drawn up to his nostril; Eric Clapton in all his red-pants, big-hair glory.  We watched a video of the inflation of the massive pillow at Altamount.  There was a how-to guide for swingers in England, black and white photographs from poetry readings in Hyde Park, and a cloth-covered, Epcot-center-like display, a weird little room which we could enter only after removing our shoes and which gave me a foot cramp because of the rolling surface inside (I still can’t figure out the point of that thing).

If you’re really into trippy stuff you’ll probably enjoy the strobe light displays, swirling circles and amoebas pulsating on the walls in dark rooms. 

And there are several photos, portraits, and album covers of those buggy little guys who sang “All You Need is Love”. 

So the exhibit shows that the summer of love was celebrated differently in different parts of the world, whether it was through sexual, spiritual, political, or artistic liberation.  Some call the participants non-conformists; others laud them as visionaries.  The artwork leaves you with a wealth of information, a heady feeling, and a few more curiosities about an era which we as Gen X or Y kids can’t really understand.

There are parellels though.  There were musicians that lived hard and died at twenty seven, there was unabashed nakedness which has translated to a naked fear of AIDS, racial tensions are still rampant, there are still school shootings and alot of the drugs have remained the same.  And the one thing we’re still digging, unfortunately, is the uncertainty and unrest festering like bacteria in the petrie dish of a seemingly senseless war.  Which begs that question: ”Haven’t we learned from our past mistakes?”

If you’re at all into the music and pop culture of the late 60’s, check out this exhibit.     

Atrocity. The word alone conjurs up brutal horror laced with sadness. The Atrocity Exhibition crashed into Thierry Goldberg Projects (5 Rivington Street, NYC) on June 28 and will continue to break you out of your sense of disillusionment until August 28.

For Ahmed Alsoudani, atrocity is the violence of war going on in his homeland of Iraq.

For Ben Grasso, it’s an explosion.

For Molly Larkey, it’s the atom bomb.

For Wendy Heldmann, the aftermath of an atrocity can be just as devastating as the actual event.

As if to extend their disparate examples of atrocities, the artists use different mediums — drawing, sculpture, painting — to make their statements. Some are brutally lifelike, others are abstract. No matter what the subject matter, method, or style, the result is always the same: the works underscore our own humanity in the face of terror.

When an art exhibit gets extended, it’s worth taking notice. That’s the case with Sarah Peters’ Being American. The exhibit was supposed to close at Winkleman Gallery (637 West 27th Street, New York) this Saturday, but it’s been extended until next Friday, July 27. For her first-time having a solo exhibition in a city that eats, sleeps, and breaths art, that’s a noble accomplishment.

What makes Being American impressive is Peters’ ability to look past herself as a comtemporary American artist to argue that it took a lot of bad art to get to where we are today in the art world. She question the very foundations of art in the United States as she considers the failed aesthetic ideals of the eighteenth century.

Through a series of hurried black-and-white drawings, Peters shows the rejected, castaway works of time gone by. It’s a landscape of passionate yet abortive attempts to create beauty that was based on European eccentricities. She even includes a bust that although is a self-portrait actually references William Rush, America’s first classical sculpture.

Being American has been getting rave reviews from critics, so go see for yourself what all the fuss is about. And we want to know what you think: Apart from its critique on early art, does Being American aesthetically hold up its own values?

Last night’s opening for No New Tale to Tell marked not just an impressive, thought-provoking exhibit, but also 31GRAND’s first show in their new gallery at 143 Ludlow Street in Manhattan.  And the masses came out to celebrate.

Whether they knew about the event beforehand or just happened to pop in to see what all the fuss was about, the downtown twenty-something gang was out in all its glory.  It was a calm, cool crowd that packed the multi-room gallery.  The type that sprung one self-absorbed guy who thought it would be okay to light a cigarette in an oppressively hot room filled with sweaty bodies, when common gallery-going experience clearly dictates otherwise.  Backs practically pressed up againts the paintings, well-dressed people stood obstructing the view of the artwork.  Networking, flirting, socializing, the masses spilled out onto the sidewalk and across the street.

