No Logo James Stanfield

Sorry that I have not posted lately. I have been struggling with the idea of a blog for the past few weeks. I’ve even written a couple of entries that, for various reasons, I decided not to post.

I just found the site for a book that I recently read. It’s called No Logo, and I highly recommend it. It looks like the site contains many of Naomi Klein’s writings. I’m afraid not to read every article. www.nologo.org

Catch & Carry at Volume, Inc. James Stanfield

I’ve spent a few days writing a review about Catch & Carry, an exhibition at the tiny temporary space of Volume, Inc. The exhibition smartly centers on depictions of plants and animals, mostly minus the landscapes they inhabit, and the different media used to capture these depictions. Several revealing points pop out of the dialogue between works including our psychological need for some form of experience with nature, the way in which video and indeed all media work to distance us from that experience, and the common use of plants and animals as a shorthand notation for natural landscape.

I’m not going to reproduce my review here, but I did want to talk about one work in the show, a video loop by Elizabeth Neel called Stand (After Guernica). Aside from the heavy academic title I found the work to be particularly resonant.

The loop depicts a few seconds of what looks to be surveillance video of a horse attempting to wobble to its legs. These few seconds are repeated indefinitely, and the horse is never actually seen standing. In fact the video comes off as just a single image with the duration of the video seeming either very short or very long. It’s much like a wildly beautiful painting, albeit one that moves.

But the creature looks extremely fragile as it comes to its legs, and I began to read the horse’s action as very painful for the animal. The work emphasizes the dominance of what it means to capture an image, and also what it means to manipulate it by cropping and editing. I’m sure the horse was not really in pain, but I began to feel guilty for enjoying the beauty of an image that had captured an otherwise majestic animal in such a compromised moment. This simple snippet of video was revealed as powerfully capable of degrading its subject. In this way the loop became a charged fragment or a kind of media critique.

Monkeys Do Not Have Sex With Elephants Keith Gladysz

The Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) opened last fall in Chelsea, and features thousands of artworks from the Himalayas. The inviting space is like a mini-Guggenheim with live music, maroon, yellow and crest colored gallery walls, friendly staff and good food. And the collection of thankga paintings and ritual objects is unparalleled in North America.

I particularly enjoyed "The Demonic Divine" exhibit, which featured images of wrathful dharmic protectors. Badass good guys, just the way I like it.

Honestly, what I enjoyed most about the RMA was the bizarre wall text. For example, the picture I used for this article is from a photo I took of a thangka painting representing Ganesh getting a blowjob from a menstruating blue monkey goddess (I always knew Buddhism was cool). The accompanying text explains, "Monkeys do not have sex with elephants, and elephants do not have human heads. Meaning in much of tantric imagery is not literal". Important and helpful, thank you.

I also like this one: "HAIRSTYLE: Buddha has so much wisdom, it's created an extra lump on top of his head".

I really liked this place alot. It's a more comfortable space to hang out in than the typical white cube scenerio, and there's even an area designated for meditation if you're so inclined. I'm into that, though when I go back I'm sure I'll be spending most of my time reading the walls.

Window Blow-Out, 1976 James Stanfield

The following two paragraphs are quoted from Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, a catalogue that Keith found at a garage sale for 25 cents.

Beginning of quote:

Invited to an exhibition of work by architects and artists, “Idea as Model,” Gordon Matta-Clark elected to show not a new vision of architecture or planned proposal, but the current state of some architects’ model buildings: he displayed photographs of buildings in the South Bronx whose windows has been broken out by its residents. To complete the installation, Matta-Clark borrowed a BB gun from Dennis Oppenheim and blew out the windows in the exhibition space on the eve of the opening. His work was removed from exhibition and the windows quickly replaced in time for the reception.

One of Matta-Clark’s boldest and most direct statements on modern architecture, this exhibition offered him the opportunity to criticize what he felt to be a lack of attention paid by today’s architects to the problem of decaying buildings. He was disturbed by the attitude he felt existed on the part of many architects who saw them only as structures to be removed in the interest of renewal and urban planning, and constructed replacements that themselves soon became objects of decay. Matta-Clark felt that modern architecture was not meeting the needs of people, but rather was creating dehumanized situations; it had become an industry successful only in making money.

End of Quote.

Living in New York for the past year has meant that I take a daily walk through a couple of ghettos. I even suspect that I live in one. Decay is everywhere, but it is a kind of populated, active, loud decay. This is the architecture into which Matta-Clark inserted himself. It was the kind that was falling apart, messy, and polluted.

I can’t imagine having the nerve to pull off the stunt that I quoted above. I would have loved that show, if indeed we had been allowed to walk around in the broken-windowed exhibition hall. Matta-Clark’s architecture was often about people, but I think it was also about how hard it is to be a physical body in a world full of things that are always falling apart.

The First Bushwick Biennial Mayumi Hirano

The Bushwick Sketchbook Biennial was held at our apartment two days ago - Mother's Day. We were uncertain what kind of crowd we would get, but it turned out to be a nice number of friendly people. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and I personally had a lot of fun.

I had been a bit worried about the installation because I thought our apartment didn’t have enough space for showing 15 artist's works - even if they were just showing sketches. But it looks like I was wrong. After stuffing the closets with all our junk we had enough space. I was just happy that nobody complained about the hanging.

I didn’t get to do a studio visit with everybody, but the ones I got to do I enjoyed. I asked for sketches, and I ended up with everything from drawing to collage, photographs to sound work. The variety was a nice surprise.

As a part of the show we have built a web portal to show the artists’ other kinds of work. We thought it would be nice to send that out over the web. Take a look when you get a chance: www.januaryblog.com/bushwick.html.

