Let My People Show

Josephine Baker Spotted Near Times Square: Josephine Baker has...

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:23:34 -0400

Josephine Baker Spotted Near Times Square:

Josephine Baker has arrived in Manhattan, courtesy Kiki Smith. The multi-faceted artist has rendered the fabulous, American-born toast of Paris, along with the multi-hued shooting stars that surround her, in stained glass, installing them in a decidedly unglamorous venue—a rubble-strewn lot at 46th Street and 8th Avenue. The site, in the heart of the Theater District, is called, reasonably enough, “The Last Lot,” by the Art Production Fund, which borrowed it from the Shubert Organization and presented the project in conjunction with the Times Square Alliance.

The piece, called Chorus, holds its own in the cacophonous scene by refusing to compete with it. The star, bedecked in pearls with one breast artfully exposed, presides over her entourage, glistening and translucent, out of reach but visible through a chain-link fence. They they form an improbable garden of jewels in the high-tech, honky-tonk setting.

Chorus offers its touch of glass through September 4.

Photo © BFA/Courtesy Art Production Fund.

Under My Umbrella-ella-ella: Photographer Tim Schreier passed by...

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:49:00 -0400

Under My Umbrella-ella-ella:

Photographer Tim Schreier passed by Pat Steir’s wall painting on Rivington Street yesterday.

Da Puppy Code: If Awol Erizku’s 2009 photo Lady with a...

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:25:01 -0400

Da Puppy Code:

If Awol Erizku’s 2009 photo Lady with a Pitbull looks familiar, maybe that’s because she reminds you of another famous lady in art history holding a cuddly (yet suggestive) creatiure—Leonardo Da Vinci’s Lady With An Ermine, his 1496portrait of the teenaged mistress of Duke Ludovico Sforza, Cecilia Gallerani.

The photo is part of the Ethiopa-born artist’s upcoming show at Hasted Kraeutler, featuring models he found on the street and online who sat for him in poses reminiscent of the Old Masters.

Courtesy of the artist & Hasted Kraeutler, NYC.

Member of the Tribe: Crowds along the High Line watched as JR...

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:45:00 -0400

Member of the Tribe:

Crowds along the High Line watched as JR and his crew unfurled 64 strips to reveal the image of Brandon Many Ribs yesterday, a part of the artist’s Inside Out Project that brings faces of the Lakota people to New York. Want to join in the worldwide, participatory-art portrait project? Here’s how.

Photo: Tim Schreier

Sofa, So Good: Where Yuskavage Meets Vuillard He’s the...

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:30:00 -0400

Sofa, So Good: Where Yuskavage Meets Vuillard

He’s the painter and onetime Nabi whose multi-hued, multi-patterned interiors, populated by a coterie of urbane friends and patrons, are featured in a current show at New York’s Jewish Museum. She’s the painter of provocative figures, particularly outlandish undressed females, that play with convention and expectations. So just what about Edouard Vuillard does Lisa Yuskavage find so mesmerizing?

Find out this Thursday, when Yuskavage reveals to Jewish Museum chief curator Norman Kleeblatt how she was seduced and influenced by the French master’s work. The public chat is sure to be revealing—one way or another.

Left: Edouard Vuillard, “Marcelle Aron (Madame Tristan Bernard),” 1914. Courtesy The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Alice C. Simkins in memory of Alice N. Hanszen. Right: Lisa Yuskavage, “Northview,” 2000, oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

A Little Birdie Told Me: Is the cardinal turning into a...

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:17:20 -0400

A Little Birdie Told Me:

Is the cardinal turning into a peacock? Another in-process view of the mural created by the Art School Without Walls with H Veng Smith and Sofia Maldonado at 5th and D. Stay tuned for a full report…

Tweet This! A small detail of the incredible mural created by...

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:57:17 -0400

Tweet This!

A small detail of the incredible mural created by the Art School Without Walls under the direction of two street artists, Sofia Maldonado and H Veng Smith, on 5th and D on New York’s Lower East Side. The Veng-Maldonado collaboration, where his winged creatures meet her winged clouds, conjured a vibrant, new hybrid style, rooted in nature and spray paint and modern walls and even ancient caves. Veng’s birdies here were caught in one of Maldonado’s tropical storms, but they don’t seem to mind.

The Matrix Is Everywhere: I go for the tactical photo op in Neon...

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:54:09 -0400

The Matrix Is Everywhere:

I go for the tactical photo op in Neon Box Head, a 2008 piece made of neon and mirrors by trippy installation duo Assume Vivid Astro Focus that’s in “Never Ever Ever Land,” a group show at Anna Kustera gallery. It’s one of a number of immersive, participatory installations in New York right now, including Ernesto Neto at Bonakdar, Hélio Oiticica at Lelong, Lucio Fontana at Gagosian, and, most spectacularly, Cloud City, Tomás Saraceno’s constellation of large, interconnected modules, opening this week on the roof of the Met.

This proves that it’s more important than ever to wear flat, comfortable shoes when you’re looking at art (unless you’re actually working in gallery, in which case black pumps are OK). The Met offers even stricter guidelines for potential climbers of Cloud City: besides warning that no one with leather soles will be admitted, it advises women to consider wearing pants, given the transparent nature of the artist’s massive modules.

Anarkia en Andalusia: Greil Marcus, Spanish Punk, and...

