FS/LS: The Good and the Not-So Good in Chelsea

New Work by Frank Stella @ Paul Kasmin, Lucas Samaras @ Pace MacGill

Frank is still working space. Like many artists of his generation, Stella emerged from under the shadow of de Kooning. In fact, Frank once had a reproduction of 'the king’s' work taped to the wall of his studio to remind him of “what not to do”. And of course, Stella’s early black and white paintings were the anti-de Kooning: an antidote to miles of second-rate, second generation re-treads of the masterful meanderings of Willem I. (Stella’s early work prefigured so much that lesser talents have made entire careers out of their implications; Sol Lewitt, for one).
Since 1975 and the “Painted Bird” series first seen at MoMA in that year, Stella has displayed a knack for creating sculptural work which to my eye appear to be like 3-D recreations and ruminations inspired by master Will. It seems that the ambiguous and open-ended gesture-based abstraction was impossible for Frank to resist forever so Frank finally gave in to the power of the small postcard taped to his wall so many years ago.
Some of Stella’s work fails in the same way that de Kooning did on numerous occasions: too much Sturm and Drang without a solid core; this is the price of risk. I’m sure that there are as many Stella “misses” as discarded de Kooning drawings. All of this is old news yet few people regard Stella as “hot” in the over-heated tulip-crazed frenzy of Chelsea.
I have long been a FS fan and if you haven’t read his “Working Space” yet, it’s an education in itself.
As for this show, it’s a stunner, even better than his show at Paul Kasmin last year. My personal favorite involves an open-ended “Buckyball” intertwined with various other free-form sinuous curves.

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY New Work by FRANK STELLA from April 2 – May 14, 2005.
293 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001


Lucas Samaras @ Pace MacGill, Chelsea

"LS? Who is LS?" I wondered aloud as I entered the gallery yesterday in Chelsea, ducking out of the cold rain. Oh, yeah. Good ol' Lucas Samaras, the irascible, unpredictable, irreverent and just-plain 'in-your-face fun where you’d least expect it' artist. As you walk in and you see all of these people sitting at computer work stations not unlike any cubicle farm dot-com hell from the recent past. As it turns out, LS has created some dozens of iMovies and umpteen Iphotos for your viewing pleasure.
Now don’t get me wrong I have great admiration, respect and genuine awe of much that LS has created over the decades, especially his fabric paintings but as someone involved in new media, this is “a little too little, a little too late.” All of the ho-hum Photoshoped self-portraits are such old news that it is a little embarrassing to sift through them; this is “art of this century” by someone from last century.
Other voices, to the contrary.

Lucas Samaras :: PhotoFlicks and PhotoFictions
Pace / MacGill
534 West 25th Street

Max Ernst @ The Met / Diane Arbus, Too

Max Ernst
Through July 10, 2005
Ah, good old Max Ernst, the first multimedia artist. I forgot how various and varied his work could be. This show is a knockout on several fronts: for the sheer quantity of iconic works and for the range of formats included. The only works missing from this retrospective are the miniscule paintings from the Arizonia years. This exhibition is a must-see for anyone unfamiliar with his technically expansive paintings, his inspired and lurid collages and the “frottages” made of rubbings of diverse textures.


Diane Arbus Revelations
March 8, 2005–May 30, 2005

I ducked in to see the Diane Arbus photos on exhibit; it’s a good double bill with the Max Ernst show. You could easily see both shows without getting “museum-headache” –that awful feeling of information overload that one gets at the larger museums… the shows complement each other in odd ways, maybe because they are so foreign to each other yet there is a shared eeriness or tinge of voyeuristic pleasure in transgressing “good taste” that makes these shows so prescient right now.
I recently watched Kubrick’s masterful “The Shining” and realized for the first time that the Diane Arbus Twins http://www.archiviokubrick.it/film/shining/making/arbus_twins.gif
was the inspiration for Kubrick’s treatment of the sibling ghost sisters in the film; no wonder they are so haunting. “If you’re going to steal, steal from someone good.”

Just for fun, see the twins on this page (towards the bottom of the page).

Gehry in NYC

One of my favorite architects will soon have three major structures in New York City...see for yourself:

#1. The New Brooklyn Nets Stadium (in development)
Bring Basketball to Brooklyn


“This is an important opportunity for everyone,” added Frank Gehry. “Our goals are to create a great Arena for a great team, and to create something really special for Brooklyn.”

