Armory Week: Sew Me the Money

Armory: Show Me the Money

Armory Week: Salvage Operation

The Fairs: Glop Art

Early in my painting career, I edited a magazine devoted to the textile arts. The big discussion then was art versus craft. It was a serious issue, since so many art-school trained artists with BFAs and MFAs were, by dint of their medium, designated as “craftsmen” or "craftswomen,” a second-tier status in the art world. Well, let me clarify, many adopted the term themselves, then they wondered why they weren’t getting the kind of representation they wanted. If you have a choice of saying “I am a fiber artist” or “I am an artist,” why opt for the restrictive one and then be pissed off that you’re unable to show your work more widely?

Armory Show: Tracey Emin at White Cube, London; stitched blanket

Detail below

It’s great to see that the discussion is finally over. Artists make what they make, whether it’s with fiber, glue, thread, wood, metal or paint, or something else entirely, like trash. Art is art. Sometimes it gets covered by a textile magazine, sometimes in the art press. Just spell the artist's name right.

I am biased in my love of cloth, fiber and thread. I am the granddaughter of tailors, the niece of a dressmaker and of a lacemaker. This final post in my coverage of the New York fairs focuses on work in fiber, or work in other mediums that reference textiles. I didn’t love it all, but I liked the ambiguity of some of the work--is it a drawing or a weaving?--and I liked the narrative thread of the images you see here.

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Armory Show: El Anatsui at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City

With its liquor-bottle caps and bottleneck wrappers held together with twisted wire, it's as much sculpture as painting or tapestry. I love the different ways the work can be interpreted

Armory Show: Mary Heilman chairs at 303 Gallery, New York City



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Armory Show: Patrick Van Caeckenbergh at Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
Detail above and installation below
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Armory Show: Eve Berendes at Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt

This threaded sculpture has a Caracas-in-the-Fifties feeling, but it's a contemporary work

Armory Show: Ruth Lasky at Ratio 3, San Francisco

From a distance they look like framed drawings, but they're technically adept weavings

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Detail below
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Armory Show: Alyson Shotz at Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art, New York City

This piece is called Four Dimentional Drawing. This work with its precise geometry, bicolored threads and the shadow that's integral to the piece, may be my favorite piece in this post

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Detail below

Lin Tianmiao, Kukje Gallery, Seoul

There appears to be a photosilkscreen image on the surface of the woven fabric, but it might be the weaving itself. Within and atop the surface are masses of threads that force you to see beyond them into the image. The title, nicely poetic, is Seeing Shadow

Volta: Surasi Kusolwong at Hoet Bekaert, Ghent, Belgium
The installation consisted of a booth full of tangled skeins with a low divider of polished stainless steel

Detail below

Armory Show: Ivan Morley at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Not a favorite, but I included it for the visual narrative--what the previous work might look like if stitching has been a priority. You notice, by the way, that weaving and stitching are no longer "women's work"

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Detail below

Armory Show: William Kentridge, Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan and Naples

Detail below


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Bridge: Beatrice Kusiak, Collective Gallery, New York City




Armory Show: Nicholas Hlobo at Michael Stevenson, Capetown
A Xohsa man who came of age as apartheid was ending, Hlobo uses stitching to bring together metaphorically the different pieces and layers of personal and cultural identity. (I liked the work better once I learned that.)
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Detail below






Armory Show: Daniel Zeller at Pierogi, Brooklyn
You can't tell from the full view, above, but this is a drawing, not a textile, but you can see from the detail below that stitching, lacing and weaving are the visual substance of the work



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Armory Show: Thomas Fougeirol at Praz-Delavalade, Paris and Berlin
Anothe bit of trompe l'oeil: an oil-on-canvas painting that suggests shimmering lace
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Detail below




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Armory Show: Amanda Ross Ho at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles
How did macrame get to be such a joke? This piece is not macrame--I think it's cut canvas or paper--but it does seem to let you in on the joke
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Volta: Maria Nepomuceno at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janiero
Hammock sculpture executed in coiled basketry technique
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This piece just creeps me out, but I'll tell you why I put it in the mix here. Across the aisle from this booth was Samson Projects from Boston. It's director, Camilo Alvarado, was showing Rune Olson's Hustler-style images of women, and of men with full breasts and hard cocks, each topped with a painted bear head. This hammock-like sculpture (or possibly an actual hammock) so embodied the sexuality of the photographs that I laughed out loud. Was it a curatorial decision or just the coincidence of placement? Anyway, it's the first, and possibly the last, example of a he/she hammock I've ever seen.

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And with this post, my coverage of the New York fairs is over. I would have shown you more from Pulse, but midway through my camera malfunctioned. Next year . . .