The crowd gathered with good reason: the rather large collection of works clinging to the walls inspire the imagination.  Anthony Pontius’ The Great Rescue drifts towards the surreal if not postmodern in its collaging of reality and the illogical.  Ryan McLennan’s Gather and Adam Stennett’s Underwater Mouse 2 evoke auras of fantasy through its soft, mesmerizing style even though they are clearly rooted in perillous realities.  Ursual Brookbank’s BR.FLR. has a captivating movie-like quality of beautifully capturing a moment in time.  Alessandra and Alex Exposito each paint animal skulls bubble-gum pink as if they were designing wall adornments for a bratty teenage girl in the Southwest.  Meanwhile, Magalie Guerin’s Montreal/Afternoons  and Damaged seem ripped from a Victorian leatherbound book.

Those are the highlights, but there are many other multi-media artworks on display. There was enough there to intrigue me that I would go again to get a better look when the crowds are busy at some other opening.

Things sound so much better in French.  Take for instance Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…), the exhibit Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak curated at Sara Meltzer Gallery.  Doesn’t Ceci n’est pas just seem like something that would roll off your tongue if you knew which letters to pronounce?  So much more sophisticated than simply “This is not.”  But, since some of us sadly are not as multilingual as we’d like to imagine ourselves to be, we get a bonus title in English. 

Art devotees, however, surely would recognize Ceci n’est pas…  as a play on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, which coyly displayed the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe under a picture of a pipe.  By doing so, Magritte reinforced the fact that his painting was just that—a painting, a representation of a pipe, not a tangible pipe.  By borrowing Magritte’s phrase, the exhibit at Sara Meltzer Gallery clearly winks at the in-the-know art world.   

Yet with this biting title, the gallery is simultaneously smirking at the art world, by poking holes through its snobby facade.  They say:   

Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) an exhibition about painting. This is not an exhibition that defines a moment or a trend. This is not an exhibition that celebrates the emerging artist or the mid-career artist or those who have passed. This is not an exhibition about appropriation, subversive strategies or architectural interventions. This is not an exhibition about global warming, the war in Iraq, government corruption, Lindsey Lohan or Knut the polar bear.

This is not even The Bong Show, which also capitalized on Magritte’s The Treachery of Images to reflect on what is and is not acceptable subject matter in art. 

Cleverly, by explaining all that it is not, the exhibit brings us full circle.  We understand the irony of our self-awareness.  We get that an exhibit like this one could potentially be poking fun of us, but because we know that, we think we’ve transcended the game.  In reality, we’re still just another overly smart, dumb consumer. 

This sort posturing in the art world is what Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) is all about.  With acid wit, twenty-two artists explore what art is … and is not.  As players in the field, they’ve seen the hype, the trends, the gimmicks, the frustrations, the elitism, and the personalities that make up the contemporary art world.  Sometimes the artists leave you guessing what’s a stereotype and what’s the truth, but they never leave you indifferent.   

The artists showcasing their talents are Tamy Ben-Tor, Peter Coffin, Jennifer Dalton, Alejandro Diaz, Charley Friedman, Neil Goldberg, Terence Gower, Pablo Helquera, Christopher K. Ho and Troy Richards, Nina Katchadourian, David Kramer, Cary Leibowitz, Michael Lindeman, Pam Lins, Reynard Loki, Edgar Orlaineta, Laura Parnes, Danica Phelps, Jude Tallichet, Guy Richards Smit, and Michael Smith. 

There are also a slew of cheeky events in relation to the exhibit:  

Wednesday, July 11, 7pm
Pablo Helguera performs We all Need a Pygmalian, a musically enhanced inspirational lecture introducing The Pablo-Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style. Thursday, July 19, 8pm
An evening of screenings by Alex Bag, Kate Gilmore, David Kramer, Laura Parnes, Guy Richards Smit and Michael Smith. Tuesday, July 24, 7pm
Kalup Linzy performs a sequel to his 2006 Conversations wit de Churen V: As Da Art World Might Turn. Wednesday, July 25, 6-8pm
Open Book is an opportunity for artists who work in book form to share their production and process with other artists and interested viewers. Please submit materials to Sara Meltzer Gallery by no later than July 6th. Co-sponsored with Regency Arts Press Ltd. For further details, visit www.sarameltzergallery.com. Tuesday, August 14, 4pm
A walk-thru of the exhibition with private dealer Betsey Geffen, aka Charley Friedman

Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) just opened yesterday and will run through Friday, August 17. Sara Meltzer Gallery (525-531 West 26^th St., NYC) is open Monday - Friday, 11am-6pm; closed for July 4. 

Photo: Jennifer Dalton, The Collector-ibles (Top 10 Collectors According to ArtNEWS) (detail), 2006. 