#2: Headquarters of IAC/Interactive in Chelsea (under construction now)
Frank O Gehry in Manhattan

Does anyone know what the third one will be?

The Michelangelo Code

The idea that art imitates life is always being turned around out with life imitating art (Schwarzenegger as the Gov’ner is right out of a Phillip K. Dick Sci-fi send-up) but this new one is too much!

In today’s news that there is a conjecture that Michelangelo forged the “Laocoön” marble sculpture; this is comparable to Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” speculations about the Catholic Church.

“A scholar has suggested that "Laocoön," a fabled sculpture whose unearthing in 1506 has deeply influenced thinking about the ancient Greeks and the nature of the visual arts, may well be a Renaissance forgery - possibly by Michelangelo himself.”

NY Times, 4/18/05

Endless Walking but Getting Nowhere

Julian Opie’s Walking Animations
Animation of “Kiera Walking” on this page is an example of the electronic billboard currently installed on the steps of the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street, downtown NYC. There are two separate “animated” billboards, each one shows a figure walking but getting nowhere, very Zen and also both hi and lo-tech. I’ve seen this animation at night and it is very effective visually as the moving lights cut through the surrounding visual clutter, such as the tail lights on the car in front of you.
Seen during the day, the walking figures come alive as their movement is echoed by the many everyday New Yorkers walking to and fro. The futility of the urban constant rush is also wryly commented on as these figures spin their wheels yet go no further. Isn’t the Department of Education housed in the Tweed Courthouse?

See photos and read more at Gothamist.

Fric Fischl @ Mary Boone Gallery

Sure, go ahead and see the Damien Hirst “paintings” at the Gagosian gallery. Decide for yourself if they are interesting or not. I found them a trifle tedious after the initial surprise at the use of Photorealism (such a tired style at this point). But while you are on 24th Street, check out the recent paintings by Eric Fischl.

In contrast to Mr. Hirst (who showed thirty paintings), Mr. Fischl presents us a handful of large-scale paintings. These new works are continuations of the style forged in the go-go eighties and it is more than curious that these painted are being exhibited at this point in time in Chelsea. The world changed so much since Eric Fischl burst on the scene in 1984 at the Mary Boone Gallery yet these images almost seem like items from a time capsule from the era of Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”. These images seem forced and strangely cloying, in spite of the fact that they are well painted; all that talent could be put to better effect than essentially copying photographs at a large scale and adding a dash of bravura brushstrokes. For all the smoldering desire in the images there is a ho-hum feel to the whole venture.

Through April 23rd
541 West 24th St.

Why is there an Arts Blog?

To provide an unbiased and informative view of selected highlights in the NYC arts: on the streets, in the galleries, museums and auction houses.

What makes this source important?
A down-to-earth yet educated and sincere look at the art with an eye for trends, interesting and stimulating exhibits and relevant news in the cultural life of this great city.

Are the views represented here truly unbiased?
The opinions expressed here are free from commercial interest and not affiliated with any for-profit business.

Does this mean that this site aims to be a comprehensive listing without personal likes, dislikes, or values of any kind?
No. Discerning the best and most compelling art from the wide range of current exhibits without hype, without an agenda and with an eye toward sharing insights into what is for many an awfully complicated scene. A broad perspective, mature and nuanced inquiry and an educated eye inform the views expressed here.

Can people add comments and opposing viewpoints to counter the opinions expressed here?
Yes, definitely.

What to see in NYC:
Max Ernst @ the Metropolitan Museum.
Does anyone remember the last NYC retrospective of this enigmatic artist? The show at the Guggenheim (I think in 1974) was a real eye-opener. More to come on this important exhibit.


Frank Stella @ Paul Kasmin Gallery
New Work April 2- May 14
An old standby, Frank Stella is always the thinking man’s artist. It may take a while before we catch up to his latest works but the never fail to provide visual force to what can be static and stale in lesser hands.

Damien Hirst’s sculpture, installed at the Lever House

While I definitely agree with Jerry Saltz’s opinions of the recent paintings “by” Damien Hirst, (see the article “The Emperor’s New Paintings”) I can’t agree with his take on the sculpture recently installed at the Lever House:

this from Jerry Saltz, published in the Village Voice, 4/5/05:

Worse than the paintings because it's permanent—not to mention marring the entrance to the beautiful Lever House on Park Avenue—is Hirst's hideous Virgin Mother, a 35-foot bronze eyesore of a naked pregnant woman with a cutaway view of her womb. ...Virgin Mother should be removed straightaway and those responsible for placing it here should be fired or whatever is done with reckless, imbecilic billionaires.