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The Fairs: Inside the VIP Rooms

Armory: Show Me the Money
Armory Week: Salvage Operation
The Fairs: Glop Art
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So, OK, this isn't breaking news, but since I have the pics, I'm posting them. I spent the most time at Pulse and the Armory Shows--hours and hours at each one--so it was great to be able to use my press pass to enter their Inner Sancta, the VIP Rooms.
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Contrary to common belief, there was no river of champagne flowing, no nubile waiters dispensing caviar, no billionaires dancing in the buff. Maybe that was at the opening. What I saw were a lot of tired fairgoers drinking coffee, yakking on their cellphones or reading the paper. Wait, I was one of them.
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The windows in Pulse's Collectors' Lounge looked west onto the Hudson, so if you arrived late in the afternoon you got a spectacular view as the sun dropped behind New Jersey. (I returned several times, and when I took the shot below, night had already fallen; it was just before we switched to Daylight Saving Time.) The white leather sofas and armchairs were heaven-- I say this without guilt as a vegetarian--cossetting a fair-tired body until the coffee kicked in. The Armory VIP room had wide chairs and ottomans that you could go to sleep in. And some folks were doing just that.
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The VIP rooms at Pulse, above, and the Armory Show, below. There was art--an intestinal light sculpture at Pulse that was curiously appealing, and a platform full of naked rubber dolls at the Armory Show

The Fairs: Glop Art

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Armory: Show Me the Money

Armory Week: Salvage Operation

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Armory Show: Phillip Allen at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Using my my trusty maxim, Two's a coincidence; three's a trend, I'd say we've got a trendlet. Call it "Glop Art"--paint that's slathered, plopped, squeezed and smeared. The paint companies must be so pleased.

My favorite artist in this genre is the British painter Phillip Allen, work shown above and here. I'm wild about his unlikely combination of linear geometry and schmear, which I find visually and viscerally satisfying. (The love child of Thomas Nozkowski and Scott Richter?) At first you try to connect the two disparate elements, as if the surface has been scraped to reveal the painting at the center. But no, that's not the process at all. There's no logic to why a geometric painting would require this buildup of paint at its borders, and that's part of what attracts me: the mystery--no, the oddity--of it. The other part is, damn, I just dig them.
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But the two artists artist shown below, Allison Schulnick and Kim Dorland, not so much. Sure Schulnick's solo at Mike Weiss Gallery a few months ago reportedly sold out, and I hear the sales were huge at Mark Moore's booth at Pulse. I'm not swayed. What's the opposite of 'love it'? A few booths away from Mark Moore (and let me say, the paintings themselves were beautifully installed), the Angell Gallery was showing big, sludgy paintings by Kim Dorland.
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Here, see for yourself.

Pulse: Allison Schulnick at Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica

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Collectors snapped up Shulnick's work. Chris Bors reports in Artinfo that within hours of the opening, 12 of the 16 paintings had sold. I guess I'm just not cut out to be a collector. Other subjects, besides monkeys, are clowns and flowers.

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Then there's Kim Dorland, at the Angell Gallery, Toronto. Actually, I kind of liked the surfaces up close; it was the images themselves that repulsed me.

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I don't usually write negative comments--I just ignore what I don't like--but these paintings pushed a button. I like being challenged, and I have changed my mind about some difficult work, but I just can't quiet my inner voice here, which keeps going "Eeeew."

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Pulse: Kim Dorland at Angell Gallery, Toronto

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Detail, above, and full view on far wall of Sad Girl, 2008, oil on panel, 72 x 72 inches

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Armory Week: Salvage Operation

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Blogpix at Platform Project Space
Blogpix, The Show

Blogpix, The Panel

Armory: Show Me the Money

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Maybe it’s the economy, but it seems that more artists than usual have been trolling for trash. This is not a new development—artists have forever been transforming detritus (and who better to do so?)—but far greater numbers have put aside conventional, and expensive, artmaking materials in favor of stuff found on the street for free. I saw it at the Armory Show and at Volta, in the Chelsea galleries and in SoHo. It’s painting. It’s sculpture. It’s lowly junk turned into humble art—well, pseudo-humble, because if it gets shown in a high-rent New York gallery or art fair, presumably with high prices, it’s really not so humble.

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At the Armory Show: John Beech at Peter Blum Gallery, New York City

In this first installation, John Beech at Peter Blum Gallery, I kept thinking "car parts" but whatever they were, the transformation of Beech's objects was sublime. The installation had these elements almost dancing on the wall. (Coincidentally, the building's capped ductwork echoes the round shapes--and you'll see that this theme of art and not-art runs through the post.)

Detail below..

