Carol Es is the latest artist featured on J.T.'s excellent artists interview artists project. I like this pingirl.
These are my two friends kidnapped from Marius Valdes' exhibition of hundreds of unwantables. They now live on my kitchen windowsill.
ATM - I like Deki Yayoi's work. She's an artist I've been aware of for a while, since her first or second show in Japan. The stuff here was more restrained than what I've previously seen of her work but still good. She's nuts. Every little dot of color has a smiley face in it. It was interesting to walk across the street to Baumgartner after that and see Kusama Yayoi's small painting. Can't find an image of that piece but it was a lot like one of Deki's without the smiley faces. They are both nuts. Is this the first show of Deki Yayoi in NYC? If so I wish you had been able to see one of her bigger more obsessively wacked and cosmic pieces.
Tomoo Gokita was a doodler.
DCKT - How could I not see Tyler Green's show? The artists in this show do that "lots of" thing again of taking lots of something and and piling it all together until they have a bigger something - lots of soy sauce packets, lots of little tape circles, lots of little pencil circles. Maybe the difference between the three in this show and most other "lots of" artists is that "lots of" people often let the final shape seem like a more organic thing, while the three here have mostly created straight-edge boundaries to box their growths in. Dan Steinhilber is the most interesting for me.
Augusto Di Stefano was a double disappointment because not only is he a lot-of artist he is also a doodler. I thought he would be showing paintings?
The gallerists were friendly. I wandered a little too far back but all three people back there gave a warm "hi".
Lehmann Maupin - At first I thought Christian Hellmich was the missing Leipzig chick except she's not from Leipzig and I'm not sure she's a chick. My favorite works in this show were the smaller of the David Deutsch paintings. Fabien Rigobert's video and photo came in second. I liked Angela Dufresene's smaller paintings at Monya Rowe more than her large ones here.
Clementine - Wayne White is so unbelievably boring. Please, no more! David Rathman is a doodler and boring (the link is from his old cowboy work, now he's doing boxers). No more scrappy drawings, please!!! There are very few people who can do scrappy doodles and lots-of well, and more are not necessary. Give me some meat and I'll take a scrappy doodle on the side, but I don't want any more scrappy doodles as the main course. It's not healthy!! Where is the nourishment in Chelsea? I can't believe I used to want to be in this gallery. Okay, I would still do it - but it's not my first choice!!!
Cynthia Broan - Melanie Stidolph's photograph of a radiant baby was a beautiful backyard Blakean cherub. Sarah Bednarek had a subversive sofa screenprinted with terrorists among the foliage. The Una-Bomber, Hitler - I forget who exactly but all of them are historical figures. This could be in your grandmother's living room with matching curtains and nobody would ever notice. If only this fabric could be slipcovered onto something for a Bush/Blair photo-op.
I'm a big Sarah Bednarek fan. Pictured above is a detail of her piece "Ideologues and Dictators", currently on the cover of the British magazine Miser and Now. Deadpan photos of her with Mussolini's mustache, Lincoln's mole, etc.
Robert Miller also had very good paintings by Alice Neel and Milton Resnick.
Lennon, Weinberg - The Stephen Westfall painting. Dogwood is a large vertical rectangular canvas trisected by two horizontal and two vertical red bands, creating nine white squares. The white squares are each divided further by one horizontal and one vertical black line - like windowpanes. None of these bands or lines are exactly straight or match up. They're all a little off and it hurts your eyes looking at it trying to make this marks line up as they should. I saw this shortly after seeing the Good Vibrations show at McKenzie.
Here's a Jerry Saltz essay on Stephen Westfall.
McKenzie - Good Vibrations - lots of good stuff - I liked Julian Stanczak, Barbara Takenaga, and most especially the two paintings by Laura Watt.
Sonnabend - Four large landscape c-prints by Elger Esser that had an old postcard feel. Turns out that they actually are photographs of old postcards blown up big. My favorite got taken off the wall and wrapped before my eyes!
Barbara Gladstone - The Slater Bradley and Chris Burden videos. I didn't even realize this was an old (1980) Burden video until I looked at the sheet, I thought it was something new going for a trendy look. Big Wrench is an obsessive funny stalkerish video about a truck.
Nicole Klagsbrun - The seven playful Tuttle-esque pieces/interventions by Cordy Ryman. He had pipe pieces, door braces, a pink corner "ladder", and some wall painting-sculptures (Spider Star was my favorite of those).