Yes, the Lever House is beautiful, especially in light of the recent renovation but this provocative sculpture is a perfect compliment to the pious modernism evoked and evinced by this building. I hate to say how utterly innocuous are the stone sculptures of Isamu Noguchi next to this brash bronze monstrosity. I love the irreverent insouciance of this strident Virgin Mother who literally bares all with such cosmopolitan élan and verve. I can’t explain why I love it (I know I’m supposed to like the Noguchi sculptures) but I took some people to look at the sculpture in the pouring rain and we all felt a similar sense of awe. Damien Hirst, after all is a sculptor first and foremost.

Art Criticism in the Age of Blogging

Not to be a “blog snob” but, it seems that Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times in his recent article: "This is Your Brain on Pause" agrees with our opening day (see our earlier posts on 3/12/05 and 3/14/05) assessment of Damien Hirst’s recent show of “paintings” at the Gagosian Gallery. In a word, they are bad; and in the sense that Warhol was “badder” and certainly did it first, Mr. Kimmelman is in agreement with us.
Blogging gets there first, trumping other reports with the immediacy and topicality of the speed of light while the lumbering apparatus of the paper news goes limping into the 21st century like a senescent relative from the old country, barely tolerated by today’s “fresh direct” generation.
Hate to say it, but does anyone under sixty years of age care about “classical” music? If so, they don’t go to concerts and they certainly don’t buy it in the record stores (a quaint notion in itself).
But, back to Damien Hirst, the artist known best for his sculptures, which is his true métier. There is currently a fabulous sculpture by Mr. Hirst at the outdoor concourse beneatht he Lever House at 53rd and Lexington. I call the sculpture “the Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” although it is probably closer to about 40 feet in height, the bronze sculpture depicts a striding pregnant woman with her flesh literally splayed open in the artist’s signature deadpan science-museum expository and explanatory presentation depicting the unborn fetus and the half-shorn skull in anatomical correctness; all of this in such a matter-of-factly “just out for a stroll’ way that passersby, janitors, tourists and myself including are left standing on the sidewalk scratching our collective heads. Now that’s Art, no matter what else you can say, this piece is striking and strident in a fresh and direct way.

, Mr. Hirst's flat-footed pictures, blithely lacking finesse, ignore photorealism's first goals and aspire only to be passingly ghoulish.

And absent invention, they hang there like corpses. They also arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it. Other paintings abound in Chelsea for comparison - not universally good, but generally craftier about the medium, making more of paint's expressive potential and its physical allure. Just up the block from Gagosian, on 24th Street, are shows by Magnus von Plessen, Jules de Balincourt, Martin Kippenberger, Eric Fischl and Gary Hume that at least feature more painterly paintings.

- Michael Kimmelman, NY Times Published: April 3, 2005

Look to this site, "NYC Arts" for a review of Eric Fischels' recent paintings coming soon.

To continue the riff about animation:
Wikipedia History of Animation
Finally a history of animation with links, links and more links.

A Brief History of Animation

This is a link to as clear and concise a history of animation can be found anywhere. Well done. For more of the context but sadly no images, here is "A RATHER INCOMPLETE BUT STILL FASCINATING HISTORY OF ANIMATION" By Dan McLaughlin. This site is crying for images, but definitely worth a look, thanks Dan for doing the heavy lifting.

Basquiat@ The Brooklyn Museum of Art

Weighing in on Basquiat@ The BMA

Like the Human Torch in his paintings, Jean-Michel’s “Flame-On!” rocked the art scene in the early nineteen eighties.
It makes perfect sense for Brooklyn-born and bred Jean-Michel Basquiat to have his homecoming at the Brooklyn Museum, (his show at the Whitney in 1992 is but a distant memory in the collective psyche of New York City). Where else but here should we see the Basquiat paintings and drawings with new eyes; eyes that have been primed by the look and feel of Williamsburg, itself a reflection of East Villiage scene which engendered J.M.B. in the first place. SAMO indeed: “same ‘ole ____” that being the tag used by the artist in his earliest attempts to gain the notoriety he craved.
The music of Miles, Bird and Hendrix fueled Basquait’s improvisational style and infused the high-keyed color and outrageousness that is central to these haunting images.