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:53:05 -0400

Anarkia en Andalusia: Greil Marcus, Spanish Punk, and Me

“I think I wrote that punk produced better art than all the avant-garde movements before it. And I meant that.”

So said Greil Marcus, the great rock writer, during his long, introspective, and illuminating interview with Simon Reynolds, which the Los Angeles Review of Books has been posting in mesmerizing segments. In the latest section, part 3 of 4, Marcus discussed Lipstick Traces, his groundbreaking book subtitled A Secret History of the Twentieth Century--in which, as he puts it, “I spent five hundred fucking pages trying to make this case, that the Sex Pistols had an entire tradition — an unspoken, unheard, invisible tradition — behind them. They were the avant-garde taking its revenge on the 20^th century, and saying, ‘Now, you’re going to have to listen to us whether you like it or not.’” He got there by way of Dada and the Situationists, and Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten, and the medieval heretics and the Brethren of the Free Spirit—to name but a few.

I had met Marcus while I was fact-checking his articles at Artforum; though he was victim of one of my most famous typos—the “Butthole Surgers“—he hired me anyway to photo edit Lipstick Traces. And when I told him about the punks I was meeting in Priego de Córdoba, the Andalusian town I frequented in the ‘mid-80s, he helped me land an assignment from the Village Voice. The LA Review has just republished my 1988 piece on its blog.

For me, it was a chance at my first big story. For Marcus, as he explains to Reynolds, the story illustrates one of the great truths about punk: “it’s never revived, it’s rediscovered.”

As he describes it, “These kids come up to her and say, ‘We’re punkys, we have these Sex Pistols records, but we don’t know what they mean… Could you translate them for us?’ So she writes all the lyrics to the songs out in Spanish… Now they start singing the songs in Spanish on the street, but they also start hearing the songs in a way they never could before, with all of the rage and the dynamics and exploding walls in the songs intact, but with the slogans and the signposts too. They begin to delve into the history of their own town and discover forgotten anarchist traditions. They discover how the anarchist movement was repressed during the Spanish Civil War. They begin to realize that they are part of a historical continuum. There has been a conspiracy of silence to deprive them of knowledge of their own real legacy. And then they go off and live their lives, with a sense of resentment and deprivation and anger that they didn’t have before. That’s the punk story. And that was not a revival; that was a rediscovery.”

I was delighted to see my old article get new legs. Even now, some of those lyrics still resonate in my head, especially Kortatu’s chant, “La Cultura— es Tortura.” Who doesn’t feel that way sometimes?

Feria in Priego de Córdoba, mid-80s. Photo by Robin Cembalest

Shepard Fairey: What a Relief! Shepard Fairey’s Pace...

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:08:00 -0400

Shepard Fairey: What a Relief!

Shepard Fairey’s Pace Prints show, titled “Harmony and Discord,” conveys the agit-prop message for which the Obama Hope artist is well-known: one series, Reagan and Friends, depicts the former president, along with Richard Nixon and other corporate types, as corrupt salesmen. Others riff on global warming, the dove of peace, and a grenade that could pave the way for a revolution.

But this political commentary is delivered in particularly seductive and tactile images that show the artist exploring technique as well as the powerful influence of artists he admires. Targets and comic-book text bubbles riff on Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Rugged, handmade paper is the ground for some of the editions, made with a mix of stenciling, spray paint, embossing, and relief printing. And, for the first time (in an inspiration he credits to Barbara Kruger), Fairey experimented with the magnesium printing plate itself as a ground, reveling in its relief surface as he layered color on top. (He had special plates made so the pictures wouldn’t be flopped.)

At the opening, the artist also revealed his next project: paintings inspired by every song on Americana, the new album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse covering classics like “Oh Susannah,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “Clementine.” The works, to be exhibited at a private, one-day event to celebrate the album’s release at Perry Rubenstein’s new Hollywood gallery next month, were the result of an elaborate back-and-forth process between artist and musician. “It was a genuine collaboration,” says Fairey, who describes the resulting images as “heroic but with a dark twist.”

Detail of “Rise Above Rebel (Plate),” 2012, hand-rubbed, rolled, and transferred ink on photo-etched magnesium plate. 32 x 24”; edition of five. Courtesy the artist and Pace Prints, New York.

Does Frieze Have a Homeless Problem? In retrospect, perhaps, it...

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:09:00 -0400

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...

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:26:00 -0400

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...

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:00:44 -0400

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...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:30:56 -0400

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...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:24:16 -0400

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’...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:53:23 -0400

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...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:21:00 -0400

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.

Your Face Here? JR, the peripatetic French artist spreading...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:29:00 -0400

Your Face Here?

JR, the peripatetic French artist spreading goodwill and enormous posters around the globe, moves through Little Italy with his InsideOut project.

Operating in the juncture where participatory art meets social media, the TED Prize-winner asks people to send him black-and-white photographic portraits—which he transforms into posters and sends back to their communities, where the images are posted in public settings, and then documented in online archives.

Created by JR, his partner, Marc Azoulay, and their team, this portrait, part of the Lakota Tribute series, hovers over the intersection of Mulberry and Prince Streets in downtown Manhattan. Check out the way their Ben-Day-like dots play off the bubble letters below— setting up a comic-book showdown between street art and graffiti, perhaps.

Photo: Tim Schreier

Venus Envy: Black Box Venus, 1990, by Al Hansen, the Beat...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:56:34 -0400

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...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:48:54 -0400

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.