Feigen - I liked Craig Love's small pieces best. At first I thought the Judith Linhares painting was a Dana Schutz (and here is a discussion on Edward Winkleman's comments about Schutz which mentions Linhares).
D'Amelio Terras - My favorites here were the two collages by Corin Hewitt. Really weird.
CRG - I liked Zak Prekop's small green painting best.
Monya Rowe - I was most interested in Angela Dufresne's three paintings here. She also had some bigger paintings at Lehmann Maupin but I didn't like them as much.
303 - The Shannon Oksanen portraits were too much the same but worse of the better portraits of that same gallery's Maureen Gallace.
Margaret Thatcher - friendly staff
Marianne Boesky - closed for installation but friendly staff-person who tried to get me a cup of water.
I've had enough of doodles, doodling, and doodlers and saw way way more merchandise than art. I wish I had had time to see the Helion show and Cezanne and Pisarro at MoMA.
QM, I think I'll call her QM starts with an older woman, a psychologist named Dr. Ruth Fielding, waking up and realizing that a mud-coated animal woman is under her bed. She coaxes/drags the creature out and most of the film is spent with her studying it. The creature woman, QM, crawls around in the dirt and never speaks. It's hard to tell how much time passes exactly. All the upstairs floors of Fielding's house are covered with brown dirt and she walks around in a dirty lab coat muttering into a tape recorder. She has a video camera over her front stoop and yells at kids playing outside. She covers all her windows with books. She seems crazy and might even be imagining QM.
Felding, played by Kathleen Chalfant, is based on a real-life psychologist named Alice E. Fabian who documented her own battle with madness through tape-recordings, journals, photographs, and wall-scribblings. She made photographs of photographs and had microfiche diaries locked in safe deposit boxes. Siden had made a number of seperate QM and and Fielding pieces before deciding to have the two meet in QM, I think I'll call her QM. I can't explain all this because it is ten plus years of two ever more convoluted projects which end up meeting in this one movie. I'm not sure why in some videos QM is so articulate and in QM, I think I'll call her QM she crawls around like a lizard - something about time and space and cosmic mud.
If you go to Mass Moca make sure you schedule enough time to spend with Ann-Sofi Siden's Queen of the Mud Museum, at least an hour. That one film is half an hour long and there is much more to the project. It's worth the time, probably my favorite out of all the stuff I saw today. I'll talk about some of the other stuff tomorrow.
Here's a Daniel Birnbaum article on Siden.
This is Larry Woiwode.
I chose a poem from his collection Even Tide and asked Larry if he'd write it on my painting. In this picture you can see Larry holding the book and transcribing the poem. He changed it a little bit from book to painting; the original poem was written about twenty-five years before the transcription. I'm very thankful to Larry Woiwode. Below is the poem taken from the book, tomorrow I'll post an update showing how it was edited for the painting.
I stared the stars in the face for an answer
And the moon appeared – it was no apparition,
The gold round host
In a cold sky.
It spoke:
Dark is nearer my heart than light;
I arrived, as you, out of equal circumstance,
And I, as you, reveal myself at night.
You see death has taken my face
And ages before the rest but my eye
Looking down wondering why you tremble
When you contend only with her or a her and I
With the irresuscitability of myself,
Myself, myself, and this – ambiguous sky.
BONUS!: this is the same painting Jonathan Franzen posed with earlier. Here's the finished painting.
UPDATE 7/11/2005: the last line is the only thing different on my painting, he omitted the word "ambiguous".
This is Sherod Santos.
Here's an interview with Sherod Santos.
Thumbs-Up Magic, Activate!
This is Carl Dennis. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Practical Gods.
Daniel Buren, Inside (Centre of Guggenheim), 1971. Installed for one day.
I came across this color reproduction of Buren's 1971 Guggenheim piece over the weekend. This title is different - I thought it was called Peinture-Sculpture. Maybe one title is for the piece and the other for the exhibition, like with the latest exhibition The Eye of the Storm and the big centerpiece Around the Corner? Doesn't he have another title for the gel-covered windows at the top, something like The Rose Window? Isn't it all one piece? Why the different titles?
Here's Daniel Baird's Brooklyn Rail article on Buren's 2005 Guggenheim installation.
I blogged the Daniel Buren lecture, part one here and part two here.