The images at the top of this post were shown at the Biennial and are by Emily Mae Smith.

MOOM Keith Gladysz

I just came across this site, MOOM- the Museum of Online Museums. I looked at three or four listings and I was convinced. This is great stuff! Already, I saw photographs of manholes from around the world, Nose Art (girls painted on bombers), Fencing Manuals from throughout history, and a cereal box collection.

I'm going back to look at more. Check it out.

MOOM

Lucky Pop Face Keith Gladysz

A couple of weekends ago on that 80 degree saturday, I was in my native Huntington, LI. There was an antique show in Heckscher Park which I walked through, knowing I would finish my trip with a visit to the eclectic and insecure Heckscher Museum of Art. It's a worthwhile place with a suburban complex and a good collection of Arthur Dove and Milton Avery. Dove lived locally and showed there; his nearby cottage now being converted into a musuem.

I saw the exhibit "A New Narrative: Marden Fitzpatrick Stella Warhol". I never heard of Tony Fitzpatrick and was most interested in his work for that reason. The rest of the show was as expected. There were 10 of Fitzpatrick's etchings with aquatint from the '90's that lined one of the walls. The small stature and undisguised narrative of these works in this traditional medium lent themselves well to the location. They were comfortable and a bit too easy; like playing cards, gum wrappers or kids' prizes.

Tony made the pieces because of his interest in luck, calling it "a very real thing and I like trying to put a face on it" That sort of charmed me, though I didn't think much of the outcome. What I liked was the transmission of this direct thought into representation. It's palpable. Maybe looking at them in my hometown made me nostalgic for face-value image making, like stuff from high school art class. Seeing them anywhere else, I may not have given them another thought.

Sad Sack James Stanfield

Ian Kiaer should be one of my favorite artists on Earth. A certain curator gave me a poster of his a few years back. It has hung on my wall in four different apartments in three different cities. It’s just an image of an upside down trashcan. I think it is fantastic!

But Christ, this guy sure knows how to dampen my admiration. Why does his work have to be so pinned down? Why does he build work around narratives? Why is his work about stuff? Here’s an excerpt from the press release for his current Tanya Bonakdar Gallery show:

"‘The Grey Cloth’ presents five new works inspired by a novel from 1914 of the same name written by the German architectural critic and writer Paul Scheerbart. Setting his novel in the mid-20th century, Scheerbart lays out a visionary work about glass architecture, but within the context of a human and irony-filled narrative that includes the personal suffering and megalomania of the story’s main characters. Within the year the novel was complete, Scheerbart had died of an infection in his legs, and the show touches on his illness, his looking into the future which is also symmetrically our past, a kind of fictionalized Modernism, and somehow, the difficulty of writing and thinking about visionary work."

And here is an example of what the show looks like:



Do the text and images here have anything to do with one another? Seriously, how does it help to have read the above paragraph and then be confronted with work that is so full of arbitrary choice? It doesn’t. It’s just tiring. He makes wonderful, dematerialized combinations of objects. They mean so much on their own. They don’t need a text as an excuse to exist. Well…OK, maybe they did in the 90’s, but not any longer. Ian, it worked! You’ve got the attention that you deserve. But it's a new decade, and you don’t need to pretend anymore.

Canada Gallery James Stanfield

Here’s a little note about Canada Gallery’s latest. In the past year they’ve had several exhibitions that made a couple of friends and I use the term trash-art with regularity. It seems that we couldn’t really decide whether trash-art was something we wanted to be or was something we wanted to work against.

Ever since one heart-stopper of an exhibition by Gedi Sibony, which I must confess to only having seen as photographs, I’ve been determined to not miss another of their shows. After numerous trips (with only Ronson Crow even beginning to be an exception) I’ve remained mostly underwhelmed.

But the latest, Seven Thousand Years of War with Aidas Bareikis, Phil Grauer, and Sarah Braman really pumps some excitement back into the room. The work represented is a little light on the content end, but what it does have is a kind of angst-fueled formalism. This brand of we-all-drop-dead assemblage takes its art history lessons from the likes of Rauschenberg, Kienholz, and a dash of Anthony Caro, but if you’re willing to follow my trajectory you might find that almost every object in the room betrays a sensibility indebted to late 80’s and early 90’s personal punk, via The Melvins and Dinosaur Jr.

I believe this is how the new trash-art (for lack of a better phrase) plans to operate. You can approach it like you would a 45 year-old high-modern sculpture, and at times it’s a little like the everyday shit you see clogging the garbage bins on Canal Street, but the important key here is feeling the works in the same way you, fifteen years ago, felt an emotive alt rock song. And while this approach comes with some nostalgia in tow, it might help to make sense of the kinds of punchy, ramblings leaking out from under Canada’s door.

One artwork in the show is not trying to do anything that different from any of the other artworks in the show; no artwork in the show is trying to refer to anything specific in the world. If a work by Braman confronts Anthony Caro’s work, I don’t understand it to do so didactically. It only brushes shoulders with the elder and moves quickly back to its native vocabulary of trash structure. If Bareikis winks to Kienholz, it is just a wink, never taking on any of his specific politics as subject matter. This is much how Kurt Cobain may have been dipping into one of his notebooks, cobbling various fragments of songs together – a verse here, a chorus there. Every work is a practice in arranging or cropping, and all with an aesthetic sense focused on the anger and ennui that I associate with a certain era of rock music.

Word of warning: you most certainly should not approach this work with a thesis statement in hand or ear, and maybe this is why I’m most excited about this space. They seem to be throwing a good portion of art world garbage out the window, even if most it does just end up being dragged back in and displayed on their showroom floor.