Does Frieze Have a Homeless Problem?

In retrospect, perhaps, it was clear that those shopping carts filled with stuffed plastic bags parked around the grounds at the Frieze art fair, the kind that homeless people push, aren’t really homeless peoples’ carts. That is, they are homeless people’s carts, but they aren’t carts left by homeless people, which surely would have been removed by the staff.

Instead, they are, of course, art—a project staged by two provocateurs, curator Tom Eccles and artist Cristoph Büchel, who bought the carts from homeless people for $350-500 a piece. Each cart is titled 1% (the name of each former owner follows in parentheses)—not only for the “we-are-the-99%-occupy-movement-rhetoric,” as the artist puts it, “but also to that a cart was bought for 1% of the actual art market value.” 

Buchel’s gallery, Hauser & Wirth, notes that the carts are a prologue to the Homeless Parade, “an actual parade with homeless people” through New York City that the artist “is working to organize in collaboration with Homeless people, the Sculpture Center, and organizations that support the homeless.”

This particular cart leans against Et tu, Duchamp?,  a sculpture by Subodh Gupta, another Hauser & Wirth artist, who recapitulated the Dadaist’s rectified readymade of a Mona Lisa postcard, but in black bronze. 

Maybe next someone will come along and cast the carts in bronze, creating yet another venue for exploring issues of exploitation, appropriation, intellectual property, and personal property. But who would have the rights?

Christoph Büchel, 1% (Jacob), 2012, homeless cart. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Let It Pour!

Holton Rower’s paintings look like landscapes, networks, neurons, and rainbows distorted through kaleidoscopes.  Last night, the artist, a grandson of Alexander Calder, celebrated his opening at the Bowery gallery The Hole with a Dior-sponsored dinner, where ever-growing piles of flower petals seemed themselves to spill out of his massive, multicolored works. Then the artist demonstrated before a rapt audience how he makes his pictures, pouring successive cups of pigment onto a wood ground. The concentric circles rippled around vials of Dior nail lacquer strategically placed to create a flower effect as the paint, inexorably moving toward and off the edges of the wood, found its way around them. As the the artist completed the painting, he announced, the last five colors replicated tones from Dior’s new line. Very polished! 

Alien Nation? 

Do immigrants have a particular photographic vision of the United States? Is there such a thing as a Chinese aesthetic, focus, point of view? These are some of the questions addressed in “America Through a Chinese Lens,”  an intriguing and provocative travelogue at the Museum of Chinese in America, the newest of New York City’s museums dedicated to a cultural group. For the show, curator Herb Tam has assembled work from a wide range of photographers of Chinese heritage who depict the sweep of the country: from generic-looking suburbs to national monuments memorialized in dead-pan images by artists like Wing Young Huie andTseng Kwong Chi to abject urban settings where teens party into the night. What unites it all, Tam says, is a sense of the outsider, that “we’re trying to get used to ourselves in this space.” 

While the show is going on, new media artist An Xiao will be traveling the nation, posting her own photographic observations right here on Tumblr, at chineseinamerica.tumblr.com. But tonight she is in New York, for a panel at the museum called “Where is Photography?”, where, with Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian and curator Stephanie Tung, she’ll discuss the increasing private way our public lives are shared, along with other issues raised by the fast-changing methods in which we record and distribute images of our own experience.

Wing Young Huie, Death Valley, California, 2001,  digital C-print. Courtesy of the artist.

Pat Steir’s Spring Fling

For years in her travels around the world, Pat Steir has seen graffiti that resembles her signature drips. Those precedents were on her mind last Friday, when she donned a painter’s jumpsuit, climbed a ladder, and began splashing the wall on Rivington Street, below Sue Scott Gallery, in looping arcs of in red, yellow, blue, and white. By the time she was done, a few hours later, it looked as though a luminous, multicolored scrim had materialized, obscuring but not quite obliterating the landscape of bubble letters and torn posters beneath it.

In a sense the project was a continuation of Steir’s  Nearly Endless Line , her site-specific painting at the gallery in 2010, which also materialized on the outside wall. But this was more like a tagging than a wall painting—if not exactly a covert operation, given that the landlord said he was OK with it. That’s why Tom McGrath, whose post-painterly nocturnes currently inhabit the gallery, suggested a new title, Under the Cover of Daylight. It stuck.