“Free cash while supplies last!” Jonathan LeVine Gallery coyly advertised for tonight’s reception of Shepard Fairey’s E Pluribus Venom. By 7 PM the line to get in was already snaking long past the 81 Front Street entrance of the DUMBO installation space. Sure enough, the opening was a goldmine for art scensters.

The money was on the walls. With clever turns of phrase, Fairey — co-founder of the aptly named Swindle magazine — reimagined the Almighty Dollar in terms of America’s ruthless capitalism. In two floor-to-ceiling paintings of dollar bills, the artist quipped:

OBEDIENCE IS THE MOST VALUABLE CURRENCY
INDISCRIMINATE CAPITALISM
IN LESSER GODS WE TRUST
CASH CONQUERS ALL

REPETITION WORKS
MANUFACTURING DISSENT SINCE 1989

He even took a stab at money’s hold on the press:

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS GUARANTEED TO THOSE WHO OWN ONE

He continued his tongue-in-cheek critique of money in one of his paintings over muted collages, with the statement, “U.S. TREASURY. BRINGING DREAMS TO LIFE.”

Bundled up with money were themes of obedience (Fairey is famous for his “Obey Giant” street campaign), government, and war, suggesting that many people are blindly nationalistic.

Not suprisingly, red, black, and gold typified Fairey’s palette, although a smattering of paint adorned the floor in a kind of we-don’t-need-a-fancy-gallery-to-show-our-art type of way.

To top off the Dewars-fueled evening, Fairey was DJing his own reception, along with Cosmo Baker (The Rub) and 10 Fingers (700 Club Philly).

The DUMBO exhibit will be on view Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 - 7 PM, from June 22nd to July 7.

A second exhibition will open this Saturday, June 23, at Jonathan LeVine Gallery (529 West 20th St., 9th Fl, Manhattan), and will run through July 21.

You will not die if a penny thrown off the Empire State Building hits you.  Case in point: Anthony Savini.

About ten years ago, Anthony Savini was walking along, minding his own business, when something hit him. He turned around to yell at his assailant, but no one was there. Suddenly, it started raining pennies. He had become a magnet for money. It took him a second to realize he was right under the Empire State Building. Tourists were throwing coins off the skyscraper, as if Midtown Manhattan was a giant wishing well. Savini picked up the coin and left before another one could sting him.

“This chance encounter with a penny moving at 66 miles an hour was the beginning of my collection of coins that have stories,” says Savini. “The collection grew innocently to hundreds of coins, and collected dust in a binder.” Savini pocketed any coins he found. A 1990 penny from the Woodmere Train Station Café in New York. A 1968 yellow-painted dime, change from In & Out Burger in L.A. A penny found in a “give a penny, take a penny” dish at a deli. A quarter that was painted blue that he got as change from a truck stop in Arizona. A fingerprinted penny he found in his pocket.

After 9/11 Savini began photographing the coins he found as the series Change. For posterity’s sake, he photographed the money in the condition in which it was found. He used actual film, and only used PhotoShop for printing purposes. He explains, “Realism and the power of reality are an important part of the series.”

It is this realism that makes Change so fascinating. We live in an era in which digital retouching and plastic surgery, publicity stunts and spin doctors, and voice modulation and mockumentaries have become the norm. Even money has gotten a makeover, with collectible state quarters and safety-enhanced paper money.

“In recent years, as the dollar’s value changed for the worse, I began to look at the collection differently,” says Savini. “The Euro, China, globalization and other factors are affecting the value of the dollar in ways that ten years ago would have been unimaginable.”

It seems that these days, everything is subject to “change.”  As a backlash, people are searching for something real, something authentic. It’s given craze to unplugged and indie music, books like Found and Milk Eggs Vodka, reality TV (Savini himself has been a director of photography on numerous reality tv shows) and This American Life, and shabby chic and DIY aesthetics. Even if these trends might be bolstered by a larger corporate company and are staged or sliced and manipulated, at least they feel real. What it comes down to is that they feel personal.

And that’s what makes Change successful. The photographs are visually appealing, but aren’t particularly innovative (a quick search on Flickr reveals 54,433 photographs that match a search for “coin”). More so, Savini’s photographs are just that: copies or representations of the real thing, not the binder full of found coins. However, Savini is a wonderful storyteller that brings depth to his art.

He convincingly makes us reconsider the everyday objects in our life. Replete with endearingly genuine typos, he writes:

The photographs in Chnage [sic] are designed to bring the viewer up close to the money they use every day, surprising people who often admit they never really looked at change before. Full of detail and story, each photo on it’s [sic] own stands as an individual work of art, but as a group they take on a different role. Some of the coins feel as if they could be relics from ancient Rome and Greece, confusing something being produced today with something produced over 2000 years ago. Together the images question the value of money, the state of the dollar today, and into the future.