Basquiat@ The Brooklyn Museum of Art

Through June 5

Marlene Dumas @ Zwirner & Wirth

I went to see the Marlene Dumas show of paintings at Zwirner & Wirth just last week, as I happened to be in the neighborhood and ducked into the gallery. I’d never heard of this artist before, yet I felt that the paintings were honest and straightforward without being overwrought or pretentious. The paint is thin and applied with a fresh confidence; obviously this artist is not relying on assistants and others to “help” (see Damien Hirst in an earlier posting).
As it turns out, the NY Times ran a review of the show :


Marlene Dumas's Number Comes Up

“But the city has a fresh opportunity to see what the fuss is all about... Her work intermingles high and pop-cultural imagery and touches on favored hot buttons, from politics to female sexuality to race. Her overall subject can be construed as the ambiguity of the pictorial image, a major critical talking point right now.”

- By CAROL KINO
Published: March 27, 2005

This is painting that is as tough as nails, that tackles many issues without losing the sense of the nature of touch, gesture and surface, infused with a deftness and light. John Currin, the much-lauded “best painter in NY right now” wishes he could paint this well.
Did I fail to mention that paintings by Marlene Dumas fetch the highest prices of a living female painter?

Marlene Dumas
Selected Works
Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
From February 18 - April 23, 2005

New Yorker Cartoons: Now Showing

I love the fact that the spot illutrations in the New Yorker magazine are now sequenced like key frames in a movie storyboard. See the article in the NY Times.
What do you think?

Williamsburg: what goes around comes around

I took a walk around Williamsburg today. I have to admit I’ve avoided it in favor of the galleries in Chelsea, but after seeing a recent article in the NY Times about the imminent re-zoning of the Brooklyn waterfront, I felt compelled to check it out.
Funny, the scene there seemed like the East Village in the early eighties: lots of graffiti, scruffy boutiques and trendy restaurants interspersed by the bodegas and Polish restaurants.
I did manage to stop in an art gallery and the art on view also seemed eerily reminiscent of the East Village art of the eighties: what goes around comes around.

Daniel Buren @ The Guggenheim: An Early Look

A New York moment: getting in to the opening nite gala for the Daniel Buren installation / exibit @ the Guggenheim Museum. Outside was the blustery snow of Ole Man Winter's last gasp; inside the crystaline reflections of a 100 foot-high mirror spanning halfway across the huge atrrium of the museum. I'm told that the view during the day is stunning: sunlight streaming though the oculus (which is otherwise sheided from direct sunlight). A house of mirrors, a fun house side show, an experiment in space/time... a cubistic vision of an old friend? All of these come to mind as one tries to make sense of what is so confounding visually as to defy easy definiton and instead, one should just surrender to the senses and enjoy the sheer novelty.
Read more about the exhibit in the NY Times article by Linda Yablonsky, excerpted below:

Mr. Buren's central piece at the Guggenheim, of course, is no little shack. For the artist, it represents an imaginary cube large enough to contain the entire museum. As engineered from the artist's drawings by a Parisian architect, Jean-Christophe Denise, and the Guggenheim's technical designer, Stephen Engelman, the structure's two adjoining walls meet at the exact center of the rotunda, making it appear as if a corner of the cube had been thrust into the void from the street. Short, bright-green vertical stripes resembling film sprockets line the balustrades of all six tiers, giving the Guggenheim's spiral the look of a giant zoetrope about to go into a serious spin.

Indeed, visitors will need to get their sea legs before starting up the ramps. What the mirrors will show, besides their own reflections, is a building that appears to shift its weight at almost every step. Because of a natural distortion caused by the play of mirrors against the vertiginous ramps, there are moments when it becomes difficult to distinguish the architecture from its mirror image, inducing a sense of vertigo.

I was teaching a Photoshop class at the museum where my students were re-touching photos of the mirrored cube and sure enough, several of my students (all adults) experienced a nausea not unlike sea-sickness as a result of the dizzying perspectives on their computer screens: a "virtual vertigo" if you will.

Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow @ Pier 53

If you are in the West Village / Chelsea area, go to see Gregory Colbert's "Ashes and Snow" exhibit in the "nomadic museum" at 13th St. on the Hudson River. Tuesdays are pay what you wish (children are always free). Check out the images on the website, but it won't prepare you for the incredible installation on the pier. I espeecially was moved by the video projection and found similarities between the work of Bill Viola, recently shown at the Whitney

"...Viola creates projective narrative environments that explore the nature and consciousness and universal human experiences such as birth and death. The artist's subject matter is rooted in the history of Western and Eastern art, as well as in such spiritual traditions as Sufism and Zen Buddhism."

-from the Whitney Museum web site

The same could be said about the video by Mr. Colbert if you insert the nature of the bonds between man and the animal kingdom, between primal and instinctual connections and the place of man in the circle of life. Sounds corny and a little like cruchy granola but I left my cynical self on the island of Manahatta and was transported to another time and place as I walked to the end of the pier under the canopy of the temporary structure built for the exhibit. That the show is housed in an ad hoc confabulation of shipping crates only adds to the richness of the experience.

What do you think about the Ashes and Snow images?

The Elusive Truth About Painting

More on Damien Hirst: as I surmised in an earlier blog his new "paintings" are really based on photographs which "others" "painted"... no wonder these images have no presence or soul.
This from today's NY Times article by Carol Vogel:

Still, he [Damien Hirst] doesn't consider himself a serious painter. "I would feel uncomfortable putting myself in a category with other painters like Goya or Bacon," he said. "I'm more interested in the images than the painting."...

He readily admits that, as in the case of many artists working today, while his hand is involved in every painting, some of his assistants - most of whom are trained artists - do some of the painting for him. "I have a great team," he said.

Is it too much to ask of an artist today to paint their own pictures? I admit some of the images have interest but in an unteresting way, I mean isn't Photorealism so last century, a seventies thing?

DAMIEN HIRST : The Elusive Truth

I stopped by the Gagosian Gallery today to see the latest paintings by Damien Hirst. So did a lot of other people. Many were the people who felt compelled to see what this latest enfant terrible had wrought.
I doubt that the paintings were entirely by his hand and I suspect that there was a lot of help by the way of mechanical aids of some sort: projecting images onto the canvas in order to trace the image and the use of photographs as source material as well. Such is the state of painting today. This is not to say that the images were devoid of interest, it is just that they were so generic in feel and vapid in touch that they lacked any individuality (Warhol killed that, didn’t he?).
The images of pharmaceuticals lined up in neat rows on shelves reminded me of the paintings of Wayne Thiebald as the pills looked as delicious as the pies and cakes. Again, not much new here. The truth be told, Damian Hirst had some tremendously shocking and exciting installations (the Shark in formaldehyde being a personal favorite) but too may of his paintings lack something, a soul if you will. Check out the images on the Gagosian gallery web site, they look better as photographs on the web than in real life. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction indeed.

DAMIEN HIRST : The Elusive Truth
Mar 11 - Apr 23, 2005
Gagosian Gallery
555 WEST 24th STREET
NEW YORK NY 10011
TEL 212 741 1111
info@gagosian.com

Art in NYC Milestone: 1,000 hits!

Alreet people, that's alright. This site will reach the one thousand visit mark in the next few hours or so. Thank you to all of the visitors who made this small milestone possible. The next goal is ten thousand.
As always there is a lot going on in NYC. Check out Gregory Colbert's installation on the Hudson. more on this soon, I may visit it this weekend.

Rubens Drawings @ The Metropolitan Museum

After finishing the biography of Willem de Kooning: “de Kooning An American Master” by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, I went to see the drawings by Peter Paul Rubens at the Met. Rubens was a favorite of de Kooning, (along with Ingres and Picasso, two other consummate draftsmen) and it was through the lens of de Kooning’s skewered perspective that I came to appreciate anew the work of his forbear.
Of course, modern art has little in common with the high baroque exuberance and technical virtuosity of Old Masterly skill evinced by the drawings by this “Peter the Great” yet the similarities were telling. Charcoal, that soft, nuanced and delicate record of an artist’s gesture was common to both these Northern Europeans. On close inspection, I noticed that Rubens rarely closed his forms with a contour but instead he would subtly overlap several lines with tiny interstices in between , this gave the work a slight visual vibration and a life to the forms as if they were “breathing”. This, of course, was a characteristic feature of a de Kooning drawing.
It would be something to see a de Kooning / Rubens show n’est-ce pas? Now that would raise some dust, charcoal and otherwise.


If you can’t get to the Met to see the drawings in person, there is an excellent online companion to the show.