Steir says that taggers were respectful of her last contribution to Rivington Street, so we’ll see what happens this time. That means Under the Cover of Daylight will be on view on Rivington just off Bowery, until it’s not.

Photo: Tim Schreir.

Get Your Kicks from Schútte’s Nix Pix:

An image from “Volume II (The Big Nix),” 2005, Thomas Schütte’s portfolio of 17 color etchings with letterpress and 5 text pages, on view in his show at Carolina Nitsch in Chelsea through Saturday.

Kinetic Aesthetic: How sunrise sculpture came to Saks’ flfth floor

Landing a coveted spot on the fifth floor of Saks Fifth Avenue is coup enough for a designer, but for an artist it is practically impossible. Yet there was Nobuhiro Nakanishi, a Japanese sculptor who had never before shown in the United States, beholding his expansive piece, a mesmerizing 3-D sunrise installed right outside Phillip Lim’s front-row boutique, as friends and colleagues toasted them with prosecco, courtesy the store and W magazine.

The artwork was Lim’s idea. To complement his new collection of structured summerwear, the designer said, he’d wanted a piece that evokes the theme of kites, something that would “bring the inside outside.” A bit of a collector himself—he cites a Jim Hodges as a recent purchase—he turned to the web, where he came across Nakanishi’s “layered landscapes,” composed of images of natural phenomena that are photographed over time, laser-printed onto transparent panels, and hung in sequential rows. Lim commissioned a 27-panel piece for a prominent setting right in the entrance to the fifth-floor collections; more of Nakanishi’s mysterious hangings accompany Lim’s garments in the Fifth Avenue windows. They’re kind of like poetry in motion—call it the kinetic sublime.

Just like any beautiful sunrise, though, their appearance is fleeting—just until next week. 

Photo: Billy Farrell Agency. 

The Answer (on the L Train) Is Blowing in the Wind:

We all know what it’s like to run for the subway doors, only to watch them close and the train pull away, but it took the particular sensibility of Neil Goldberg to turn the experience into an art piece. One of his photo series shows New Yorkers doing just that; another records people choosing salad-bar offerings. “Subway Trapezoids“ shows the piece of sky you see when you ascend the stairs. These and more, including a video of a wind gust moving through people’s hair at the Bedford Avenue stop on the L Train, are in “Stories the City Tells Itself: The Video Art and Photography of Neil Goldberg,”  the first contemporary-video show at the venerable Museum of the City of New York. To help the artist explain how he transforms seemingly meaningless moments into profound and comical artworks, the museum turned to Maira Kalman, whose delight and empathy for the objects of daily life was so beautifully showcased in her recent Jewish Museum exhibition.  This Thursday, they will both appear in a conversation at the Museum of the City of New York, hosted by Queens Museum director Tom Finkelpearl. The subject is how they make art out of the everyday. Go for the talk—but get there early for treats from Brooklyn’s Blue Marble Ice Cream. 

Image from Goldberg’s single-channel video installation ”Wind Tunnel,” 2012. Courtesy Museum of the City of New York and the artist. 

Venus Envy: 

Black Box Venus, 1990, by Al Hansen, the Beat poet/Fluxus artist/actor/composer/cool cat (who was the granddaddy of, and big influence on, the musician Beck). The piece, crafted from cigarette butts, looks like the meeting of the Venus of Willendorf and Eva Hesse (via Joseph Cornell and Xu Bing). It’s part of ”the spirit level,” a group show featuring 19 artists curated by impish Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone at both venues of the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, which also includes Kim Jones, Jay DeFeo, and a number of other cult-figure creators, better known and lesser known. Catch it before it closes Saturday.

Copyright Al Hansen/Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Accidental Tour Guide:

30 years (!) after my internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I returned to lecture to our Gallery Club. The theme: Using the collections for inspiration. Before we set off on a day of looking and sketching everywhere from Egypt to Oceania, I talked about what an encyclopedic museum really is. Then I gave our members tips for navigating the galleries when they come back on their own. Read more—and see the slide show—at niborama.com, the art blog of Mista Oh!’s youth development collective, Cre8tive YouTH*ink.