Change: Photographs of found coins are on view at Piola—a decidedly commercial pizza restaurants (located at 48 East 12th Street) in a city full of greasy dives—until June 30.

Savini has plans to turn Change into a book, which may in fact be a more compelling way for the artist to share his coin collection. If he chose to do so, he could tell the story behind how he found each coin. It would be interesting to hear about the laminated 1977 quarter he got as change in a 7-11. Why he’d stoop down on such a busy intersection as Seventeenth Street and Broadway just to pick up a penny. If he was purchasing equipment for photographing his coin collection when he got the black-painted dime back as change at Cameta Camera.

Coin collecting would probably be deemed about as uncool as stamp collecting, and we want to know, What are the most rare coins our readers have found? Or, if you’re more the type to go throwing your unwanted change off buildings or into fountains, Where are the most unique penny-throwing places you’ve encountered?

For the past five years or so there’s been a healthy artistic anarchy brewing beneath the Highline on far west 21st street.  Right under our collective nose nests a hive for,” artists, programmers, hackers, activists, technologists, kids, and adults,” to study, create, and collaborate on images that marry the sultry sexiness inherent in the world of computer programming with the sweetly misunderstood progressive neo- modern art movement. 

The result:  Eyebeam! A warehouse sized imaginarium that acts as a live studio replete with physical labs and computer work stations.   The functioning studio part of the space is a two story area separated from the rest of the building by a glass wall.  A hand painted sign on the wall, “WE FUCK HERE M- F 10-6” screams of opportunity for those brave enough and talented enough to seek it. Yet, that’s not all kids!  Under the same rood resides an open, free exhibition space.  From now until the end of August that space is home to some of the genius creations conceived by Eyebeam’s industrious, uninhibited residents.   

It’s called SOURCE CODE and it’s a 10 year retrospective of programming, Eyebeam style. I visited Eyebeam the other day, completely sober, to check out the scene.  I left the joint riding a natural high, imbibed with the exuberance that only a truly unique  New York experience can instill. 

Here’s a wee bit of what I saw: 

I Shot Andy Warhol  By:  Cory Arcangel 

The basis of this piece is the classic Nintendo game Hogan’s Alley.  A game originally released in 1985 and designed to be used with the Nintendo lightgun.  The object of the game was to shoot gangsters while not shooting innocent bystanders. 

Well, this dude reprogrammed the game and titled it “Shoot Andy Warhol”.  The title screen shouts out the name at the viewer.  Then the next screen, just like the original game gives you simple instructions: 

“Shoot Andy’s Only”.  Then it shows what Andy looks like.  Don’t shoot:  the Pope, Flava Flav, or the Colonel, all followed by their images.  Trust me, it’s hysterical. 

High Seas  By:  Jennifer & Kevin McCoy 

This is an incredibly detailed model of the Titanic that’s about five feet long.  Circling the model is a track that slopes up and down like the humps of a roller coaster.  Riding this track is a camera and a spot light that flashes every few seconds. 

Behind the model is a ginormous screen projecting exactly what the camera circling the lil’ Titanic sees.  Because of the hilly shape of the track and the intermittent flashes of light it looks like we’re watching a movie of the Titanic bouncing around on the high seas in the middle of a lightning storm.  Pretty clever, no? 

There are a bunch more pieces on display, but words fail me.  This is an experience you need to see to believe and enjoy. 

Important Shit! 

 ·  The show runs until August 11!·       It’s right across from Chelsea Piers!·       For address and hours click HERE!

I was ready to dismiss Mr.’s work as typical manga when I first saw it. Big-eyed, blue-haired, and cartoony, the adolescent portraitures seemed ripped from the Japanese comic books my classmates used to read back in elementary school. Taking a closer look, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery presents Mr.’s work as a funhouse of anime — larger-than-life, dizzyingly jubilant, and … verging on disturbing.

Oversized sculptures of heads perkily sitting on the gallery floor bring to mind the clown finale in a game of put-put — you want to skip all the paintings to fixate on the hole in the sculptures’ heads. No epicathal fold here as Mr. turns the eye of “Strawberry Voice” into a window. The eye really is the window to the soul. Guys, if you’ve ever wanted to know what goes on in a girl’s head, now’s your chance. But be forewarned: it’s cute overload in there. The girl doesn’t have a thought in her brain but kewpie dolls and stuffed animals.