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I liked much of what I saw. I appreciated the crude refinement, or the refined crudeness of the work—and not surprisingly for me, the geometry of much of it. Yet walking through the fairs, I kept thinking, “Haven’t I seen this before?” In a manner of speaking, I have. In Unmonumental, an occasional series in her Newsgrist blog, Joy Garnett posts her photographs of castoff objects, often curbside trash, shot around town. In doing so she elevates the stuff to something worthy of a second look. I’ve interspersed these pics with the art. (Hint: Garnett’s pics are the smaller ones.)
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Sometimes, as with Garnett’s photographs, the castoffs are truly transcendent. El Anatsui is the master of transcendence, but there are other transformations here as well. I liked the work of Sarah Braman, who seemed to be drawing from multiple sources--Home Depot materials, Richard Prince autobody parts, and Ellsworth Kelly (if Kelly had a color sense)--but the result was startling and unique.

Armory Show: Sarah Braman at Museum 52, New York City, above and below

Joy Garnett: Unmonumental 126

Armory Show: Gyan Panchal at Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris

The stuff here consisted of plastic peeled from plexiglass squares, and an assortment of industrial plastics

Below: plastic sheeing covers either mirror glass or plexi

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I heard plenty of snickers as I hung around the Frank Elbaz booth snapping pictures. But I guess artist and dealer have the last laugh. An e-report from the Armory Fair notes that this gallery “sold the entire content of its booth, a solo exhibition of artist Gyan Panchal, on Friday to a prominent Washington D.C. collector.” Hope the price wasn’t too high.

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Unmonumental 112

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Armory Show: Leon Vrankow at Stella Lohaus Gallery, Antwerp
Below: a where the sculpture meets the floor

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Armory Show: This piece by Fabian Seiz was charmingly faux naive (sheetrock screws as a design element?)

Unmonumental 99

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Volta: Susan Colles at Seventeen, London

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Like the work of Ivin Ballen, which was at Edward Winkleman's booth at Pulse (sorry Ed and Ivin, my photos were blurry but you can see Ivin's work here), this is a simulacrum intended to better the original. The "paint" on the 2x2's was mother of pearl; on the dropcloth, stitching. Even the screws in the wall had a silvery glisten that suggested they were fabricated by the artist.

Unmonumental 107





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Armory Show: Richard Rovas at Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut

This piece, about 30 inches high, may well be my favorite in all the shows. I loved the nicely delineated rectangle cut into the crudely stacked blocks of wood, and the slight curve of the stack in contrast to the carving. The earthy red is iron oxide, I'm guessing. And then that notch in the second block from the top becomes an almost anthropomorphic wink. What's not to love?

Unmonumental 108

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Armory Show: Angela De La Cruz at Lisson Gallery, London

Painting as sculpture, detail below

Unmonumental 111

Armory Show: Susan Hiller at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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The sculptures here are called Painting Block, and they consist of what look to be repurposed paintings. Susan, meet Angela. Actually, I don't mean to be flip. I like them.

Unmonumental 116

Not all the stuff I saw was at the fairs. There was plenty in the galleries. I picked three shows whose work transcended its origins. We start in SoHo with Gerry Keon at OK Harris, a modest-size show in which each small work was quietly poetic. Here I think the artist reconfigured his materials, crafting them rather nicely, and put his hand to the surfaces, finishing what time had begun.
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In Chelsea at Freight & Volume, Jim Lee (who also had work in the gallery's booth at the Armory Show), seems more interested in Frankensteinian recreation, and I mean that in a good way. These objects are crude but powerful. The show is up through April 4. And in the vast space at Reeves Contemporary, Wade Kavanaugh has created a river of sheetrock bricks. Go see it! You have a week. It's up through the 21st.

Gerry Keon at OK Harris, SoHo

Installation view with one work, below

Jim Lee at Freight & Volume, Chelsea, above and below





Wade Kavanaugh at Reeves Contemporary, Chelsea

The installation suggests both a river and the wall that is unable to hold it back.
Detail of the sheetrock bricks below

Unmonumental 118

I'm going to close this post with the sublime followed by the ridiculous. The sublime is El Anatsui, who continues to turn straw into gold, well pieces of aluminum into golden tapestries. The ridiculous, well, just scroll down to the bottom. Kudos to the gallery for coming up with "Nothing." It had to be the easiest transport and setup ever.

Armory Show: El Anatsui at Jack Shainman Gallery. These glimmering tapestries are constructed in the simplest way from the metal remains--neck and caps-- of liquor bottles. Read more about El Anatsui here. Detail below

Unmonumental 85

Armory Show: Perhaps fittingly, I didn't get the artist or the gallery

Unmonumental 122

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Thanks to Joy Garnett for permitting me to include her images in this post.

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