Chelsea's Skeleton Crew

At Cheim & Read: Jenny Holtzer's Lustmord Table, 1994, a skeleton's worthof bones with engraved silver bands, teeth, on dropleaf wooden table

m As you Will Be: The Skeleton as Art at Cheim & Read

This month the city feels more like a necropolis than a metropolis, at least in Chelsea, where the galleries are rolling in bones. True, it’s October, so you’ll expect to see plenty of skeletal trick-or-treaters in the Village at the end of the month—and a few more for Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos, that oddly tender and un-Halloween-like embrace of loved ones who have passed—but I wonder what coincidence accounts for the sheer number of osseous offerings at the galleries. (Is there a subliminal connection to the feeling of dread some gallerists are feeling as long-term leases begin to expire? The specter of grim reapers, er, developers, is eerily present throughout Chelsea.)

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What’s on display right now is staggering: four shows—two curated group exhibitions and two solos—and several others, both solo and group, in which skulls and bones have a presence. To varying degrees these shows acknowledge not only death but philosophy, literature, allegory, science and pop culture. The shows make for compelling viewing. I was touched right down to my, well bones.

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Curated Shows

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I Am As You Will Be at Cheim & Read

This is the big one. It’s a museum-worthy show, curated by Xavier Tricot. Reminders of death are everywhere, but the mood is not grim. The work is mordantly curious (Jenny Holzer’s table of bones); coolly elegant (Angelo Filomeno’s embroidered skeleton in silk on silk, Jan Van Oost’s cast silver hand with fingers poking into a skull); and reflective, both literally (Adam Fuss’s daguerreotype of a cranium that superimposes your own face as you view it, Katherina Fritsch’s porcelain cranium set before a mirror, Kris Martin's gleaming bronze skull), and figuratively (particularly Tony Matelli’s ossuary-like pile).

Skullduggery at Cheim & Read, including Damien Hirst's Male and Female Pharmacy Skeletons; Donald Baechler's Crowd (Skulls) #1; Tony Matelli's Sad Skulls on pedestal;Lynda Benglis's Man/Landscape on floor

Above: Angelo Filomeno, The Philosopher's Woman, 2007, embroidery on silk (more beautiful and less gruesome than it looks in this picture); and Jan Van Oost, Salome, 1990, cast silver

Below: Kris Martin, I Am Still Alive, 2006, bronze

Above: Katharine Fritsch, Pictures with Mirror and Skull, 1998

Below: Adam Fuss, Untitled, 2002, unique dagurreotype

Tony Matelli, Sad Skulls, 2003, polystyrene; with Hirst skeletons and Fuss daguerreotypes in the distance

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As always, Louise Bourgeois's work pulls up a tangle of emotions. On some non-linear level it inevitably leaves me thinking about life. Here, an arched figure is composed of pantyhose stretched over an armature of, I’m guessing, chicken bones. Is it in the throes of death? No it's a Roswell-like specimen, placed for scrutiny in a vitrine. No it's a Surrealist science project. Maybe even a fashion statement. This is a work that leaves no bone unturned--in a show that does the same. See it.

Louise Bourgeois, Arched Figure No. 2, 1997; fabric, bone and steel

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Death and Love in Modern Times at Dinter Fine Art
Presented in a salon-style installation, this show is the (probably) unintended companion to the Cheim & Reid show. More modest than its upscale neighbor a couple of blocks downtown, it’s more fully packed yet also more focused: specifically on the skull. A ceramic skull with a clear ash glaze by Phil Sims stands out—literally—as it’s on a pedestal. Alas, the problem for me with salon-style installations is that no matter how gorgeous, and this one is indeed so, you can’t see the trees for the forest. Well, you can see them—I spent a lot of time looking—but I can’t remember specifics without my notes. And I can't find my notes. Bad blogger.

Panoramic view of Death and Love in Modern Times at Dinter Fine Art

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The Solo Shows

Void Thoughts on Remote Time, Mike Peter Smith at the Jeff Bailey Gallery
Walking into the space for this show feels a bit like a visit to the Mutter Museum, especially the two craniums rejiggered to have three eye sockets, but the rest of the work suggests paleontology—the "remote time" of the title—so perhaps the Museum of Natural History is a better reference. I found this show peculiar but uplifting; we’ve been here a while.

Above: Mike Peter Smith, New York Spring, 2007, mixed media; below: Australopithecus (Hand to Mouth), 2007, mixed media based on "Lucy," the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton

Steven Gregory: Bone, Stone, Bronze at the Nicholas Robinson Gallery
This show is the most macabre, what with goth-like decorated skulls—equal parts Hell’s Angels and Damien Hirst—and a large sculptural circle of bronze bones and skulls. But the vertebrae chair is an elegant-to-its-bones bit of Surrealist baroquerie, and that bronze sculpture, while undeniably reminiscent of a Medieval torture device or Hieronymous Bosch at his darkest, also suggests the Hindu/Buddhist idea of reincarnation. The drawback here is that this solo, while full of interesting and well-conceived objects, feels to me like a group show.

Above: Skulls in a row; below: detail of one. (From the press materials: "Note: Gregory's skull works antedate Damien Hirst's newest media coup by nearly a decade, Hirst being one of his most important collectors.")

Above and below: Tick Tock, cast bronze skeleton elements, with detail

Sitting up straight: Steven Gregory's Love Seat, cast bronze

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Assorted Skulls and Bones

. At Pace Wildenstein , Keith Tyson's Large Field Array
The Very Large Field Array is that giant cluster of radio telescopes set in the New Mexico desert. While its dishes are poised to receive the signals of the universe, Tyson's metaphoric radar is trained on nothing less than the sum of us. In two-foot-square segments arranged in a walkabout grid throughout the hangar-like exhibition space, we see the artist's version of the heavens on earth. Of course this tour-de-force show would have some references to death; it has everything else.

From Keith Tyson's Large Field Array: copper skull, above, and skull-and-bones chair, below

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. At Martos Gallery, Des Hughes’s funny doggie-bone skeleton, Sculpture for Dog. Those dog biscuits are cast resin. The show, Strange Weight, curated by Rob Tufnell, is focused on figuration, most of it more fleshed out and all of it interesting.

At Martos Gallery, Des Hughes's Sculpture for Dog, cast resin

. At Garson Fine Art, Richard Campiglio’s Old Siamese Friends, a mixed-media painting on panel. This work is part of a figurative theme, even if the figures include fetish-like sculptures and a kind of cartoon figuration; it’s one of the best paintings in the show. (The two-artist exhibition, with Campiglio and Suzanne Long, is the first for this gallery, owned by the entrepreneur Matt Garson, who also has M% in Cleveland and runs, with Julie Baker Fine Art, the Flow Fair in Miami).

Above: Installation view at Garson Fine Art; below: Richard Campiglio's Old Siamese Friends, mixed media on panel

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Rather than feeling creeped out, I left Chelsea in awe of the mind that can accept and express death with humor, irony, piety, fear, curiosity and a range of conflicting emotions. Walking down Tenth Avenue after seeing all those bones, I felt euphorically happy to be alive.

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