What I’m scared to know is, what’s going on in Mr.’s head? As if the giant heads weren’t strange enough, more than one of his paintings are sexually charged portraits of naked adolescents. The press release cushioned the Japanese artist’s work in cultural context:

The Otaku subculture emerged in Japan in the 1970s and consisted mostly of males who were consumed by manga comics, anime animation, sci-fi literature and video games. Mr.’s large-eyed characters and flat color fields are influenced by this movement and its Lolita-esque fascination with adolescents. The cheerful boys with their pants down and girls in short skirts appear sexually provocative, asking the viewer to question whether the work is a comment on Otaku culture or an exploration of Mr.’s fantasy world.

Still, it’s very uncomfortable perhaps because it flirts with the sexuality of such young characters but is most likely to be bought by middle-aged white men with Asian fetishes.

This is Mr.’s first solo work in New York. His work is both skillful and thought-provoking, so keep an eye on this artist. It’s likely you’ll be hearing more of him in the future.

The work will be on display at Lehmann Maupin Gallery (540 West 26th Street, NYC) until June 23. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM till 6 PM. You can preview the artwork and watch a video of the installation process here.

[Photo from Lehmann Maupin Gallery.]

Poor Paris Hilton. Not in the financial sense obviously — the heiress is filthy rich simply by virtue of being born into the right family. Any job she has held has been a rather glamorous one — model, actress, author, purse designer. And she’s not poor so much in the social sense — each time her cell phone’s been hacked, her slew of celebrity friends have been revealed, and of course we always see her dancing on tables at nightclubs that wouldn’t let most of us get beyond the velvet ropes.

Wait — where was I going with this?

Oh yeah, poor Paris. She’s everyone’s favorite celebrity to pick on. People are ruthless about their opinions of her. The latest critic is Daniel Edwards, whose Paris Hilton Autopsy is currently on display at Capla Kesting Fine Art (121 Roebling Street, Brooklyn).

The sculpture of the socialite is reportedly meant to teach teens about the dangers of drinking and driving. Just a few days ago — May 4, to be exact — Hilton was sentenced to jail for drunk driving. Well, sort of. It was more that she had been speeding without her headlights on when she wasn’t even supposed to be driving at all because in September 2006 she’d been caught driving with a blood alcohol content of 0.08. And, she never signed up for a mandatory alcohol-education program.

If Edwards’ art had imagined Paris Hilton as a crashtest dummy, it would’ve gotten the point across with layered meanings: don’t drink and drive and Paris is a dummy. If Edwards made the beautiful Paris Hilton gory from a car crash, that too would’ve driven the message home that even pretty girls aren’t safe from the dangers of alcohol.

Edwards’ Paris Hilton Autopsy is not the public service announcement it claims to be, though. He has created a sexually explicit sculpture of a naked Paris Hilton. You can take her innards out, and if you do, you will discover two fetuses. This is an attack on Hilton’s sexuality. Granted, Hilton has been caught in one too many sex-tape scandals, but that has nothing to do with drunk driving.

The Paris Hilton Autopsy “includes support material from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD),” and it is clear that the exhibit seeks to scare teens out of sex, as well as drinking. The press release for Paris Hilton Autopsy “observes the teen pregnancy crisis associated with alcohol impaired judgment,” but the truth of the matter is, Paris Hilton was not a teenager when she was charged with DUI nor when she was rumored to be pregnant, which was later reported as false anyway.

What is a fact, is that Daniel Edwards’ depictions of famous female celebrities have stirred up controversy in the past. Last year around this time, Hilton’s friend Britney Spears was the subject of Edwards’ work. Like Hilton, Spears was depicted nude, with child, and in a sexual position. The sculpture was called Monument to Pro-Life, and the artist said, “Britney provides inspiration for those struggling with the ‘right choice.’” Meanwhile, Edwards also made a bust of Hillary Clinton, in which he portrayed her in a low-cut dress, downplaying her political achivements by staring at her boobs. By sexualizing these blondes, Edwards in fact degrades women.

There is no humanity in this piece.  It merely capitalizes on making fun of someone.   Whatever message Edwards had toward promoting abstinence of alcohol and sex through the Paris Hilton Autopsy will be lost on immature teen boys who will gawk at the almost-still-beautiful naked body. Young women, on the other hand, will once again see that even in their death they are little more than an objectified body.